- Venue
- Salthouse Church
- Location
Site specific installations in historic spaces are high risk undertakings. If exhibitors are not attuned to the spirit of place, the addition of artworks to existing design creates visual cacophony.
Picture a church on a hill overlooking the North Norfolk coast. The interior is a large, simple space suffused with light streaming in through clear glass windows, diamond-patterned by delicate lead tracery. Stone, wood, and plaster draw the eyes to the walls, pews, vault, floor, altar, pulpit, and font which characterise medieval churches. This is a place of worship, not a gallery but, since 2001, it has hosted exhibitions. It was used with unusual discernment and sensitivity by Margie Britz and Liz McGowan for ‘Stars, Stones and Bones'.
Britz and McGowan worked with the church, not just in it, creating a dialogue with the space. Their interventions enhanced structural relationships and proportions, adding new layers of cultural activity to a long history of creative change articulated by human hands and eyes in response to passing time. Working collaboratively, McGowan and Britz began their interaction with shared experiences of Norfolk coastal areas shaped, washed and lit by geological and seasonal time. This shared awareness of nature prompted discussions on visual stimuli and initiated visual conversations, a piece by one artist generatind an answer by the other or, occasionally, joint manipulation of evolving imagery.
Organic forms – water-worn pebbles, shells, reeds, mud, bones, starfish – were used either to shape intricately formed three-dimensional pieces, or as referential traces on paper or canvas. Inherently beautiful, natural forms are seductive but if they are to function meaningfully within art, they require transformation, not literal presentation. This was the key to the evocative power of the McGowan and Britz exhibition; the artists retrieved and manifested the essence of the forms used. An intelligent and disciplined use of materials moved their work beyond description to poetic evocation. Particularly successful was the Esker Series (eskers are streams under or in glacial ice).
These very long paper pieces, suspended between windows, drew attention to the elevation of the church walls and introduced nature into a cultural framework in the form of the mud, clay and shingle used to colour and pattern the paper. The emphatic materiality of these and other pieces spoke of the labour of making, embodied the spirit of being, and focused consciousness in a manner appropriately elegiac in the church's contemplative space. This quest for processes of becoming conveyed what is; those elements of life and death, emergence and decay, that are witnessed in the world and which challenge the physical eye to interpret the mind's eye. When this is achieved, resonant art is created.
Britz and McGowan are sensual artists whose visual intelligence enables them to avoid the traps of sentimentality offered by nature. Their work is refined, beautiful and non-prescriptive. ‘Stars, Stones and Bones' mapped human presence onto church surfaces, creating a spiritual consciousness embedded in historical and cyclical time.
Marion Arnold is a freelance lecturer, artist and writer
