First Newcastle showing for artwork by Wilson twins
Next up at Hatton Gallery...
The next exhibition at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle is to be Lines of Action, curated by Professor Louise Wilson, known for her artistic collaborations with twin sister Jane, a fellow Newcastle Uni prof in the fine art department.
It will look at how artists have used the ‘line’ as part of their creative practice, not just in drawing but in other forms of artistic expression.
“Artists’ ‘lines’ shape and consolidate time, thought and space within artworks irrespective of media – whether this be photography, painting, collage, printmaking, film or sculpture,” we are told.
A highlight will be Undead Sun, a video installation by the Wilson sisters made in 2014, 100 years after the outbreak of the First World War when the front line came to represent a ferocious stalemate.
The work, exploring the ideas of surveillance and subterfuge, looks at developments in aerial photography and camouflage and offers “a haunting reminder of how outline plans can have unexpected outcomes and long-lasting effects”.
It was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella for Imperial War Museums, in partnership with Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (where it was exhibited in 2017) and Wolverhampton Art Gallery.
During their research, the Wilsons delved into the archives of the Imperial War Museum, the Farnborough Air Sciences Trust Museum and the Wellcome Collection, subsequently filming sequences based on archive photographs, artefacts, diary entries and personal testimonies.
This will be the first time the work has been displayed in Newcastle.
Another Film and Video Umbrella commission to feature in the exhibition is Quarantaine by artist Georgina Starr, a 2020 work said to focus on the qualities of ‘deep listening’ and to provide a ‘counterpoint’ to the aforementioned work.
Text accompanying the trailer on YouTube states: “Two young women enter an alternate reality.
“Here, within the cloistered walls of a clandestine house of instruction, they join a queue of women on the quest for a higher knowledge.”
From the team at North East Museums, which runs the Hatton for Newcastle University, comes the information that it “sketches a disarmingly surreal parallel universe whose atmosphere of mystery and affinity acts as an uplifting antidote to the turbulence and violence of war”.
To understand fully how it falls within the scope of the exhibition, we’ll probably have to go and see… which will be fun.
Among other artists exhibiting are Rita Donagh, who studied fine art in Newcastle (when the city’s university was King’s College, Durham) and later taught at the university where she met – and later married – influential educator and pop artist Richard Hamilton, and Wolfgang Weileder, current professor of contemporary sculpture at the university.
Lines of Action opens on June 20 and runs until August 1. The gallery opens Monday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm and entry is free. Details from the Hatton Gallery website.