In Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, significant emphasis is placed on the ‘artist date’. The book aims to help people recover their artistic creativity and includes techniques and exercises to harness this. One of these is the artist date, which comprises a “once-weekly, festive, solo expedition to explore something that interests you”.

This is supposed to reconnect you to your inner artist child, encourage you to focus on (and indulge in) something that piques your interest and thus get to know yourself better and open your eyes to new creative possibilities.

With that in mind, I took myself to the V&A museum in South Kensington, London. Entry is gloriously free, and there is so much to explore within the museum’s mesmerising walls. Seriously. The building itself is insane.

I went with two missions: find Lucien Freud’s etchings, and see the Energy: Sparks from the Collection photography exhibit. This was indeed a mission because unfortunately, I am blessed with the worst sense of direction known to man (it took me 30 minutes just to find my way out of the museum). Luckily, the two exhibitions were practically right next to each other. While I would absolutely recommend going to see these works for yourself, here are some of my favourites.

I think the smallest gestures that we make in our lives can have much greater repercussions than some things we might consider to be more forceful.

Gabriel Orozco, on his work

I stood looking at this photograph for ages. The light shining through the window illuminates the breath of someone left on a piano lid. It highlights the beauty in the simpler moments and shows that evidence of life can have far-reaching effects. Someone was either indulging in the joy of playing the piano, or having the luxury of listening to someone else. Even with no life present in the photograph, life was here.

The description of this series reads:

In its exploration of animal and human movement, Muybridge’s series Animal Locomotion was a feat of photographic innovation and contributed to the advancement of scientific, medical, physiological and artistic thought.

Victoria & Albert Museum

Muybridge captured the intricacies of movement by lining up multiple cameras triggered at timed intervals or by a wire. The motion portrayed here is usually so fast that it is indiscernible to the human eye. Science and art collide so beautifully in this series.

Having moved to London aged 17, Vinca Petersen became part of the ‘free party’ scene that raged across the city throughout the 1990s. Her photographs are a creative record of the experiences she had with a community that travelled across Europe.

The girl depicted here is running away from burning cars. The group would often attend protests in response to political backlash against their way of living.

This photograph elicits freedom in the wild portrayal of escapism and euphoria – two feelings often associated with this movement.