Continuing...
In the coffee area, around the corner from the Holden Gallery's exhibition in the main hall, was a delightful installation the subject of which, coincidentally or deliberately, tied in with the main theme of death - bees. The artist, Jade Alana Ashton, says Imagine yourself in a museum of the future where specimens of flora, fauna, botany, are frozen in time... All bees have died... No flowers... No pollen... No bees... Her installation (I never quite know what constitutes an installation, but this says it is, and that's good enough for me) is a collection of fantastically delicate items in jars - as, I suppose, in a museum - many of which are definitely porcelain and some of which might be bone? There are words stamped and prints printed and drawings drawn on to ultra thin (presumably paper) porcelain and the whole show has such fragility. There is a book of quotations and statements concerning bees, with backgrounds, fragments of text, pieces of fabric and lace, dried flowers all sewn in.
In the coffee area, around the corner from the Holden Gallery's exhibition in the main hall, was a delightful installation the subject of which, coincidentally or deliberately, tied in with the main theme of death - bees. The artist, Jade Alana Ashton, says Imagine yourself in a museum of the future where specimens of flora, fauna, botany, are frozen in time... All bees have died... No flowers... No pollen... No bees... Her installation (I never quite know what constitutes an installation, but this says it is, and that's good enough for me) is a collection of fantastically delicate items in jars - as, I suppose, in a museum - many of which are definitely porcelain and some of which might be bone? There are words stamped and prints printed and drawings drawn on to ultra thin (presumably paper) porcelain and the whole show has such fragility. There is a book of quotations and statements concerning bees, with backgrounds, fragments of text, pieces of fabric and lace, dried flowers all sewn in.
And that was the Death part of Monday. Life was a walk afterwards round the Middlewood Locks area of ground, across Oldfield Road from Hot Bed Press. It has been Acquired, so it can only be a matter of time until it's built on - a different sort of death, I suppose, but meanwhile it's buzzing, literally. The whole area made me think of a medieval tapestry covered with flowers - the grass, dried to straw after this long hot spell of weather, sewn through with purple vetches and thistles and buddlieas, yellow ragwort, the rust-reds of dock flowers, large (ox-eye?) daisies, something dainty and white that I didn't know, masses of glorious seedheads - and all on an almost-hidden base of broken tarmac and concrete. Tortoiseshells, meadow browns, dainty moths, bumblebees, crickets, those tiny stripes of electric blue (damselflies?), birdsong (nothing I knew). Alive alive alive.
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