A Jolly Knight, Henry VIII And 2 Parapet Canines

I decided on a quick trip over to Rochester today as I haven't been for a while. It was a glorious sunny early summer morning too and I felt like a good stroll through its picturesque and historical streets.
Unfortunately, I seemed to have misplaced my photographic mojo and couldn't quite capture anything that I was happy with on my walk. That was until I made the decision to look up rather than at eye level and saw a jolly knight, Henry VIII and two parapet ensconced dogs - o.k so the first two are pub signs (see main and first extra) and the latter are a duo of metal weather vane hounds (see second extra) on a rooftop near the cathedral but sometimes beggars can't be choosers!
I then popped into Rochester Art Gallery as I'd heard about a fascinating exhibition on the local news by an artist called Reem Acason. It's called "Two Seas" and is the English translation for the name of the island archipelago of 'Bahrain', the artist's place of birth.
She is a multi-disciplinary artist and arts educator born in Bahrain to a Bahraini father and an English mother. She has spent most of her life living in the Southeast of England with trips back to Bahrain to visit her family. Her work explores the human experience of living between the two countries and her own British Bahraini heritage alongside broader cultural and ecological legacies relating to the sea.
She sees coastal areas across the globe as politically, socially and ecologically charged spaces which are also inextricably connected to maritime history, movement, trade and migration and that they represent a flowing together of identities, histories and views of the world; contrasting cultures which overlap and connect. She wants to celebrate and highlight the cross pollination between cultures, science, knowledge and art, whilst also acknowledging the complex histories that these coastal areas share.
She uses a wide variety of materials in her work including paintings, self portraits and items collected on her travels and bought is souks; from paper made locally in Bahrain from date palm fronds to old fishing nets donated by fishermen working along the Sussex coastline. 
It thought it was a fabulous exhibition and I almost felt like I was at a private viewing as nobody else was in the gallery when I was there. My only complaint, more of a minor quibble, was that the gallery space itself was quite small - I thought it deserved more room to breathe.