Join this month’s walking route for an autumnal wander around East London. The path will take approximately one hour and twenty minutes.

The first stop will be at Haricot Gallery for Sending My Love To You, Baby, the gallery is delighted to present Sending My Love To You, Baby, a joint exhibition between artists and friends Bernice Mulenga and Joy Yamusangie. The title for the exhibition, a joint decision from the pair, emits an assured certainty, a declaration of love with clear intention. It implies a love that you already know exists, but in this specific moment is being directed to you, Baby. Though the “you’s” in question are varied for both artists, as familial, romantic and friend based relationships are featured, throughout each work is a tenderness that is beautifully expressed across the mediums of photography and painting. Mulenga offers a glimpse into the kinship with their younger sister and cousins. As the series forms partially around grief within their family, there is a call inward amongst each of them to send love, to reiterate its existence. A small act of defiance to the consuming nature of grief. In Joy’s paintings we meet the uncertainty of navigating the medium through which love is sent. The works look at the complexities of how and when romantic love is expressed, and its transformative nature as it reaches new forms. Birds and birdlike figures reappear, both as messengers and to symbolise transitions.

Next, head to Standpoint Gallery for Rocks Remember and Other Stories by Denise de Cordova. The exhibition presents work developed by the artist from recent solitary forest walks in British Columbia, Canada, and during a summer residency at The British School Of Rome. De Cordova’s work plays with ambiguities – there is a tension between notions of surface embellishment being at odds with what lies beneath. By grouping and regrouping objects, her narratives adapt fluidly to different environments. Within their fabricated forms and painted surfaces, de Cordova’s sculptures hold allusions to many literary genres, from magical realism, landscape writing and classical novels, to ancient myth and folklore tales. She describes the work as the embodiment of real and imagined space, a nexus for lived experience, re-readings, and collected stories. This new exhibition highlights de Cordova’s multi-disciplinary practice as an artist and educator. As a Fellow and part-time tutor of more than 30 years at the Royal College of Art, she has been an influential teacher to younger generations of artists.

The third stop will be at BSMT for Errol Theunissen’s debut solo show, Chroma. The show features a stunning collection of oil paintings and mixed media pieces that reflect Theunissen’s experiences as a self-taught artist who finds inspiration in his immediate environment. Theunissen’s vivid oil paintings and mixed media works draw on his Zimbabwean heritage and experiences in the UK. Capturing everyday scenes and memories, his art reflects his fascination with simple, honest relationships between humans and animals. The use of bright colours and symbolic details invites viewers to connect with themes of family and community, blending nostalgia with present-day reflections. Chroma showcases Theunissen’s unique narrative style, highlighting universal emotions through personal storytelling.

Conclude the night at In-grid’s Losing the Plot exhibition. The group show explores concepts around history and lore: looking into archival and record-keeping practices, unreliable narrators and oral histories, changelogs and other technological timestamps. Taking a playful while careful approach, the work shown will consider the social and technical mechanisms of record keeping, categorisation and labelling. We will consider where power and bias lie when keeping, updating or writing into records, and different orientations of measuring the passage of time. The exhibition itself will be mutable, a living archive which will be in flux during its run via public activations, performative moments and amendments from In-grid as artist*archivists. By creating our own technological infrastructures, archival protocols and games within the space we hope to imagine ways of working with archives that are awkward and unruly – creating space for ideas which can’t be filed away neatly. In-grid is a trans*feminist collective of artists / educators / technologists working with digital infrastructures. In-grid has been working together since 2019, and is made up of a fluid group of people who create artworks, installations, celebrations, workshops and research.