- Venue
- artnorfolk
- Location
- East England
The neutral white cube gallery spaces favoured for modernist exhibitions are radically different to the spaces of medieval churches. Both exert their influence on the construction of ‘an exhibition’, an enterprise very different to creating individual artworks in a studio. English churches are so infiltrated by history and structural character that their interiors control new interventions and so, to present art exhibitions in churches is to challenge the spirit of place. The route to success is to work with the space and not attempt to impose on it. This daunting prospect is taken up by the artists and curators who hang shows at Salthouse Church in North Norfolk, which has wonderful light from its clear glass windows, a big nave, and visually seductive plaster surfaces with patches of peeling paint, dark and worn stone floor tiles, and wooden beams and pews.
In the big church space artists need to consider the relationships of walls, niches and windows, and to use this architecturally rather than hanging images on all available surfaces. Elizabeth Humphries is an artist whose vision is derived from the language of pictorial practice. She works with the premise that tone, colour and texture yield visual fascination and she realises that physical matter has an inherent beauty as well as a history. Her work is essentially process-driven but she manipulates pattern to evoke and disrupt sign systems, and her best work invites and holds visual attention, promoting personal reverie generated by allusions and nuanced references to things known and seen.
Humphries placed her most compelling works together as a unit at the back of the Salthouse church nave where they relate to one another and to the bell tower, font and plastered walls. If she had done no more than use this area of the church Humphries would have had a wonderfully resonant small show of abstracted images in tertiary tones sustaining and extending the church ambience. This display is most compelling. However, she uses the remainder of the church too, allowing her good eye to be overcome by a desire to show a range of work and to fill all the wall space.
There are good individual pieces on the side walls but how much more refined the show would have been with clusters of works in dialogue with one another and separated by empty niches from other themes. Selection is a process of editing; installation is a process of shaping a final work – called an exhibition – from component pieces that are elements in a spatial structure. Instead of imposing a coherent statement with sub-themes, Humphries hung too many images which compete for attention and dilute the eloquence of what she does best.
She is an artist who uses her materials with great confidence. Her works are pictorial but are not paintings since she moulds, flattens and impresses paper so that marks and indentations become rhythmically sculptural. Her images are organic, sometimes symbolic and emphatically physical. They emerge from an artist who trusts her graphic judgement, believes in experiment, and responds energetically to emergent images. Her exposure to illuminated manuscripts and her experience of designing jewellery and graphic art leave their traces on the transformation of materials into images. Her best work is beguiling and completely in sympathy with Salthouse Church and its meditative atmosphere.
Marion Arnold is an artist and art lecturer at the School of Art and Design, Loughborough University
