Last night, I went to A Good Point Well Made the Sheffield Hallam University MA Fine Art show at the End Gallery, Psalter Lane. A long wait for Jo & Dave meant that I got to revisit most of the work, and spend some time thinking about the meaning of it. Pieces which had seemed flippant or pointless on first examination later turned out to be quite revelational.
In the main gallery itself were a sculpture and series of canvases by Richard Clarke, all using rusty nails or the traces left behind by those nails. Upstairs, Matthew Harrison’s artists statement kicked off with one of the most pretentious sentences ever uttered by an artist (surely he didn’t mean it seriously?): “Formed through conceptual rigour and strategy my practice develops directly through an involved process of merciless art direction”. The work was great though: mercilessly art directed (!) objects, made to exacting standards, yet ultimately rather pointless, these included a spaceship-esque desktop name plaque for Professor Colin Pillinger, lead scientist on the Beagle 2 Mars project, which was also shown floating freely in space; a bizarre contraption of coat hooks which was a modernised replica of Marcel Duchamp’s Trébuchet and which also appeared on a poster on the wall (“the actual work is located somewhere between its poster and the physical sculptural object”… by taking a photograph of it, I guess I have extended that actual work); and a series of “Save Trees” wrist bangles, all crafted out of endangered exotic hardwoods.
Further down the corridor was a film by Katy Woods entitled “Cornholme”. There was something quite eerie about this piece. It showed countryside and a small town obviously from the Pennines somewhere North of Sheffield – it reminded me of the area around Todmorden, where I stayed at the Buddhist Centre last year and took my own rather eerie photograph of a Camouflaged Snowball. The town is actually Cornholme, just South of Todmorden, where “the beautiful landscape stops [and] becomes ambiguous, natural beauty and post-industrial decay overlap, and it begins to feel claustrophobic, empty and ruined”. I remember experiencing a feeling very much like that when I drove back from Todmorden. The birdsong within the film, the lack of a human presence, and the clouds passing rapidly overhead, tugging their shadows along with them, all added to this strangeness.
Further along were works by Michael Day. I didn’t spend so much time in here, so can’t really comment on the work, but I did like his almost grey picture (photograph) with what look like a pair of headlights penetrating the greyness, called (I think) “Autopilot”.
Upstairs was a room full of works by Alan Rutherford, woodworm-like traceries on panels of wood, perspex, fibre-glass and other materials. Again, not much to say other than we all liked this a lot. Further along were more works by Katy Woods, which again I didn’t spend as much time with as I would have liked (Marcin enjoyed the book of animal stories though). Finally, we went to the far side of the campus where Joesphine Flynn’s work was playing, a pop video full of colourful flying skulls which “critiques the language of consumer culture”.
We rounded the night off by going to the Boardwalk where we arrived halfway through a showcase of artists from Sheffield’s finest Victorian-themed record label, Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation. We were in time for Monkey Swallows the Universe and the wonderful Serge Gainsbourg-esque French sauciness of The Lovers (pictured). I bought a CD (also excellent) of Thee Sheffield Radiophonic Workshop and had a chat with Missy Tassles, compiler of said CD and co-host (although not for a few months, until she has finished her dissertation) of the also excellent Thee SPC Live! radio show.
Here’s some more pictures from the evening. As you can see, I enjoyed the architecture of Psalter Lane college almost as much as I did the artwork:
