Art in the Flesh

On 17 June I had the great pleasure of returning to an art gallery for the first time since early March 2020. With lockdown restrictions easing, spaces have been able to open up again with measures in place aiming to keep visitors safe while they encounter the work. As exciting as it was for me to get back out - I've been voluntarily isolating as much as possible since 12 March last year - the Delta variant is rampaging through England, and in that week in Newcastle alone known cases had risen by nearly 800 from the week before. So it was not without a degree of angst and caution that I entered the Hatton Gallery for the Newcastle University Fine Art Degree Show.

While it was great to be in the presence of art objects placed in space again, and as much as I enjoyed the nostalgia the degree show always gives me for the heady opening nights at the Belfast School of Art equivalent, the hyper-awareness of other people and everyone's aerosol entering the space - because masks only catch so much - plus being out of practise, made it quite tiring. I struggled to focus on a lot of the work and felt an urge to keep moving. The latter issue for me is also a feeling I have developed that taking the time to be with a work and bear witness to it is a luxury. This is an act I always considered as my work as an analyst before, and the urgent feeling I get to glance and move on might speak to the increased generalized anxiety I have experienced for the past year and a half. It definitely prevented me from giving myself over fully to the work the way I used to be able to do, and it is not at all a reflection of the fantastic efforts of the fine art students. 

A highlight for me included Rose Daniel's mysterious oil paintings (above), no less because of the distinctive odour of the large canvases slick with the paint in the smallish studio room. This sensory element might not have been so noticeable before, but these days being able to smell is so often a good sign that we might not be carrying the dreaded plague, making the most pungent of smells a blessed relief. The paintings are pretty cool, too, and were so slick with the shiny paint that they looked wet and slimy with ghostly figures emerging from the aquatic, mossy-looking ooze.

I was also drawn to Chantal Makar's video work shot in Bahrain installed with an old sitting chair, table and rug (pictured above) that reflected the sitting places dotted around empty land in the city pictured in the video. It was a real meeting place for video installation, documentary and the essay film, and does a lot with the creative possibilities of that conjunction. 

Olivia Rose-Grey's multi-layered photography installation caught my attention too. The wall-mounted disks were composite photographs taken with a wide-angle lens reflecting off the artist's laptop screen. From the photography and the sheen of the print, the images seemed to bulge so that you had to go right up to them to see that they were in fact flat prints. You could also view each of the two disks through lenses aligned on tripods sitting out from the wall (as shown in my photo). In content and form - playing with the idea of portals and framings, both tangible and virtual - this work reflected most strongly for me the experience of its making under the challenging circumstances of lockdown.

We explored most of the show over around two hours and gave time to the videos and works requiring a performative element from us (one of which involved getting covered in confetti, because what's the point of throwing confetti if not at someone?). There were a couple of rooms we missed because their occupancy was at capacity the times we tried. I felt fairly saturated after just the Hatton part, particularly as so much of this work was so strong, and we saw as much as we could find in the fine art studios. It was a good experience, but I'll think I will wait for a while before trying any of the other galleries in town. The quiet university campus is one thing, but the heaving city centre I know I am not ready for. Just a little more patience!