#thebluecoat

We were RELEASED again into the outside world! And today we were visiting the oldest building in Liverpool, which started as a school, became an artists colony, and is now a bit of artists workshop and a bit art gallery. As with so many buildings in Liverpool there is such strong connections with the slave trade, something that the city is still struggling to come to terms with and is still trying to find the best possible way of handling its history. We have the Slavery museum within the Maritime Museum which doesn’t shy away from the atrocities that were committed, making sure that this moment in history is never forgotten so that it will not happen again. This philosophy is something the Bluecoat is trying to emulate; the man who built the Bluecoat school, had the first boat to leave the Old Dock, and was a leading figure in the Slave Trade... and so the Bluecoat takes its history and displays it, its doesn’t apologise or skirt around the subject, and then goes on to showcase and give opportunities to artists of colour from Britain and abroad!

Alexis Teplin - It is my pleasure to participate

The exhibition we saw today was very different to any exhibition I’ve seen before. Each part of the exhibition was arranged like a room in a house, with some of the paintings acting as a window to beyond that particular room’s space. Especially with the way the costumes she had created were arranged looking out at those paintings. The part I found particularly interesting was the sheer number of ‘other’ objects surrounding the painting - there were glass vases, metal ferns, little cups and bowls, metal seats, and handmade fabric partitions. Each section worked in conjunction with the others to build the illusion of a home setting. Teplin speaks of her exhibition as a ‘painting display’ with the other items acting as extensions of the painting, not as items in their own right. And then what happens is actors come along and wear the costumes Teplin has made, and interact with each other and the objects around as though acting out a nonsense play (Teplin has picked random sentences from books and plays and strung them together until they vaguely make some sense and then they veer off into abstraction)

I really enjoyed this exhibition, and I would love to go again!