A Cultural Visit: Manchester
- Mar 5, 2019
- 3 min read
"A gallery that is historic and contemporary, academic and playful"
Founded in 1889 as the first English gallery in a park, the Whitworth has been transformed by a £15 million development. This is a gallery whose visitor numbers have climbed spectacularly in the past five years, whose contemporary exhibitions programmes have given new life to international collections, and whose risk-taking curatorial team has gained global attention. Part of the University of Manchester, the Whitworth is a gallery that is a place of research and academic collaboration, and whose education and learning teams have generated new approaches to working with non-traditional arts audiences. Yet despite its ambition and change, the Whitworth is also a gallery that has retained a sense of the personal, the intimate and the playful. It is a place that its visitors love, and feel that they own. For them and for us, the Whitworth is simply the gallery in the park, one of the most remarkable galleries in the north.
My visit to the gallery was definitely one to remember, every time walking around where I thought there was no more to be seen there'd be another exhibition of work to be seen and appreciated. One piece that particular interested me was the Prints of Darkness, Goya and Hogarth in a Time of European Turmoil. Francisco de Goya Lucientes (1746 - 1828) and William Hogarth (1697 - 1764) were the most remarkable artists of their times. They used their roles to critique and reflect on dysfunctional European societies. There was no topic uncovered, they particularly looked into nationalism, warfare, poverty, homelessness, abuse, corruption, hypocrisy, materialism, alcoholism, racism and inequality. Another piece that interested me was Tracey Emin's 2005 blanket titled Meow.
Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751)
Specifically looking at Gin Lane, set in the parish of St Giles, a notorious slum district that Hogarth depicted in several works around this time, Gin Lane depicts the squalor and despair of a community raised on gin. Desperation, death and decay are extremely prominent in the scene and work closely to the themes of his portfolio. This one is significant to me and reflects my interests through the themes explained above, in my own work I have been known to depict connotations of death and a sense of dark undertones towards myself and experiences. I also tend to work in a grayscale colour palette and rarely use colour, other than if a design seems necessary.
Meow (2005)
Emin's quilts are provocations, they upend the traditional, nurturing craft of quilt-making, transforming it into a space for feminist self expression. Meow is made from an old wool blanket that has been adorned with capital letters cut out of felt. Rosettes are deliberately badly stitched with edges left frayed and fabric flapping downwards. If anything, Emin has used the quilt as a background for a collage. This one is significant to me and reflects my interests through the theme of provocation, in my own work I have been known to use typography in a way of provoking the reader, requiring a response to the visual message I'm conveying. I like the way Emin has done this with the question "WHO WILL MARRY ME", this question makes the audience think and even by doing this, the thought is the answer in this piece and a sense of visual communication.
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