- Venue
- Dock Museum
- Location
- North West England
It’s reassuring that artists can still find ways of re-imagining the world in which they live. Patricia Townsend’s “The Circles They Desire” show at The Dock Museum in Barrow-in-Furness works in an unfashionable realm which is routinely dealt with in hackneyed and shallow ways. Her show re-works the iconography of Cumbria’s stone circles. Typically, I’d expect work dealing with standing stones to look at through New Age tinted spectacles but Townsend, to her great credit, resists this.
There are four sets of work on display, including two installations. The first installation consists of eight monitors, facing outwards and on the floor, each playing a video loop of fire. In the centre of the ring is a small cairn. Behind all this is a display of five square images that together appear to describe the transit of a planet. On closer inspection the planet is made up of a disc from a photograph of a lichen covered rock. The second installation is of rectangular banners hanging in a circle that move and shimmer with any breeze. Printed on the banner is – you guessed it – lichen and rock, filling the field. By inverting the solidity of the rock they evoke the outside and the winds that blow on the fells nearby, where these circles are sited. The gallery in which the the work is shown is actually part of a converted dry dock. This means that beyond the works themselves are the walls of the dock and the ferns growing on them. A wonderful conjunction, especially with the banners.
The fourth set of work is simple but extremely effective. Townsend has used a segment from close up photographs of the stones, repeated that segment in the style of a kaleidoscope; the result being a circle (there’s that shape again). The resulting images echo rose windows in cathedrals and the view you get looking up into the domes of those same cathedrals. These pieces – and there are 12 on display – are beautiful and poised. They hint at links between belief systems that echo one another more than we ordinarily realise.
As I explained at the head of the review, it’s refreshing to find an artist working in an original way with a subject that typically attracts artists keen to gabble on about ill-researched mystical rubbish and a side order of hobbits, to be honest. Patricia Townsend’s smart and contemporary suite of work pushes around ideas relating to prehistory and, yes, mysticism, in a new way. Complimenting the work itself is the venue itself which reinforces the material qualities of the work and literally grounds the more ephemeral nature of the subject matter.
