From the windows of the gallery, you can see the industrial landscape of Lancashire’s past, and the work, with its depiction of metal industry, fits in very well with this. And there is clearly a great deal of labour involved with many of the pieces. Inertia is the painting that faces you as you walk into the room. It is a large piece that, from a distance, looks like a Rothko. It is split in two, with the top half looking like a slightly different shade to the bottom. Go close up though, and you discover that the top half is not just a block of colour however, but a regular pattern of hundreds of open box-like shapes, drawn in pencil, which apparently took 6 months to produce! Heat Light, which is again a grid of shapes, must have been similarly laborious.
One of the themes running through the exhibition, which John talks about in the film that was showing, is that of decay. Many of the pieces are either rusty, or appear rusty. John was happy to leave the sculptures from the first room open to the elements beforehand. I suppose the idea is to show that the whole process is a natural one, and that the pieces themselves are organic, almost alive. One of the roofs of the gallery is covered with an orange moss, which once again serves as a great backdrop to the work. This was possibly by chance, but extremely lucky if it was!
I’m not totally sure if these works would look that great in a home. For one thing, you’d need a lot of space for some of them. I’ve said before how tedious I find it that many people today seem to choose paintings that “match the curtains”, but in the case of these paintings, I think if you wanted them to fit in, you’d have to buy the painting and then match the room to it. But in the context of a gallery, and this gallery in particular, I think these works look fantastic.
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