- Venue
- Angel Row Gallery
- Location
The focus of the importance of light in art features greatly in Nottingham’s galleries this October. Reflection or projection. Both bring the contrast of light and darkness and the links certain lights have with our memories into our world.
Angel Row’s Helen Maurer seeks to experiment with the processes of her found materials yet also to take past experiences and in someway recreate hints of these through the work that she makes. She says she is merging ‘real life and fiction’ through her making of the projected scenes and that most of her ideas are drawn from remembered places.
Friday’s talk at Angel Row took the format of an interview. The “Questions and Answers” (mainly questions, may I add), seemed to show up that she thought the fact she lived on a boat was both impressive and incredibly important to the work. And to be honest, that’s all she gave as reason for her art. The man with the questions seemed eager to tell her about her work, more than ask her about it, and was quite unwilling to let her talk. This unique opportunity to hear from the artist herself seemed bombarded by his strange voice and his inability to listen. The combination of his self-importance and condescension and her willingness not give any worthwhile reasons for making this work, brought it all to a slow and repetitive standstill.
The work in itself showed creativity and had an almost playful childlike element, but you couldn’t help feeling that it had already been tried before with other artists, like James Ireland. The nautical scenes created from improvisation and experimentation with different materials seemed I suppose aesthetically pleasing, yet it left me wondering whether it could have been made by as kid messing about with the overhead projector at school. Her willingness, and I suppose honesty, to tell that it was all unplanned and random gave me the reason the feel like she didn’t particularly care about this work. I understand she liked water and boats, but how could she continue to make such repetitive work when she seemed to have little passion for it.
The piece “Cave Painting”, created the illusion of being inside a dark cave looking out into the light of the watery horizon. The use of placing the viewer in a scene where they were virtually enclosed with the way out in view did provoke interesting connotations to my life. The feeling of being stuck inside the darkness, yet the ‘exit’, the ‘way out’ was in sight, with the boat, the implement of escape waiting for you to get in. I felt myself getting drawn into this piece, pulling my own life and current situation into the work. But then it was all crushed again by her lack of enthusiasm.
I did feel interest in her notion that the work was only ever there when the light was being projected, and that it was not the cold objects that controlled it.
“Only when the light is flowing and the OHP is on and humming is the piece alive. It is the humming that brings it to life.”
This was heartfelt and I believe that to be a truly exciting concept, but when the subject is so mundane and uninteresting, the spark of interest that I had seems to lose all worth.
The humming and the colours and the lights reflected across the second room did for a moment catch my attention and make me think to reconsider my indifference. But once looked at, after a couple of minutes, I just came to the same conclusion, that it was the same thing in a different order, with a different mirror.
I may seem unforgiving; not giving her a chance, and maybe it wasn’t her fault; it was just my dislike for the interviewer. But her continuous smiling and inability to give it all meaning, created great apathy within my body and no reason to stay in that slightly dimly-lit room.
After that long hour, the Bonnington gallery gave me hope that maybe I would find some sort of depth in the medium of light within Nottingham’s art-world this autumn. Mariele Neudecker’s “Songs on the Death of Children” is a very poignant and heartfelt exhibition, taken from poetry, music, song and moving image. This blend of all these mediums creates a whole consuming experience of mourning and grief which generates this intensely gloomy atmosphere.
The darkness is the first factor that hits you. Walking down those stairs into a bleak room first sets you up for a sense of fear and uncertainty. The strange music and operatic singing in an unfamiliar language add the despair that seems to fill the air in and around the work. I walked up a ramp into an installed room, to feel the opera pouring down on me from above. With this sound filling my head, I continued to read the poem on the wall. And as I did I found myself nearing up towards the large gate, where the beautiful snow-capped mountains and serene landscapes were projected behind. I felt the need to escape. The need to run from this grief that I was being forced to empathise with; to run from her pain and break away. It almost seemed like it was too much to handle. Maybe it was my current feelings that created this, as it did the same with Helen Maurer’s Cave Painting, but here, I felt that Mariele Neudecker had most definitely accomplished a successful piece that evoked such intense emotions that echoed the theme she was exploring.
Two galleries. Two completely different artists and two completely different exhibitions. The focus of light coming out of the darkness may feature in them, but if you were to choose to see only one exhibition, it is your choice of plain aesthetics or an incredibly emotional experience to decide between. And that choice is yours.
Final year Fine Art Student at Nottingham Trent University. I mainly work with text within a live performative context.
