MA Week 64 - Catching up and Manchester

Reflection on the past week, 10^th April 2017

 

I’ve been doing quite a bit of catching up this week restarting my long overdue creative journal. I’ve done a little bit more sketching with a view to etching. I was intending to do more on last week’s collage ideas at the weekend but decided to enjoy the sunny weather instead – it might be the only two days we get!

One thing I have managed to do is to catch up with the blogposts about the Manchester Met postgraduate conference in February. The links are here:

Week 56 – developing the sketches

Weeks 57 & 58 – painting and collaging the finalised pieces, and preparing the prints

Week 58 – attending and reflecting on the conference itself

It’s been good to reflect back on this experience now I am feeling a little better. There are still a couple of posts to catch up from the end of February and I’ll get onto these as soon as possible.

 

Saul Hay Gallery

I paid a very enjoyable visit to the Saul Hay Gallery in Manchester. This is a compact gallery tucked away by the canal and railway in Castlefield. It’s not been open long but seems to be doing well, which is good news. It’s also a really friendly place and I had a good chat with the owner, Catherine. The reason for my visit was to see some work by Mandy Payne and Josie Jenkins in the “New Topographies” exhibition. I’d not seen either Mandy’s or Josie’s work for real before so this was a good opportunity on my way to meet an old friend for lunch.
 

Interior view of the gallery

 

There was a good deal of art depicting the urban within the exhibition. I keep finding that more and more people use the urban as inspiration and this gives me the will to go on with my practice. Josie is showing works from her “Scrap” series- oil paintings of a car scrapyard. It was these pieces that originally attracted me to her work. The colours are bright and the yard is depicted on a Summer day, causing a tension between the mood and subject matter of the painting, yet at the same time rejoicing in the juxtaposition of the colours. The compositions are quite tightly cropped, almost voyeuristic, which adds to the sense of tension. Josie also has a couple of pieces made from reclaimed materials . I wasn’t aware of this aspect of her practice before and found it interesting –the pieces are physically layered and this brings complexity. They are layers of landscapes within what appear to be old wooden speaker cases.

 

The white-bordered print is Mandy's work and the paintings to the left of it are Josie's Scrap series

Mandy’s pieces included a lithograph and two pieces collaged onto small tiles of her trademark concrete. I particularly liked the almost-abstract “Stripped Bare”, a lithograph and blockprint collaged onto concrete . Her work is so meticulous and detailed. All aspects – the subject matter, the limited colour palette, the substrate – conjure up the urban. I am still hoping to see one of Mandy’s aerosol on concrete pieces for real.

Inspiration, then, and also the aspiration to one day have pieces in a gallery like Saul Hay.

It was also quite interesting to “find” this part of Manchester – Castlefield – as I am no real fan of the city. However, I really liked this area, which is evidently one of the oldest areas, near the meeting point of the Bridgewater and Rochdale canals. It made me wonder if I could wander there. How would that feel? Not being in Leeds? Am I ready for that? I’m not sure.