- Venue
- Mid Pennine Arts
- Location
From the 6th January to the 10th Febuary, the Mid Pennine Gallery in Burnley was home to Sue Flower's ostensibly disparate selection of photographs, drawings and objects. The display culminated on its final day with a dance performed by South Indian Prabin Villareesh, a gold medallist Bharatanatyam performer.
Villareesh's dance, in its physical expression, embodied the collection and gave form to much of the artwork that surrounded his movements. As it progressed, the dance became a physical extension of a sketch drawing of a flower entitled Thinking of Me (Applecross Series, 2006), painted on a floor installation in the centre of the gallery. Audience members were invited to take their shoes off before the dance, literally to feel the earth as best they could, through the wooden floor and down into the Lancastrian earth. The dance, as this extension, developed into metaphor for the earth as an atmospheric whole. At points arms were outstretched to the sun, at others coiled protectively into the body.
Significantly, the spectator was communicated a sense of our connection to the earth. Each step created a visual, temporal and spatial gap from the installation's wooden membrane, a thin layer above the earth. As each step rose, concurrently, there rose a fear that Villareesh's ascending foot would not return to the grounded physicality of its home. Yet each time, it reconnected with the thick bold, black strokes of the drawing, an invisible, intangible yet definitive, gravitational pull bringing it back home.
The display itself featured works from Sue Flowers over the last fifteen years. Similarly to the floor installation there were pencil drawings; photographs of the natural landscape and outdoor displays; and objects such as ceramic bowls, signifiers of Flowers' formative training in ceramics.
The pencil drawings, at first glance, could have been taken from a botanists's field sketch book and are perhaps testament to the artist's experiences whilst working at Kew Gardens. Certain lines within the drawings are firm and bold but shaded by soft, grey intermittent lines, exemplary for Flowers of the ‘soft and hard edges of life's experiences' and the fragility of the senses.
The origins of the displayed photography can be traced to South America and Operation Raleigh in 1989. This was time when, as Flowers says, ‘the lens became my eye.' Similarly to Villareesh's manifold dance, many of the photographs transcended spatial and temporal boundaries; in Feeling the Earth Flowers made a statement of one life, that of the individual and his/her place within the collective heartbeat of the global community. This was exemplified by the striking similarities between a South American photograph, La Cruz (Wayculi, 1990), that depicted a wooden cross, lightly decorated with flowers, in front of a whitewashed adobe wall and Lancashire's Kirkby Stephen (Lancashire, 2006). The latter replicated the strong hard lines of the former through a wooden shelf in front of a stone wall, possibly that of a cottage or farmhouse, adorned in bright white masonry paint. Two decorative floral flowerpots sat on an outdoor shelf and extended the connection as several gardeners' gloves, instruments used in shaping and connecting with the earth, rested limp on the shelf's end. Primarily, the connections were visual, but, allowing the senses to succomb to temporal constraints, other parallels became visible: the connections of earth with landscape, culture and environment.
It is here where Anubhaava held its greatest strength. The exhibits could be subsumed as disparate in form, content and delivery yet, when absorbed, shared an inseperable union.
