23/10/2012
Upon an opulent rug of faded tendrils and Rose blooms sits a miniature house of glowing white. It’s like a pared-down dolls house made of white muslin (more like a symbol for a house, a dream-like motif for a home). It’s size is evocative of those tiny, imaginary worlds of our childhood where play and fantastical drama were projected and played out. On the back wall of the house (the wall facing into the room) a strange, mysterious sequence of images and incomprehensible actions are unfolding. A circle, like a giant peep hole or the pupil of a giant’s eye, has dilated and through it we see domestic scenes; a close up of a tiger lilly in a vase, a child’s toy assembled and dismantled, a woman sat at a round kitchen table punching the air above her frantically. This last scene lingers and we are drawn to notice that there are two vases of flowers on the table and a bowl of oranges which she meticulously arranges and re-arranges. In one of these compositions the oranges and flowers are laid out along the table’s edge and the woman begins to rotate the table round and round. These strange, jarring rituals all take place within a constantly evolving drawing. This is Sabina Sallis’s video work which she tells me “is just in process” but which she wanted to bring to the show because of what she regards as the importance of “talking about work, having a discussion and getting feedback” and “not just working on your own”.
The conversation with Sabina has magically and astutely cast the fortune for the rest of the afternoon in the gallery. The state of ‘work in progress’, the essential, living activity of raw, unfinished creation and collaboration comes to the fore as a group work on a collaborative, performative drawing using electri
cal tape and D.I.Y Workshops spontaneously erupt through the energy of the day; Liam Jedaburg Witter guides a small group of diligent and focused individuals on how to make your own rucksack out of hose pipe, wire, electrical tape and bubble wrap. They follow his instructions carefully but mutably, occasionally glancing at his illustrated instructions, more often being carried away by the creative potential of all these materials put together… They all leave with their own full transparent, but fully waterproof D.I.Y rucksack/party bag. Meanwhile Charlie Snow (a third year Fine Art student at Northumbria University) invites people to delve into an impossible rainbow of coloured felt and dreaming; tapping in to the traditional, communal activity of quilt making she asks participants to transcribe their untold dreams into a patchwork of cut, stitched and appliquéd panels. Each of these – along with other panels she is making in collaboration with friends, colleagues and ladies knitting circles – will be integrated into the whole piece; a giant, collaborative quilt of imagination and dreaming.
In the warm, dark of the gallery’s back projection room Andrew Wilson’s Film Let’s Forget Everything and Get Drunk underscores the false dichotomy of Work Vs Idleness, proposing that time out of arbitrary and everyday life and work is essential for connecting us to our latent creative potential. Presented as a slide show of images which run in parallel to the narration – occasionally illustrating it but predominantly offering a simultaneous dialogue – it covers the scope of a thesis only presented in a familiar, jovial and straight forward manner. It is an appealing, gently anarchic declaration of the value of the pub as a place for spontaneous, ad hoc creation and creativity “the rules of Soccer were written in a pub” the narrator tells us and suggests that had all the heads of state been in the pub in 1914 that perhaps the course of Western history in the early 20th Century would have been a much gentler one. The ethos of this work and the idea of the pub as a creative hub for conversation and collaboration – where people feel free to express themselves, their ideas, their dreams and their ambitions more fully than in the constraints of everyday life – is at the heart of this project. It’s for the next couple of days to tell how and whether this comes about through Lunch time Discos, Conversations and Jamborees…
Iris Aspinall Priest
