Category: 5. Entertainment

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During the past few weeks, I have had Covid (claimed by some to have originated in a pangolin or in a Chinese lab studying animal viruses) and have read articles about the destruction of the seabed through bottom-trawling, Asian hornets’ threat to Britain’s bee population and what the Sycamore Gap tree-felling verdict means for nature.

Glance at the news and it is impossible to miss our entanglements and codependence with innumerable organisms and creatures. In response, artists, writers, architects and designers are increasingly seeking to emphasise humility and fragility rather than placing humans at the heart of everything. 

An upcoming play at London’s Royal Court, Cow | Deer, for instance, seeks to “evoke the lives of two animals” through a performance that uses “only sound and no words”. Recently at the Venice Biennale, landscape architect Bas Smets filled the Belgian pavilion with plants, carefully monitoring their needs so that they are able to temper and control the environment. And opening this week, an exhibition at the Design Museum seeks to understand “a growing movement of ‘more-than-human’ design”.

“We’re looking at the world through this net-zero agenda now but it is quite a limited framework, effectively carbon accounting,” says Justin McGuirk, director of the Future Observatory research programme at the Design Museum. “But there’s this whole other side: our relationship with the natural world. We need new narratives — carbon is important but it is not enough.”

More than Human is about those narratives. From bird-safe glass for buildings to artworks for animals, it is about design beyond ourselves. “Design is quintessentially human-centred,” McGuirk says, “and we want to ask: what if humans are not at the centre of every decision? What if design could be something that helps other species to flourish?’’

It’s a shift that has been in the ether for a few years. In his 2022 book Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence, artist and writer James Bridle tells the striking story of Otto, a six-month-old octopus. An unsettled resident of the Sea Star Aquarium in Coburg, Bavaria, Otto became famous for rearranging the contents of his tank “to make it suit his own taste better” and occasionally smashing rocks at the glass walls in anger. The aquarium suffered a series of mysterious short circuits, the power suddenly cutting out when no one was around. Otto was found to be responsible for this too. He was observed on camera swinging himself up to the top of the tank and squirting water at the lights above, blowing the circuits. The bright light apparently bothered him.

This creature, with its tentacular tendency to interior design, displays of frustration and invention, is held up as an illustration of another kind of intelligence that has evolved differently to our own yet in which we recognise many of our own characteristics. Along with goats that can predict volcanic eruptions, bees that can communicate complex flight paths to pollen through dance and trees that sustain and nurture each other, Otto is a fine example of Bridle’s contention that, facing environmental catastrophe (and the rest), we have much to learn from nature in building our future. 

Octopuses appear at the Design Museum too in the work of Japanese artist Shimabuku, which revels in a playful attitude to the cephalopods, a joyful blend of research and communication in which he “gifts” glass balls and vessels to the creatures for their mutual amusement. 

Another example of benign human-ecological intervention seen here is the Melbourne-based Reef Design Lab’s ceramic Modular Artificial Reef Structure, an elegant system designed to rebuild the bones of coral reefs damaged by overfishing — an architecture for marine ecosystems. The project utilises a 3D-printed mould and slip-casting to recreate the “cellular structure” of the reef, fostering coral and other aquatic life. It’s a modest, if more realistic successor to utopian San Francisco design studio Ant Farm’s cult project Dolphin Embassy (1974) — a floating lab to initiate communication between humans and dolphins, and whose unrealised plans are also included. The Dolphin Embassy suggested a shared research space on equal terms, an astonishingly radical proposal, albeit one that proved prohibitively complex and expensive.

Among the works in the show, which spans folk artefacts such as corn dollies and woven fish traps to building materials that incorporate spaces for other species such as Johanna Seelemann’s bird and insect-friendly urban facades, is an unmissably vivid tapestry by designer Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. I went to her London studio to see a part of it and was thoroughly seduced, even though it was not designed for people. Ginsberg’s intent was to attempt to interpret how pollinators see. 

“It was originally a garden designed for the Eden Project,” she tells me, the Pollinator Pathmaker intended to address the massive decline in their numbers. “I thought it would be more interesting to make a kind of sculpture for insects rather than about them. So I had to begin to understand how insects see.” That has its challenges. “Bees can’t see red,” she tells me, “but they can see ultraviolet.” Some insects, she says, possess 15 types of photoreceptor, “which is incomprehensible to us. Our view of a landscape is not the only view. Perhaps if we could see more like them we could develop a degree of empathy.”

The result is astonishing, a psychedelic shroom-dream of a surface that ripples with colour, pattern and texture, still identifiably a meadow but made magically monstrous in scale and hue. The tapestry is part of a larger project to remake gardens, which includes a tranche of (real) gardens spanning from Cornwall to Berlin (so far) aimed at appealing to the most diverse possible cross-section of pollinators, from bees to birds. She calls it “the world’s largest climate positive artwork” with a self-deprecating grin. “You can download a digital PDF with an edition number and plant your own garden. It’s like the anti-NFT.”

Listening to nature was once understood as transgressive in western culture. Demons and witches were said to be able to metamorphose into animals, and animism was seen as a dangerous remnant of paganism. Today we are again beginning to understand not only that everything is connected, but also that there is no nature that has not somehow been affected by us, whether indirectly or through deliberate intervention. Even the great wildernesses such as the Amazon are believed to be the results of millennia of cultivation, shaping and forming them to better suit our own purposes. Now that we have changed everything, might we consult, or at least consider, the many millions of other species on Earth?

July 11-October 5, designmuseum.org

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In the first painting, the baby is one week old, mottled and skinny, his clenched fists raised to his shoulders in what is known as a newborn’s startle reflex. In the second, he is crying, his month-old body rigid in protest at the cold plastic of the scales on which he has been placed. In the third, in which he sits on the woman’s lap, he has an eight-month-old’s sturdiness, his cheek rounded and his mouth puckered in an expression of displeasure as she pulls his clothes up and over his face. An ear has been caught in the neckline of his top. Only one wrinkled navy sock remains.

Without their titles, these three small oil paintings show a woman ministering to a small baby. She is perhaps a little old to be his mother, but she is gentle, her hands swift and confident as they perform actions they have carried out many times before. The series recalls the work of the 19th-century impressionist painter Mary Cassatt, who depicted the bonds between mothers and their infants in images of breastfeeding, bathing and dressing. In these contemporary equivalents, the scene is also private, domestic. The woman is a modern Madonna of sorts. As she dandles the child on her knee, there is tenderness, and an undisguised painterly delight in the pinkness and plumpness of his flesh.

And yet the paintings are not sentimental. What is being portrayed is a more complex delineation of work and care. Look closer at “Sarah Weighing Laurie, 4 Weeks” (2024) and you’ll notice that in the mirror above the mantelpiece lined with cards celebrating the baby’s arrival, a second figure is present. This woman — only partially visible, her face obscured by the camera with which she records the scene — is his mother, and the painter of the picture. The delight in his flesh is her delight (he usually sits on her lap), but in painting herself off-centre holding a camera, she is also showing herself as an artist at work. In these paintings, her subject is not her son so much as his care under Sarah, a health visitor, for whom the undressing and weighing of small babies are necessary tasks of her job.

A working artist who is also an expectant or new mother may well grapple with the question of whether to make motherhood the subject of her work. Will the work be thought sentimental? Will she be taken seriously? The Scottish painter Caroline Walker has done so, but in the questioning and quietly assertive vein of her previous work. Walker has long been interested in depicting women’s working lives. Previous subjects have included manicurists, hairdressers, shop assistants, waitresses, bakers, tailors and hotel cleaners. An ongoing series shows the painter’s mother, Janet, at her home in Fife as she goes about her daily round of domestic duties — unstacking the dishwasher, hoovering, making beds. In her cool, spacious paintings, Walker depicts these women engaged in a variety of often menial tasks. The paintings draw attention to their unseen labours, making clear the value of their work.

In the past four years, following the births of her children, Walker’s world has shifted, but her gaze remains the same. A considerable body of new work — four series, now on display at the Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire, in an exhibition titled Mothering, her largest solo museum show to date — depicts babies and young children being cared for in environments rarely portrayed in paint. In one, a child is read to by a staff member on the floor of a nursery, her face uplifted inquisitively, the worker’s legs outstretched. For Walker, entering these settings has provided a prism through which to continue her commentary on the world of women’s work. Her new paintings reflect powerfully on the labour involved in bringing children into the world, both seen and unseen, paid and unpaid.

The exhibition’s title is important. There is a distinction, Walker suggests, between motherhood, and the specificity of the mother-child relationship, and mothering, open to a constellation of women, engaged in innumerable acts of care.

Walker’s inquiry into mothering begins behind closed doors. The first series is titled Lisa, depicting the painter’s sister-in-law at home, preparing for and in the weeks following the birth of her first child. Two paintings show Lisa in her bedroom, the roundness of her stomach mirrored by the birthing ball on which she sits. She fiddles with the pump, examines the mattress of the Moses basket, spreads tiny folded sheets in tidy piles on the bed. One senses that this feels new to her, and a little strange. The space has been carefully mapped: an open doorway, a sense of moving from room to room.

With the arrival of the baby, Lisa’s interior space contracts. In “Refreshments” (2022), she is drawn down and on to the playmat on which her baby lies on the floor. But the painting’s subject is not so much the interaction between a new mother and her baby, than the objects accumulating on the table: undrunk glasses of water and juice, television remote controls, a folded cloth, a mobile phone. Walker draws attention to the visual changes wrought to the domestic landscape when a baby arrives — the endless laundry, the clutter. She is perhaps the truest chronicler of the domestic reality of early motherhood. Elsewhere, a draining board is illuminated by the buttery yellow of a Medela breast pump.

There are affinities between painting and childcare: arranging shapes and colours, feeling the tackiness of things, repeated actions like wiping

A tender darkness creeps in. In “Night Feed I” (2022), Lisa nurses the baby by an uncurtained window, an image of companionship and acute aloneness. The light coming in from outside has the amber glow of a streetlamp. The brushstrokes are loose, languid. Time with a baby is often measured in phases. They can be fraught, also fleeting.

The series includes Walker’s first registered self-portrait, “Me and Laurie, Six Weeks Old” (2024), in which the painter shows herself holding her son. She looks tired, and “not terribly happy”. She made the painting for herself, she told me, when I called her up after seeing her show at the Hepworth, as a way of marking the passage of Laurie’s babyhood in her own life.

Walker is a documentarian of a kind. She begins with taking photographs, amassing a quantity of material from which she works in stages: pencil and charcoal sketches, small studies in oil, gridded-up drawings (no projections) on stretched linen, before underpainting freehand in acrylic and then oils. She works in series, so that each subject, explored across a number of related paintings, has the quality of a body of research. Alongside Lisa, Walker was beginning an artist residency at University College London Hospital, though which part of the hospital she would spend time in had yet to be determined. The event of her own pregnancy focused her attention on the maternity wing, and its predominantly female workforce. She would now be both patient and artist-in-residence at UCLH.

Attending her appointments and scans, the colours and surfaces of the hospital appealed to her. During her labour, she fixed her attention on the curtain drawn around her bed, deciding she would paint it ultramarine violet and cerulean blue. She described this process to me as a kind of “logging”: exciting, almost involuntary, difficult to switch off. The start date of her residency was ultimately deferred by the pandemic. A year after the birth of her daughter, Walker re-entered the wing as an artist, equipped, as a result of her own experience, with a kind of “knowingness”.

From her research at UCLH, Walker began her most compositionally complex painting. “Theatre” (2021) is brightly lit, and the baby has already been born. In the long interval following delivery (stitching up, cleaning), two uniformed nurses attend to the baby in its crib, four to its mother, while two further figures stand behind a trolley towards the back. One clasps her hands behind her back, looking perhaps a little bored. The painting has an almost sensory quality, of hushed, airless warmth, of shoes squeaking on linoleum floor. Walker is describing the calm and efficiency of the operating theatre, the choreography of the figures, so that only afterwards do we notice how the new mother turns her head in the direction of her baby. All the painting’s vitality is concentrated into this sightline.

A theatre shrinks to a cubicle. I particularly like the ink drawings Walker produced following her rounds of the postnatal ward with a midwife, armed with a pile of consent forms and books of her work. Implicit in each is Walker’s presence, and the generosity of the women, so lately having given birth, in allowing a stranger to observe their first bewildered attempts at mothering their babies. “I did some rounds with the midwife, and I would wait outside the curtained cubicle, and she’d ask them, and she’d say, ‘It’s OK, you can come in,’” Walker told me. Her loose, inky strokes convey such tenderness as a doctor examines a baby, or a midwife shows a new mother how to change a nappy, or breastfeed. Walker explores the concept of mothering in its most expansive sense, as something which can be taught and learnt.

Having a small child has made me think about artmaking, and especially painting, differently. There are affinities between the processes involved in painting and those of looking after young children: choosing and arranging shapes and colours, feeling the tackiness of things, repeated actions like wiping. At my son’s settling-in session at his new nursery, I noticed the tactile and visual appeal of the activities laid out for him: kinetic sand, putty, a shallow tray filled with water and brightly coloured plastic sea creatures. A small world catering to a child’s developing aesthetic sense.

In Walker’s Nurture paintings, depicting scenes from her daughter Daphne’s nursery, there is sheer pleasure in colour, light and surface texture. In “Sensory Play” (2025), the light is purplish, the plastic balls pearlescent, the floral pattern on the dress of the little girl almost juicy with paint. Elsewhere, one senses Walker’s enjoyment of reproducing the children’s artworks on the walls, even a nursery worker’s cascading blonde hair. The scale of the paintings is astounding. To stand before “Morning, Little Bugs” (2023), at over eight feet tall, is almost to walk beneath the protective tree canopy into an environment both stimulating and safe.

Walker is resistant to the idea that her paintings are radical, but perhaps nowhere in the history of art has a child’s outdoor or sensory play area been the subject of a large-scale oil painting. And as the curator Hettie Judah has observed, to paint creativity in early-years settings is inherently political, as Walker is describing the environment in which a child first encounters artmaking as it is being steadily removed from primary education in British schools.

Instead, Walker would prefer to think of her work as the more muted yet respectful practice of paying attention. She paints what is happening, and what is there. The nursery workers are a continuation of the manicurists, hairdressers, shop assistants, waitresses and hotel cleaners of her previous works. Their profession can be menial, repetitive, certainly undervalued. There is a sense that they might glance out of the window or at the clock, concentration lapsing into their own thoughts. As she photographs her subjects, Walker looks for such small breaches in a person’s presentation of themselves to the world. In this way, her paintings of women caring for children narrowly resist becoming idealised portrayals of maternal care, or depictions of such womanly qualities as gentleness and compassion. Her subjects’ interior lives are unknowable; they are real individuals, existing in their own private worlds.

Perhaps nowhere in the history of art has a child’s sensory play area been the subject of a large-scale painting

Often in Walker’s paintings, a transaction is taking place. She has been permitted into a workplace, a woman’s home or a hospital cubicle shortly after she has given birth. Or, she is paying another woman to look after her children, so that she can do the work of painting them. Recent paintings reflect upon a no less complex phenomenon: the role of grandparents in the care of young children. In her ongoing series Janet, Walker reflects on the changing role of own mother, and the ways in which, in becoming a grandmother, Janet’s unpaid labours have expanded. In “Sticker Dolly Dressing” (2024), Janet sits at the kitchen table (at which Walker sat as a child), absorbing Daphne in a sticker book. In “Granny’s Hair Salon” (2025), Janet lovingly dries Daphne’s hair. One can almost hear the quiet murmurings, the little jokes.

