- Venue
- Surface Gallery
- Location
- East Midlands
What are you? Where do you come from? What happens if where you come from changes, do you change too? What happens if they close where you come from? Does it matter?
A modest but thoughtful exhibition at the Surface Gallery, Nottingham pushes at these fundamental questions. Andrew Tebbs and Cynthia Hamilton have both used cameras to explore some of the issues around identity and its relationship with the nature of place.
Andrew Tebbs’ large brooding photographs of redundant pit workings – often in light conditions caused by black weather fronts moving into a sunny day – reflect and memorialise the communities that served them. Newstead, in particular, is a pit village – though it resembles nothing more than a housing estate in the middle of nowhere that happens to be near a coal seam. Clipstone has the tallest headstocks in Europe and there is a move to preserve them. They stand like sentinels over a village that once manned them, a constant reminder of what no longer happens. A hole in the heart, if you like. With the closing of these pits the communities entered a twilight life, off the main road and away from our gaze, but a life nonetheless. More plural, less rigid, which might seem to be a good thing but for a community founded on surety it must have been and continue to be hard. In one picture we see three people on a bench looking towards the pit workings. We are, in this image only, an audience looking at another set of viewers who look onto a community, probably theirs. It looks like we’re viewing from a landscaped slag heap – evidence of a dynamism and brute force, overcome by softer influences – which speaks of a place in retirement.
All this is not say that the pieces here are overtly political or even angry – that horse bolted a long time ago – rather they display in their detail (a conservatory on a house near the pit, the walkers on the slag heap), a quiet resignation to make the best of what there is. It’s not easy to move on from these places, so they have to make do. Tebbs has created in these large brooding pictures a telling mediation on what it means to live in the shadow of one’s past.
Cynthia Harrison’s work is, in the word of Alice, curiouser. Four unnamed and similar collages deal with the idea of the home. Each follows a simple format – a photograph of a flat agricultural landscape, which is then overlaid with the image of a house, mounted on card to stand slightly proud of the background, and flanked by two black and white blow ups of women’s heads, again mounted on card. Each picture has the same elements, but each element is a variation – a different background, house or woman. These three elements combine to create a strange blend of longing or memory. It’s not clear if the women are from the houses or desire them. There is a dislocation in form and content – the collages are obviously hand made rather than Photoshopped, the house would never be built in the settings shown here – that throws up a kind of gap. It’s through this gap that the viewer begins to project their own agenda. These contingent responses are where the story begins to unfold. We are invite to impose our own experiences of home and, I suppose, motherhood on these familiar and yet unsettling pictures.
When you grow up your life, however odd, seems normal. It’s the yardstick by which you measure stuff. Often it’s only when you meet someone from outside your family or neighborhood that it begins to dawn in you that not everyone’s life is like yours. Tebbs and Harrison have created works that invite contemplation. Our gaze is re-drawn to familiar territory, but on closer inspection that territory may not be ours. It speaks of a longing or, in Tebbs’ case, a resignation that may be stoic or practical. Life goes on and we take our past with us, whether we like it or not.
