STATE OF THE ART

The Bristol 1904 Arts plays a major role in the cultural life of Bristol. It’s a centre for painting, music, magic, poetry, storytelling and fellowship. There are also active birdwatching, walking, photography, classic car and chorus groups. Meetings are on Wednesday evenings in their hall attached to the Red Lodge in Park Row Bristol where their major artistic event, the 112th Annual Paintings Exhibition, will be running from 29 April –7 May, open to the public every day from 10.30am to 4.30pm. Paintings by the society’s team of talented artists will be on sale.

• bristol1904arts.org

Strange Dance, Royal West of England Academy (RWA), until 1 May

The exhibition, StrangeDance, represents a collaboration between musician and Radiohead drummer Philip Selway and artist Stewart Geddes, toward developing the music and album art for Selway’s third solo album of the same name. The collaboration emerged from lockdown Zoom conversations between Selway (who was beginning to work on new songs from his Oxfordshire home) and Geddes, commuting through Bristol’s vacant streets to his Bedminster studio. Selway then invited Geddes to create the album art for Strange Dance (2023), forming a working partnership, where the visual elements and the music developed in parallel to each other, as a wordless dialogue. Geddes was mindful not to illustrate the songs, but to respond to their inferred spaces and moods, as they increasingly came into focus. Eventually, from the suite of eight paintings, Selway selected four to be used in various ways for the album, including Finnador, the painting that became the cover to StrangeDance.

• rwa.org.uk; Queens Road, Clifton, BS8 1PX

Image: Finnador, Stewart Geddes, Strange Dance, photograph, Acrylic on Canvas –album artwork for Philip Selway’s Strange Dance

Belonging, Rainmaker Gallery, until 6 May

In this solo exhibition, Rick Grimster explores his relationship to the country of his birth. A war baby, born in London in 1945 to a Mvskoke father and an English mother, his life is but one of the numerous unique stories that make up the Indigenous diaspora. Whilst Grimster’s abstracted landscapes fit firmly into the school of mid-century British modernism, they are elevated by an instinctive, unbridled joy of colour and love of nature aligned with his Native American heritage. Where we land on this earth is dictated by forces beyond our control –migration, colonialism and in this case World War II. How we make sense of our individual journeys is up to us. Rick Grimster has found peace and belonging through his lifelong love of painting and an unbreakable connection to land, wherever he may be.

• rainmakerart.co.uk;

Artwork by Rick Grimster

Garry Fabian Miller: ADORE, Arnolfini, until 28 May

Garry Fabian Miller, one of the most inventive and original photographers of his time, makes a very welcome return to Arnolfini, and his home city of Bristol, to present ADORE, a major exhibition celebrating a lifetime of his work. ADORE invites you to explore Fabian Miller’s ‘camera-less’ practice that experiments with darkness and light, and weaves in work by the artists, writers and thinkers that have inspired him over the years.

• arnolfini.org.uk; 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA