Restoration Conversations - Magazine Issue 8

Vanessa Nicolson, Carla Danella, Anne Chisholm, Sarah Cecilia Harrison, Suzanne Valadon and more...

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Autumn Winter 2025/6

This issue of Restoration Conversations explores modern and contemporary art and film from women’s perspectives, with several thought-provoking shows, like ‘MARY MARY’ (quite contrary) at The Artist’s Garden and ‘Ketty La Rocca: you you’, the Estorick Collection’s retrospective on the Italian conceptual artist. In Florence, this issue celebrates ‘The Rose that Grew from Concrete’, the final exhibition at Museo Sant’Orsola, prior to the venue’s re-opening in 2026. We’re also seeing the world from behind the lens of ‘Women Trailblazers in Documentary Cinema’, with a special focus on French ‘pan-African’ film director Sarah Maldoror and her tribute at the 66th edition of Festival dei Popoli, the world’s oldest documentary film festival.

Curator Carla Danella’s interview with writer and art historian Vanessa Nicolson, author of Have You Been Good and The Truth Game, offers us a fascinating look at ‘the dark side of privilege’, growing up in the shadow of Bloomsbury icons. Anne Chisholm’s personal reflections on ‘Aunt’ Celia’ provides an insightful glimpse of portraitist Sarah Cecilia Harrison. Margie MacKinnon brings painter Suzanne Valadon to the fore, together with Berthe Weill, the art dealer who supported her and other ‘young artists’ of the Parisian avant-garde whose works will soon be on show at the Musée de l’Orangerie. Finally, and as always, this issue focuses on restoration, from the restored Artemisia painting damaged in a Beirut bombing, to the art of Violante Ferroni, whose works created for an eighteenth-century hospital stand as testimony to the ‘art of healing’.

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