After an hour-long bus ride, six-hour airport wait, six-hour flight, and one-hour car ride, I finally found myself back home in a bustling 8:00 am London for Thanksgiving break.
Although we’ve never really celebrated Thanksgiving in my French household, I did get to see a lot of family and enjoy the activities I love most. While my brother only had two days off from his college so didn’t come back home, I got to spend time with my sister, parents, and two grandmothers who came to visit.
Probably my favorite thing about London is all there is to do: from museum exhibitions to theaters and simply walking around its streets, I never find myself out of options, especially since we only moved there two years ago.
This break, I visited the wildlife photography annual competition exhibition at the Natural History Museum. There are one hundred pictures displayed in four rooms in the various categories, such as Underwater, Young Photographers, and Urban Wildlife. The pictures all have a story to tell, and the photographers come from all over the world. I especially love the Portfolio category as it is really an entire story made of pictures and tends to be activist oriented, so it becomes all the more educational in that regard.
I also went on a guided tour of a Cezanne exhibition that had actually originated in Chicago and then was shown at the Tate in London. The tour guide was European and the way she criticized (constructively of course) the American-made exhibition was very interesting to me. While the Chicago exhibition highlighted the politics and social circumstances that might have dictated the painter’s workers (with a bit of a presentist lens), our tour guide preferred to stay more grounded in the art and the techniques Cezanne employed. The culture in my two homes are often in dissent, but I still really enjoy learning from both and, even more, seeing them in parallel.
To wrap up my journey through London’s art wonders, my mom and I participated in a three-day (six hours per day) sculpture workshop taught by the president of London's Royal Sculpture Society. My mom had recently taken up sculpting again (not since a college club!) in a weekly session and told me a lot about it while I was at Groton, so when she found this workshop, there was no convincing to be made.
There was a model in the center of the room and twelve of us surrounding him (see picture). All the sculptors in the room were very experienced compared to my mom and me (one even had a kiln in her house!), but it made it all the more interesting to see everyone’s distinct style throughout the three days. The experience was unlike anything I’ve ever done before. From measuring the face’s dimensions to cutting off half the chin because it had grown out of proportion, my mind had no space to wander. The project might have not been completed in three days, but it was wonderful nevertheless and I really hope to be able to do more of it in the future!