Vestiges | Annely Juda Fine Art
Vestige, from the Latin vestigium: a footprint, a visible sign of something that once existed but is now gone. Vestiges is a grab-bag summer group show at Annely Juda, five artists loosely following that brief. Of the five, Laura Footes is the one who actually hits it.
Her scenes are all London, blurred with overlays. Two pairs of paintings. The first shows the city’s double decker buses, one view from the bottom floor, one from the top.
I take the 25 and the 205 down Whitechapel Road most weeks. City skyscrapers behind me, markets and mosques on either side. Footes’ version of that same route is slightly hallucinatory. Familiar and disorienting at once.
Night Gardens II (2026)
The second pair is aerial views of residential gardens at night. Creeping overgrowth around flimsy wooden fences. Illuminated extensions. Harsh streetlight on the roads. A bruise-coloured sky above it all.
A passing moment is caught. It’s admittedly a conventional, familiar, even banal moment for any Londoner, or maybe even any city-dweller. But sometimes that capture is all you can ask of an artist.
Vestiges is at Annely Juda Fine Art (London). 23 July - 28 August 2026