For the fifth in our series of Frieze week blog posts, find out about the ropes, scrolls and vases that Jenny White, Head of Visual Arts Programme, was drawn to:

“Entering the hallowed portals of Frieze Masters, it’s a delight to encounter distinguished artist Paula Rego's beautiful and sinister large acrylic canvases in Marlborough Gallery’s Paintings & Etchings from the 1980s. Gluttony of Fish and other luminous frivolities combine serious storytelling with nippy crustaceans. An interview with Rego in her studio in the 1980s reveals a youthful stare to camera which belies the knowingness of her animal subjects, some mythical, some real, cascading through nursery rhymes portfolio published in 1989. As my colleague Diana Eccles says, thank goodness our predecessors acquired an edition for the British Council Collection, which has been seen in 15 countries around the world to date.

It was high drama over at Mumbai gallery Jhaveri Contemporary's spotlight on Mrinalini Mukherjee's giant knitted hemp rope sculptures, like walking into the wardrobe of a Kurosawa Samurai film. Mrinalini, who passed away last year, received a British Council Scholarship in 1971 to study sculpture at the West Surrey College of Art and Design in Farnham, UK (now the University for the Creative Arts).

As I used to work as Arts Manager for the British Council in Japan, my eyes were drawn to the Japanese references at Frieze, such as British Council Collection artist Ryan Gander’s involvement in an interesting curatorial experiment between Taro Nasu alongside Limoncello.

Grayson Perry's Huhne Vase, 2014, showed how Japan can be a surprising and unexpected inspiration. Named after a disgraced former politician, the vase was purposefully smashed and then the cracks repaired using a ‘kintsugi’ technique where a very hard lacquer resin is mixed with gold to hold the pieces together.

At Marian Goodman’s stand, Gabriel Orozco’s three hanging Obi Scrolls, 2015, were made during a residency in Japan, where intricate thin silk ‘obi’ sashes for kimono, have been cut, overlayered, then mounted onto hanging scrolls with selvages revealed– very ‘wabi-sabi’ (a term used to represent the acceptance of an idea of transience and imperfection in Japanese aesthetics as the highest form of beauty).”