Reflections on Hinterlands Exhibition Post Opening Night
I’ve discovered recently that working on a joint exhibition featuring two people is very different to working on either solo or a group show. The work has to fit together as one body of work and this is dependent on real trust between both parties. It is also vital to put the curation and final selection of the work ahead of the sense of needing to push into the spotlight all recently produced work ahead of the overall sensibility and look of the exhibition.
Because Aaron and I will be doing a talk about the show for Guernsey Arts who sponsored the show and the general public, it felt like a good time to reflect on the process of putting the exhibition together and how it feels now after it has been open for a week.
At the beginning of last summer, Aaron and I had a conversation about the idea of holding a two-person landscape exhibition. The catalyst for this was seeing our work in the ‘Exile and Return’ exhibition last May: a group show to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Channel Islands from Nazi occupation. Our work felt congruent being landscape-based with both the painting and photography in the exhibition containing a sombre and slightly eerie undertone.
Once we’d secured a venue we met regularly for updates and to discuss the broad sense of direction the work was moving in. Aaron had been working on this body of work for four years in the periods when he was in between documentary portrait projects. He already had a large number of photographic images already, but wanted to ensure that there was some crossover in relation to sites that we were working from. I was still immersed in developing work that considered the impact of the German occupation on the landscape and the dark social history under this.
We met at local sites that were important to each of us. For me, the Saltpans near my home, a wasteland of pampas grass with the urban chimneys and lights of the electricity power station shining through. Aaron had been working up at Le Guet, a site of 100 year old Monterey pines, many of which had been felled by the savage power of storm Goretti in January. Their giant uplifted roots leaving vast inky dark craters surrounded by the deep bed of pine needles and bramble covering the steep hill to the bay below. From these joint site visits to shoot and sketch, additional work was developed.
Due to the gallery being on the site of a local college, due to safeguarding restrictions, we could only be on site the weekend before the exhibition opened to hang it. This felt like quite an overwhelming task on the Friday night when I dropped off my smaller paintings. Hanging in while deep in conversation with Aaron o er that weekend made me realise what an art form in itself good curation is. It also became clear that we both had very similar ideas on what worked and what looked out of kilter. This felt reassuring and meant that although various areas were arranged and rearranged, with some pieces being omitted or reprinted in different formats, we both felt that our work was shown to its strengths.
The opening last Friday was really packed out and visitors really seemed to enjoy the interplay between my painting and Aaron’s photos. It is not common to see paintings and photography shown together. My cousin visiting from London for Easter said: “It was interesting to see the same subject treated by different artists in different mediums but knowing there had been a dialogue.” She felt that it was common to view photography as somehow being more ‘real’ than painting which could be seen as more interpretive, yet Aaron’s photos felt more ‘otherworldly’ than the paintings.
It will be interesting to give a talk in the next ten days and perhaps have some conversations about the work in the gallery with visitors. It takes a while to have a sense of distance from the work and be able to fully reflect and work out new directions of travel. I shall miss Aaron greatly as he and Carmen are moving to Scotland to be nearer to family. Thankfully, north of Inverness, there is a great deal of wild beautiful landscape for him to explore.