Anna Souter

Coming out of my Instagram posting hibernation to share this beautiful publication I recently received from Jonathan Michael Ray Just before going on maternity leave, @jonathanmichaelray asked me to put together a text on Storm Stones, a wonderful series of engraved stone works inspired the artist's drawing sessions with his four year old daughter during a residency on Orkney. It's now been printed as part of a lovely zine with images from the series, DM Jonathan to secure a copy :)

After a few nights of truly appalling sleep, Aidan gave me a small reprieve last night, just in time for my birthday! It's also not raining and Iris has gone 48 hours without a meltdown, and now I'm sitting with a coffee and a magazine, feeling very blessed to have my beautiful family (even if Steve did forget it was my birthday and booked to be away for 3 solid days... 😆) Celebrating with a random selection of images from the last 8 weeks since we became a family of four!

In search of fresh #water Anna Souter reports on the exhibition 'Thirst: In Search of Freshwater' at the @wellcomecollection . Through this thought-provoking exhibition, she sees a clear link between access to water, socio-economic inequality and the environmental crisis. What does it mean to be thirsty? What measures will we take to quench our thirst? And how do we control other people’s access to water? These questions are at the heart of Thirst: In Search of Freshwater at Wellcome Collection, London, an exhibition that draws together historical artefacts, documents and contemporary art to interrogate our relationship with water throughout history. Throughout the exhibition, historical objects are juxtaposed with contemporary artworks, creating channels for visitors to feel a connection with their ancestors. Thirst encourages us to consider the people who lived on dry land thousands of years ago, how they survived, and how we can learn from their wisdom. The exhibition is careful to avoid romanticising Indigenous knowledge as something mystical, and instead seeks to frame this knowledge as engineering, citing some of the ambitious and ingenious ways in which people have accessed fresh water in challenging environments over the millennia. Flowing across a range of times and geographies, the exhibition asks us to consider the myriad human and environmental factors that impact our relationship with and access to fresh water. “There’s huge political and socioeconomic inequality at the heart of many of these stories,” says the exhibition’s curator @janicecyli . She emphasises that watery ecologies, cultures and economies are closely linked – and are often affected by inequality and oppression in inextricable ways. Read the whole article at /magazine/article6562-in-search-of-fresh-water.html - Visit the 'Resurgence & Ecologist' branch of our Linktree and find this in our #FREE to read articles (see bio) @annasouter is a writer, editor and curator with an interest in contemporary art and ecology. Thirst: In Search of #FreshWater is at @wellcomecollection , London, until 1 February 2026. #Photo © @mhammed_kilito . Courtesy of the artist

Welcome to the world baby Aidan! Born yesterday lunchtime at 41+6 weeks at a whopping 10 lbs 10 oz / 4.8 kgs, birthing you was the hardest thing I have ever done but I managed without pain relief and without injury - I am proud of myself and of you and we are very excited to welcome you into our family 💙

I was sad to see how much of the reporting and criticism around Maret Anne Sara's Turbine Hall installation failed to engage with the Sami perspective, instead focussing on whether it would be popular or likeable. Somehow the Turbine Hall apparently has different rules from other exhibition spaces? You can read my small effort to engage a bit more closely via Hyperallergic "Some have criticized Sara’s Turbine Hall project for not being big or spectacular enough, sometimes ignoring the content and, in particular, the context of her work. Certainly, it is not the most visually memorable installation that this space has ever seen — but it feels wrong to judge this work on what is absent. What is present is a nuanced and meditative exploration of an interconnected community and ecosystem on the brink of disaster, where temperature fluctuations and ongoing extractivism are damaging heritage and environment. The canary in the coal mine, as it were, for our lives in more temperate areas. We could all undoubtedly benefit from taking Sámi science seriously as we collectively hurtle toward even more cataclysmic changes." @maretannesara @hyperallergic Image 1: 12. Portrait of Máret Ánne Sara at Tate Modern Photo © Tate (Sonal Bakrania) Other photos mine

It's always gratifying when an artist asks me to work with them for a second time. It was brilliant to be asked to write about Connie Harrison's work again, this time for her upcoming solo show at @lucegallery in Turin, which opens tonight! "Throughout these prismatic paintings, there is an elision of the distance between foreground and background, playing with the traditional spatial rules of painting, unfolding into multifaceted organic geometries. Despite being landscape-like, the works eschew a horizon line or central vanishing point, eluding definitions of scale; these could be close-ups of a garden border or views of the earth from far above, as romantically intimate as they are distantly topographical." @connieharrison

I've admired Anna Ridler's work for years now, though I mainly knew her best-known project Myriad, for which she created a dataset from thousands of tulip flowers and then built an AI program to create new iterations of tulips, creating a comparison between the Dutch tulip bubble and the speculative forces driving Bitcoin values. I was delighted when she asked me to work with her on a new artist statement text, offering the opportunity to get to know the rest of her work better.  Swipe along to see a picture of me looking young and fresh-faced with this piece in person on a trip to Liverpool in 2019! "Since floral motifs have traditionally been associated with the feminine, Ridler knowingly accepts the possibility that her work might be reduced to its aesthetic qualities, interested in society’s struggle to reconcile prettiness with technological and conceptual complexity. Flowers themselves are often deemed decorative and therefore trivial, despite being essential to the functioning of life on earth.  The botanical world’s capacity to hold paradoxes echoes the ways in which Ridler’s work simultaneously contains and acknowledges contradictory aspects, as well as examining how these contradictions are culturally constructed." @annaridler

