It has been ready and waiting for months. As BALTIC reopens, a ground-breaking North East exhibition is on public view at last. David Whetstone reports.
We Survive in Financial Times by Sarah Framrose at BALTIC
If a single exhibition can be said to catch the mood of 2020 then surely it is the one visitors are seeing as the enter a reopened BALTIC.
“Connor wearing my dress and his sister’s wig, 7th May 2020” is the caption beneath one of the deft line drawings that make up Cassie Adams’s untitled artwork.
Another sketch is captioned “Coffee rings” and another simply “3 bikes, 1 car”.
She draws what she loves, the artist explains.
“Over the past three months, I made use of a notebook I thought had very little potential and filled a bare wall with images of nostalgia, desires and feelings.”
Will Stockwell’s five-minute video, 30works30days, was made as part of a lockdown project last April.
We see him in his pyjamas, dancing in his kitchen, daydreaming, fantasising, pulling faces. It is frenetic, claustrophobic and often funny.
“My aims were to be playful and find new ways of making work within the new limitations of lockdown,” he explains.
“It pushed me to create something in a short space of time. It also helped me maintain momentum and not be too precious about outcomes.”
For the vulnerable and the bereaved in 2020, masks and enforced separation intensified grief and loneliness.
For nearly everybody, limited to one walk a day and queuing outside ‘essential’ shops, attention became focused on things close to hand and perhaps normally overlooked.
Not everything was completely bad for everybody.
The BALTIC Open Submission exhibition
In December, BALTIC director Sarah Munro said: “During lockdown one of the few positives was an enhanced sense of community and of people really engaging with the idea of art and taking part in a much wider range of cultural activities, whether knitting or baking or drawing or walking.
“That was something we wanted to think about in our programme going forward. How could we enhance the positives?”
BALTIC Open Submission is one of the answers to that question.
It breaks new ground for a gallery best known for showcasing the work of artists of international repute and often from overseas.
“This was our first open submission process,” said Sarah Munro.
“It was free to anyone from the North East who considered themselves an artist, creator or maker of any kind.”
BALTIC curator Katie Hickman along with North East artists Richard Bliss, Lady Kitt and Padma Rao were given the task of whittling down the 500-plus submissions to the 142 featured in the exhibition.
The result, promised Sarah, would “celebrate and make visible the incredible energy and creativity that exists right across the continuum of makers”.
Conceived over a year ago, BALTIC Open Submission has lain ready and waiting for months.
The enforced lockdown delay only heightens the sense of a year which has become a curious void for many of us.
Calendar highlights which would normally help with the process of memory and chronology are scant for 2020. Festivals and sporting fixtures were cancelled.
Family gatherings were off limits.
City Lights #2 by Robert Myers at BALTIC
The new BALTIC exhibition, taking over the ground floor, is a reminder of just how long this war against Covid-19 has been going on. References to April mean not the one just gone but the one before.
Although expertly arranged and hung, it is inevitably a bit of a jumble – though an entertaining and thought-provoking one.
If it had been intended as a visual metaphor for social distancing, it would have to be deemed a failure.
Exhibits from those North East people who, in Sarah Munro’s words, “considered themselves an artist, creator or maker”, fill walls and floor and sustain a rolling video programme.
Reflecting the pandemic was not part of the brief although inevitably many of the exhibitors have done so.
David Mangenie says he “did this painting after returning from Sainsbury’s for the very first time. A nerve-wracking experience, queuing up, not quite knowing what to expect once inside.”
“This piece,” says Emma Barratt, “only exists thanks to Covid-19. I hadn’t painted for around 10 years and streaming making art to my friends online was one of the social outlets that kept me level during the worst of things.”
The eye-catching Chilli Moon Jar was made by ceramic artist Annabel Talbot and members of mental health and arts charity Chilli Studios whose ideas were incorporated into the piece via a series of Zoom sessions.
Zangar by Hengameh Firoozi at BALTIC’s reopening exhibition
Other sources of pain and anxiety emerge, including the injustices suffered over the years by Iranian women (Hengameh Firoozi’s painting, Zangar) and families caught up in war (Dot Seddon’s textile work, Collateral Damage).
It’s good that many of these traumas have been channeled into objects of beauty.
Although that’s not perhaps how I would describe Michael Lewis’s bubbling confection of plywood, expanding foam, LINE-X liquid rubber and iron paint which resembles something spewed from a volcano.
“Constantly experimenting with many materials, I’m always looking to create something original,” says the self-taught artist from Bensham, Gateshead, now given the chance to exhibit in his local gallery.
Mam by Erin Dickson
Humour was a fortunate by-product of lockdown and it is present here.
It is hard not to smile at Erin Dickson’s 3D printed Mam, painted a queasy shade of green. Implacable with her mug and slippers, she seems to capture the lockdown spirit perfectly.
Also on view for the first time today is a new commission called Virtual Care by Pakui Hardware, the collective name of artists Neringa Cerniauskaite and Ugnius Gelguda.
The installation represents a first UK solo exhibition by the Lithuanian pair.
BALTIC is open Wednesday to Sunday and bank holidays, 10.30am to 6pm. Visitors are encouraged to book in advance although visits on the day are welcome. Go to www.baltic.art or call 0191 478 1810 for more information and bookings.