Baya Simons

I was born in the Republic of the Congo, in La Côte Sauvage, where my father worked in forestry. I lived there for 15 years, and it was such a carefree, insouciant existence. Sometimes we came back to France to see my grandfather, who worked as a fisherman on the Île de Ré. I remember the fish and the fruits de mer were fantastic there. While I was training to be a chef I travelled to Spain, America and France, and eventually settled in Marseille. I found a little restaurant, and I said to my w…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Influence — the power to persuade, advocate for change and imagine better ways of doing things — takes many forms. Nowhere is this more clear than in the magazine’s annual Women of the Year issue, a list of the world’s most influential women written about by other powerful women on the international stage. This special project was assembled, over several months, in consultation with hundreds of FT journalists across dozens of bureaux, our readers and industry leaders. The end result is a list f…

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…

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

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