I've also had a piece published in the current issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine - which is also available to read online via the link in my bio It's a piece on the current Wellcome Collection exhibition Thirst: In Search of Freshwater, where I was particularly taken with Karan Shrestha's work:  "A key, and increasing, source of flooding is melting glacier ice, which forms the subject of the next section. Here, a new commission by Nepali artist Karan Shrestha explores the displacement of Indigenous Ladakh communities after glacier meltwater flooding. In this case, government corruption and inadequate infrastructure failed to support people trying to move to Nepalese cities, forcing many to become migrant workers in the Gulf and other parts of South Asia. “This is a work that brings us all the way from the ice caps to issues of migrancy, exploitation and displacement, as well as considering the cultural loss of Indigenous legacies, folk songs and traditions,” curator Janice Li explains." #insearchoffreshwater  @wellcomecollection @resurgencetrust

This one feels particularly appropriate as I approach birth and breastfeeding for the second time. It was so lovely to work with @rowanhannah on this text about her new series Carriers, which draw ideas of matrescence together with meditations on fluidity, water, vessels, and ways of knowing. Hannah and I have known each other for a long time now, both before and after becoming mothers, and so it was particularly lovely to be able to put together this text for her at this juncture.  "Though the torsos in Rowan’s Carriers series do not directly represent pregnant bodies, they allude to bodily aspects of matrescence, such as milk ducts and the placenta (a complex organ grown anew for each pregnancy, protecting the foetus and conveying nutrients). These nodes of exchange between mother and baby are markers of the porousness of the body, where environmental factors and bodily fluids weave a complex dance of liquid interconnection between beings. However, these sculptural works are not only relevant to those who have experienced pregnancy or lactation. Instead, these states of being are shown to be synecdoche for a wider truth: that all bodies are porous and fluid, existing in a wildly fluctuating state of interweaving. Pregnancy is not a unique example of symbiosis, but instead evidence that symbiosis is a universal fact of life."  Images: Hannah Rowan, Vegetal, 2025 Hannah Rowan, The Sea Inside, 2025 Hannah Rowan, In Our Veins A Salty Stream, 2025 (courtesy the artist and Edit Gallery)

It was a real pleasure to be invited by Anne Carney Raines to write a text for her duo show with Imogen Allen at Soho Revue last month. I've loved Anne Carney's work for a long time but it was great to get to know Imogen's work as well for this beautiful show. "Both artists share an interest in finding ways to paint the things that contemporary art gatekeepers have deemed too cliché – or even too pretty – for representation. Sunsets and butterflies are pinnacles of colourful kitsch, but Raines and Allen have both found ways to make these too-popular subjects central to their practices in unexpected and radical ways. There is a playful defiance at work here, a knowing wink at the art world’s usual markers of taste and class." Anne Carney Raines and Imogen Allen: Imago at Soho Revue @annecarneyraines @imogen_allen_ @sohorevue

As I wind down to go on maternity leave shortly, I've been super lucky to work with some of my favourite artists (and got to know some new wonderful artists as well). Thank you so much to everyone who has commissioned me recently, it's nice to go out on a high! I'm going to be posting a few snippets over the next few days in appreciation...  First up, @xantheburdett 🌱 I didn't know Xanthe's work before Michelle at @wilder.gallery asked me to write something for their booth at @echosoho , but I loved it as soon as I saw it because it resonated so closely with some of my research: "This body of work, particularly the large painting Lady Bertilak, is closely inspired by the medieval story of Gawain and the Green Knight, in which a knight who is “grass green and greener still” challenges Sir Gawain to deal him a blow with his sword, after which the knight will return the favour. Gawain cuts off his opponent’s head, only for the knight to pick it up and ride off laughing, apparently unaffected. The Green Knight, who exhibits a plant-like indifference to beheading, and his wife Lady Bertilak, whose role is to test Gawain’s purity by trying to seduce him, evoke the uncanny and unruly wildness of nature, revealing the weirdness of the places where human and nonhuman forces meet." Xanthe Burdett, Lady Bertilak, 2025 Images courtesy of Wilder Gallery #artwriting #painting #gawain

Pre-frieze London highlights part 2... 1 Do Ho Suh at Tate (actually not great with a toddler as she really wanted to touch it all...) 2-3 Maret Anne Sara at Tate (beautiful, understated, touchable!) 4 Pipilotti Rist at Tate (touchable art for the win again!) 5-6 @chantalpowell in a fascinating show at @thecollegeofpsychicstudies 7 Very messy chocolate ice cream in the sunshine 🌞