Shadows in Huddersfield

I am not the world's best at being prompt with exhibition visits, a situation that definitely has not improved with my new habit of trekking up and down the country on a pretty regular basis.  Thus it is that, in the last week of the Open House exhibition at Huddersfield Art Gallery, I have finally made it across the Pennines and through the door.

My original intention was to catch the letterpress-based exhibition, part of Open House, by David Armes of Red Plate Press, but one happy consequence of leaving it so late was that I suddenly discovered I could now also see Sumi Perera's Liminal Spaces - as winner of last year's Flourish Award for Excellence in Printmaking at the WYPW open exhibition, she was given a one man show at Huddersfield, and this is it.  There's more about both exhibitions here.

When I mentioned on twitter that I was looking forward to Liminal Spaces, Sumi said she would be interested in any photos I took of the shadows - I wasn't too surprised; when she exhibited at Bath Contemporary, they mentioned how much shadows fascinated her.  It gave me all the excuse I needed to take a million photos (not by any means all shadows), which of course I duly did.  As I've indicated before, I love her work - a lot of it is to do with her use of colour, inevitably, but it's not all about that aspect.  I've read the background blurb for her exhibition, but I do wish I had been awake enough to realise this exhibition was going to happen, so that I could have attended her introduction - while I'm quite happy to like her prints because I like them, it would be good to add a little more understanding too.   They are intriguing.  I would have liked to have listened to the sounds that went with one wall of her work (those that look like the traces of recording needles), but for whatever reason I failed to make the equipment work.  Taking the show as a whole, though, that was a very small thing.  Loved it.

David Armes' exhibition was about place and memory.  The letterpress aspect was mostly fragments of speech, and was combined with maps, directions, patchwork (beautiful subtle shades of heather and slate; lovely background mark-making) and layering.  You can read more about David's intentions in his blog of the project, but for myself I found the show wistful, leaning back in time.  The maps, used in squares as a substrate for quotations, were surely old maps, the repetition of speech felt like echoes of memory, and by happy chance the photos I took of backlit work had a sepia-tinted feel to them (though the actual works didn't).  Even those soft colours in his gorgeous grid piece could have been chosen from fabrics long ago.  

Shadows, echoes, repetition - they were everywhere I looked.  I know that was all set off by Sumi Perera's work, full of repeated images and multi-coloured echoes and her own interest in shadows, but in David's work I found myself tracing the same themes - for instance, each map square carried a matching set of quotations, quiet echoes over and over. Maybe shadows didn't have quite the same presence, but I searched for them anyway.  The other Open House exhibition, curated by Jim Bond, Liz Walker and Rozi Fuller, suggested more in the same vein - there was plenty to look at, but I'm afraid I didn't pay enough attention (counting down the parking).  I concentrated on the central piece of work, involving screens with windows in, an anglepoise-style light rigged to move (yup, lovely shadows) and a video on a loop (more repetition) and then I called it a day.     

To top off an immensely satisfying gallery trip, I drove home on a new (to me) route across the Pennines full of drop-dead gorgeous landscape and space, which I shall have to revisit very soon.  Definitely a good day.