The Negligent eye at The Bluecoat March 2014
Influential work
The first piece I saw claimed its space in the small side gallery. Beatrice Haines ‘Heavenly bodies’ had three boards showing just the hair and forehead of three people with scanners infront of them. The scanners were in purpose built boxes in the middle of the room, they obviously connected to the pieces as the light came from them and the noise and clicks of the scanner really caught my attention and made the piece seem like it surrounded me in the space. Paired with Steve Mcqueen’s coffin like presentation I had seen earlier in the year this piece made me very intruiged to try my own wood work and see how it filled the space. I used the C2C machine to create graves and photographed them as 2D and 3D pieces to test this effect.
Beatrice Haines ‘Heavenly bodies’ backlit scanning electron micrograph 85x85cm
Abigail Stokes, 'Graves', 2014, wood, 130x 70cm
I was immediately drawn to was the Helen Chadwick piece ‘Viral Landscape’. It was interesting as I instantly knew I had seen these pieces before in the Walker Gallery. The difference here was that it was much more immediate as they were directly in front of you in the space however in the Walker they are on wall in a narrow space so you walk along them rather than viewing them head on. I felt they were more captivating in the Bluecoat because of this. This was very beneficial for my research into gallery spaces and impacts as they are both white walled gallery spaces but the immediacy of the pieces in the Bluecoat really sold them.
Helen Chadwick pieces ‘Viral Landscape’ C-type print photograph, powder coated steel frame. 120x300x5cm.
Variety of Work
I felt the exhibition had good balance, of varied sizes of work. From the tiny Thomas Bewick ‘tale-pieces’, then right next to it Nicky Coutts ‘Another Land 3’ at over a metre high. The variety kept the show very dynamic but it wasn’t sporadic enough for the mind to lose focus as it wasn’t over crowded and the pieces had enough space for each to be viewed separately.
Thomas Bewick ‘tale-pieces’, 1790, wood engraving on paper from a general history of quadrupeds 37x 31.9 cm
Nicky Coutts, ‘Another Land 3’, 2006, C-type print on aluminium, central panel 132x119cm, wings 132 x53cm each.
A further demonstration of how well the space was used is when walking down the stairs I noticed a sculpture hanging from the ceiling, I had walked right under it and not noticed it, it was a clever way to encoroprate the Marilene Oliver ‘Fallen Purga’ sculpture.
Marilene Oliver ‘Fallen Purga’ 2010, corrugated plastic 220x55x40cm .
Over All
A thought provoking, clever exhibition that has further inspired me to install my work into spaces as dynamically as possible.
