Guest Blogger Kelly Smith has selected her winner from the four shortlisted artists in the Northern Art Prize…have you been yet? Who do enjoy most?
This weekend saw a trip to the Northern Art Prize in Leeds Art Gallery. I had been to a preview with a group of social media enthusiasts in November where we had a sneak preview at the installations beginning to take shape but this was my first look at the completed show.
The first room held a big bowl of rock sweets, a display of hand blown glass apples and bird box designs by Alec Finlay. At the rear of the space was a multimedia installation by Haroon Mirza with angled video screens and turntables with slowly spinning records, post-it notes and light bulbs.
The connecting corridor led past Finlay’s poem-covered, sound-emitting life-rings and into a second room. Here was yet more Finlay: a cabinet full of herbal phials with acrostics labels, a neon rock, paper, scissors game, and a circle of apple colours. Further back, a large white box-like table held Lubaina Himid’s brightly-painted Victorian jelly moulds complete with micro-inhabitants; wall-framed paintings of the moulds seemed like windows at one of the table’s sides. Nearby, a set of nine beautifully embroidered pennants accompanied a David Jacques video inspired by an essay on Francisco Ferrer’s tour of Liverpool in 1908.
My favourite piece by far was a second by Jacques. Entering the gallery from the corridor, with Finlay’s life-ring soundtrack still evoking the seaside, you discover a long white bench, two tripods with stereo viewers, four sets of headphones, and a large wall-mounted grid of black and white industrial-scene stereograms. We picked up a set of headphones each and peered through the viewers at the selected cards.
I love stereograms – the way your brain can fuse two slightly displaced two-dimensional photographs into a single three-dimensional image absolutely fascinates me. But Jacques made the experience quite sublime, playing an almost sensuous narrative through the headphones, describing how and why this happens. And then the piece became fun too. On the bench was a box of loose stereogram cards. After checking on the wall description that it was allowed, we set to changing the images in the viewer, rapidly selecting one card after another looking for the perfect view – container yard followed scaffolding followed a docked ship. Sometimes the three-dimensions appeared instantly, other scenes took more effort. We raced through the box like children playing Top Trumps, swapping cards, tangling the headphone wires, and each thinking we’d outplayed the other.
There was lots of good work to be seen at the Northern Art Prize this year and I’m sure the judges will select a worthy winner. For me, for his mix of science, industry history, almost minimalist symmetry, and audience participation, the winner is David Jacques.
*Penny’s photograph above was taken during the November social media event. All four artists were asked in advance if they were amenable to having photos taken of their work before the final installation.