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Jun 21, 2025

JOBS AT THE BOTTOM

Field Notes: Twenty Cultural Festivals Across the UK, Link Below To This Article On Tat.

I am going to be honest. It’s been a pretty terrible week for doing anything. So I have very little wisdom to expel. In fact, I’ve been keeping my head down from wisdom altogether. Judging by the state of the news, we don’t seem very good at learning lessons anyway.

One thing I did watch, which stirred some sense of passion—though equally left me appalled at our collective lack of foresight—was a speech by Tony Benn in Parliament in 1998.

Watch it here.

I went to a funeral on Wednesday afternoon. It was an extraordinarily beautiful event, filled with laughter, music, and of course, heart-wrenching sadness. Watching the proceedings, I thought: this is what life is about. This is what makes sense. In a world where, moment by moment, the very structure of things feels shaky from the unpicking of community and the fierce rhetoric swirling everywhere, you sit in moments like that and realise how vital it is to keep seeing friends and family. To keep calling them, chatting to them about things they may find boring, interesting, irritating, and everything in between. Those are the calls that will one day be so sorely missed.

One line at the funeral stayed with me: this incredibly special person entered every situation with confidence, but never with complacency. It’s a thought I’d like to hold onto, to try and carry forward in my own life, even in the moments when confidence fails us.

Recently, at auction, I bought a group of works by the American-English artist Budwin Conn for Tat. He’s not especially well-known, which is often how the most interesting things begin. And yet, almost immediately, I found myself entirely absorbed by his work — which is not something I say lightly.

It reminded me of an exhibition I went to earlier this year; it was the Noah Davis exhibition at the Barbican. I hadn’t been so arrested by an exhibition in some time. It was both profoundly life-affirming and laced with an unbearable sadness. One leaves exhibitions like that reminded of the importance of making the effort to go and feeling the benefit of that action.

So when I came across the realist yet dreamlike work of Budwin Conn, I found it deeply moving. There’s a theme running through it, one that seems to be in the air at the moment: human connection, community, those quiet, contemplative moods we so often pass by or forget in the hurry of life. Yet through someone’s ability to compose a work of art, we get to hold that moment, and create our own attachment to the subject.

These works will be go on Tat London next week.