These paintings, among Walker’s most affectionate, are a meditation on familiarity, which has become both subject and methodology for her over the course of her career. Returning to recognisable places and settings allows her to record time passing, children growing and the ways in which even our most important relationships are subject to change. Janet has been influential in Walker’s working life for many years. Perhaps Walker’s most powerful message, if we are to look for one, is that nurture is the work of many hands, stretching across generations and beyond family. Care begins at the beginning, the web by which we are all connected.

Harriet Baker is the author of “Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann”

“Mothering” is at the Hepworth Wakefield until October 26, then at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester from November 22-May 10 2026

All images © Caroline Walker. Courtesy the Artist; GRIMM, Amsterdam/New York/London; Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and New York. Photos: Peter Mallet 

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Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

At nearly 90, Steve Reich is in the autumn of his composing career. Even at this age his music is as recognisably Reich as it ever was and yet it has gradually acquired the feeling of a spiritual quest and there is a deep sense of calm self-assurance.

Biblical references lie behind these two most recent works, which are receiving their first recordings. Traveler’s Prayer, for 11 instrumentalists and four singers, was given its premiere in 2021, and Jacob’s Ladder, also for four singers but a slightly larger ensemble, in 2023.

The similar line-up of performers suggests that they might sound the same, but that is not case. The more sensuously beautiful Jacob’s Ladder (shades of Music for 18 Instruments) contrasts restless activity in the instruments against voices that are slow-moving, as though outside time. They sing lines from Genesis while the instruments describe angels moving between heaven and earth. The Synergy Vocals ensemble and the New York Philharmonic are conducted by Jaap van Zweden.

The shorter Traveler’s Prayer, composed during the pandemic, is impressively darker and more pensive. Reich says that the events of that period increased the gravity of the texts, three short Biblical extracts. The contrapuntal complexity in his writing for the voices adds intellectual ballast. The Colin Currie Group is again paired with Synergy Vocals.

At just over half an hour, this disc of Reich’s latest work is short and to the point. The artwork on the physical disc is by the composer’s wife, Beryl Korot.

★★★★☆

‘Reich: Jacob’s Ladder and Traveler’s Prayer’ is released by Nonesuch

Streamers outside of the U.S. can no longer access South Park on Paramount+.

Sources have confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that Paramount+’s license to stream the series internationally has expired, noting the streaming platform is in continued negotiations and hopes to have the series back up soon for all subscribers. International fans of the long-running animated series can still stream South Park specials on Paramount+ and watch the show on Comedy Central, however.  

The news of the expired international license comes just days after it was announced that the season 27 premiere of South Park has been pushed back two weeks to July 23 from its original date of July 9 amid a streaming rights battle between the show’s creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Comedy Central’s parent company Paramount Global.

A tweet posted to South Park’s official X profile following the July 2 announcement read: “In response to the press release from Comedy Central about the change in premiere date for South Park Trey Parker & Matt Stone said — ‘This merger is a shitshow and it’s fucking up South Park. We are at the studio working on new episodes and we hope the fans get to see them somehow.”

As first reported by The Hollywood Reporter last month, Parker and Stone threatened legal action against Paramount, accusing incoming president Jeff Shell of interfering with their contract negotiations with Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and Netflix. Shell, currently chairman of sports and media at Redbird Capital Partners, is set to take the reins once the merger between David Ellison’s Skydance and Paramount Global is complete. The deal, originally set to close on July 6, is currently awaiting Federal Communications Commission approval to transfer Paramount’s broadcast licenses to Skydance. On Monday, representatives for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and its Hollywood Local 399 and the Center for American Rights met with the FCC to discuss concessions and emphasize their “commitment to explaining and applauding a final license package that protects the interests of workers, consumers, and investors.”

