Yayoi Kusama

It’s been a wonderfully stimulating day of art. After a good long sleep at our quiet stop we had a relaxed breakfast before walking a few minutes up the road to Sale Water Park tram stop. Our return ticket was £4.30, Zone 3.

There’s a lot of high rise building going on in Manchester. Maybe there really is a Northern Powerhouse. So much so that our walkway was closed so we had a bit of going round the houses detour to get to The Warehouse for the Yayoi Kusama exhibition.

We saw a film about her life and work, lasting about an hour. Some of it I had seen before but other bits were new - her happenings/protests about the Vietnam war for which she was vilified and felt driven from USA, returning to Japan. Her mental health had always been precarious. She lived in a psychiatric hospital for many years but eventually was honoured by Matsumoto, her home town where a gallery for her work was built. This is where we saw our first exhibition of her work, in 2018.

We then headed upstairs to go through these large inflatable installations where I asked Mr C to take the blip as I noticed my jacket toned in. From there we climbed more stairs to a viewing platform from where we could look down on the main part of the exhibition. Inflatable “clouds” where people could lie down to look at the pink spotty balloons, large pink and black inflatables, enormous more solid sculptures of herself, an enormous yellow and black pumpkin, smaller pink balloon where we could look through a hole to see an infinity mirror installation giving the illusion of hundreds of balloons. There was also a large one we could enter (briefly - there was a queue). The place was full of enchanted, excited children running around amongst it all.

By the time came out it was lunchtime - we had some eggs royale in a nearby cafe then used google to walk to the Whitworth Gallery which was about 40 minutes away, passing a wonderful art deco cinema and the university. It is now UK’s second largest city with a population of over 9 million. I’m not a city person but was impressed with the public transport system with many roads banning cars during the day so buses, bikes and taxis could move freely and of course there would be cleaner air too.

At the Whitworth we saw the Durer engravings from 15th century Nuremberg. They were wonderful - delicate, intricate, indescribable.

We got a bus back to the centre then our tram out to our van where we made a coffee and had cake before driving round the m66, 65, then Nelson and over a single track road with scary drops and few passing places to Widdop reservoir in the hills where Mr C had excelled in finding a lovely spot. We had a walk to the reservoir but the wind is biting and already shaking the van.