Rita Fennell

Complicated threads twist and wind in The Garden of England at the Queen's House Gallery: Alice Kettle shakes up the royal collection with flowerbeds in the North-West Parlour and lacy fronds hanging down the Tulip stairwell of Inigo Jones' architectural masterpiece in Greenwich.

Subtly placed pots evoke a contemporary presence at Sir John Soane's Museum, where several ceramicists engage with the museum space and its history. You will have to hunt a bit to find these works among the teeming objects in the permanent collection, but once found, they make for a striking flash of bright newness.

Dulwich Picture Gallery delivers an exhibition of 17th century Spanish painter Murillo and his patron de Neve, from shimmering religious masterpieces in a replica Sevillian church, to the kitsch delights of Ruskin's bête noires, the Beggar Boys.

Raven Row must be congratulated for bringing this major retrospective of Bela Kolarova’s artistic career to London.  Relatively unknown outside the Czech Republic, Kolarova’s work is a revelation of an artist working within the constraints of a totalitarian regime to express the issues of the everyday.     

A delightful new exhibition from the V&A, featuring 49 of John Constable's oil sketches that trace his work from Suffolk and Essex through to Hampstead, Brighton and Salisbury. These impressionistic sketches show the artist in process, working in the moment and from reality to discover a truthful representation of nature.

A fantastic project by the Education team at the Wallace Collection, Journeys East is their collaborative approach with community groups. The results are rich works in collage, ceramics and silks that reflect on the Dutch Collection of Art while raising contemporary issues of migration, identity and the hidden self.

Joana Vasconcelos follows her hugely successful exhibition at the Palace of Versailles earlier this year with a site-specifc display at Haunch of Vension. Vasconcelos' works are fresh and contemporary, spectacular and exuberant, and play with both everyday objects and the unexpected.

Paul Benney has used the Deadhouse, the subterranean space of Somerset House to brilliant effect.  The individual, brick storage alcoves are dark and dank even in daylight, but their size and atmosphere works to create a rare environment for viewing art that feels both exclusive and intimate.

This exhibition is densely packed with material relating to the history of the modern Olympic Games and reveals the part Philatelists have had to play in preserving lived experiences that took place through postal communication.    

This is a stunning solo show by Barbara Steinberg - an artist who by her own admission is comfortable working in what some consider to be the unfashionable medium of oil paint and who deserves the Signal Gallery’s description of her as a painter’s painter.