Baya Simons

HTSI writers pick the best food, fashion, auctions, exhibitions and adventures for the month ahead

Nature and history collide on the archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe. It’s a complicated yet captivating landscape

What do the hours between dusk and sunrise hold? We asked these photographers to share their stories

We talk about the human body as a machine, an instrument, a vessel. We say that it has its own language and its own genre of horror. It can be a temple or a weapon, an agent of fear and shock or delight and beauty. Through 12 photography projects, this special issue touches all of these iterations of the human form. Basketball players readying themselves to leap for the ball appear like figures from a Renaissance painting. Bodies that find deep water terrifying tentatively learn to swim. Dancers…

There are a lot of curiosities in The Cult of Beauty, the exhibition currently on show at the Wellcome Collection in Euston. A bandage to protect your moustache while you sleep dating from 1910. A £375 “24K Gold Serum Intense” by Chantecaille that contains “an innovative cocktail of pure gold and Vitamin C”, displayed next to a 19th century lithograph of a French courtesan who used to drink liquefied gold to preserve her youth, a practice believed to have eventually killed her. A corset for a ba…

The first prayers of the day are said at 5 o’clock in the morning at the Abbazia di Praglia, at the foot of the hills outside Padua, Italy. The monks make their way through the 15th-century cloister to the church, with its barrel-vaulted ceilings and frescoes by Campagnola, where, as sunrise breaks through the windows, they say their matins. Afterwards, they follow the daily routine as set out by Saint Benedict in 530AD, to “labour at whatever is necessary until about the fourth hour, and from t…

Barbara Kruger’s seminal work seems to me to embody the essence of this show. It contains this double rejection: of women being synonymous with (passive, silent, irrational) nature and of men as producers of culture. We see a closely cropped image, likely culled from a 1950s fashion magazine, of a glamorous woman lying against a grassy background with her eyes gently covered by leaves. The leaves make me think that she’s dreaming of another world: reimagining or willing into being a place that e…

In the thick of winter 2021, photographer Siân Davey’s 33-year-old son proposed a family project. “Why don’t we fill our back garden with wildflowers and bees, and the people we meet over the garden wall, we’ll invite them in to be photographed by you,” he said. Davey and her four children were galvanised by the task and set about clearing the small, neglected garden of their cottage on the Dartington Estate in Devon. The resulting photographs show passers-by, friends and family — including Dave…

Today’s obsessions with eating have inspired a new wave of art. The results are oddly delicious

Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge This small, light-filled glass extension echoes the simple beauty of the original 19th-century cottages-turned-museum created by collector Jim Ede. I almost always discover exciting local artists and makers here, such as pottery from Very Less, whose berry bowl is now on my wishlist. I also love the simple jewellery made by Studio Adorn in Norwich. The recent Lucie Rie exhibition was complemented by elegant ceramics from local makers, books on pottery and make-at-home k…