Paramount currently has two years left on its $900 million deal for the digital rights to South Park. In the June 21 letter written by an attorney for Parker and Stone’s entertainment company Park County, Shell is said to have asked potential bidders to modify certain terms of their offers in a “manner calculated to benefit Paramount at the expense” of the company, specifically pointing to Shell urging WBD to give Paramount+ an exclusive 12-month window for new episodes of the show and to shorten the term of the deal from 10 to five years.

“We hereby demand that you, Redbird, and Skydance immediately cease your interference,” the letter reads. “If these activities continue, we will have no choice but to act to both protect our rights and discharge any obligations we may have to the public.”

In response, a spokesperson for Skydance released a statement which read, “Under the terms of the transaction agreement, Skydance has the right to approve material contracts.”

South Park first debuted on Comedy Central on Aug. 13, 1997. The season 26 finale episode “Spring Break” aired on Mar. 29, 2023, with three specials following between October 2023 and May 2024.

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If you missed out on the Pacific Break Samoa launch concert, don’t worry. We’ve got you.

You can listen to some of the region’s best music artists, recorded live at Apia’s Friendship Park in June 2025.  

The concert features performances from well-known Pacific Break winners – Danielle from PNG, Ju Ben from Fiji and Chris Kamu’ana Rohoimae from Solomon Islands.

They play alongside local Samoan acts including Mr Tee, Tofaga Meke and Mr Cowboy, at the free, family friendly event hosted by Radio Australia’s Jacob McQuire and Michael Chow, and Samoa’s Young Sefa.

Featuring:

• Mr Tee
• Chris Kamu’ana Rohoimae
• Danielle
• Tofaga Meke
• Ju Ben
• Mr Cowboy

PRESENTERS: Jacob McQuire, Michael Chow

SOUND ENGINEERS: Selwyn Cozens, Kristina Miltiadou

SPOILER ALERT: This post contains details about Love Island USA Season 7, Episode 34.

The final week of Love Island USA Season 7 is here, and only four couples will make it to the final.

Following the dumping of Clarke Carraway and Taylor Williams, America was allowed to vote for their favorite couple once again, and two Islanders would be left vulnerable to leaving the villa.

RELATED: ‘Love Island USA’ Season 7: All The Dumped Islanders From Jeremiah Brown To Cierra Ortega & More

The remaining couples are Amaya Espinal & Bryan Arenales, Iris Kendall & Pepe García, Huda Mustafa & Chris Seeley, Chelley Bissainthe & Ace Greene, and Olandria Carthen & Nic Vansteenberghe. One of these couples will join the dumped Islanders below.

RELATED: ‘Love Island USA’s Cierra Ortega Addresses Villa Exit Over Racist Post: “I Genuinely Had No Idea That It Was A Slur”

On Episode 34, the Islanders met up with their families ahead of the Season 7 finale. The families gave the Islanders energy to get to that finish line as they gave their take on their journey in the villa.

The Islanders were treated to one final dinner where they would find out if they were going to make it to the finale or if their road to finding love was over.

RELATED: All Of Ariana Madix’s Outfits As Host Of ‘Love Island USA’ Season 7

Who are the couples going to the Love Island USA Season 7 finale?

• Amaya and Bryan
• Huda and Chris
• Olandria and Nic
• Iris and Pepe

Which couple was dumped from Love Island USA Season 7, Episode 34?

Chelley and Ace were dumped from the villa, receiving the fewest votes ahead of the Love Island USA Season 7 finale.

RELATED: Ariana Madix Makes Call To ‘Love Island USA’ Fans To Not Be “Atrocious” To Islanders On Social Media: “Don’t Do That”

When is the Love Island USA Season 7 finale?

America would now vote for their favorite couple to win Love Island USA Season 7, and the results would be revealed on Sunday, July 13.

Scroll through the photo gallery below to meet the Love Island USA Season 7 finalists.

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