The now much quoted ‘Stockport is the new Berlin’ may only be uttered by people who have never visited either place, but changes are happening in the Greater Manchester town – namely an influx of infrastructure development money and creatives. One such cultural addition comes in the form of PINK, a non-profit curatorial project focused on interdisciplinary research, practice and collaborative exchange who opened their site in Stockport in September last year after relocating from the city centre.
PINK’s ethos revolves around facilitating and platforming the cross-pollination of ideas between artists, researchers, writers and all manner of creatives, not only for singular events or exhibitions, but as ongoing, experimental relationships. PINK acts as a supportive space for forging these connections through collaboration whilst holding space for, and encouraging learning through, failure. This support for the artistic community comes in the form of studio spaces built as part of the renovation – all currently occupied – but also their diverse programme of events and the exhibition advice and funding application mentoring provided by Director Katy Morrison, along with a hefty dose of dedication and humour that is so refreshing to witness.
Morrison’s personality and awareness of the sector is undoubtedly the reason PINK has survived in an increasingly difficult time for the arts, let alone grassroots arts. When PINK reopened, Morrison provided free spaces for local creatives to avoid insensitively parachuting into the flourishing community. Her current PhD thesis is embroiling her deeper in the world of residencies and, importantly, she is bold and forward in both her approach to projects and her interpersonal connection. This combination of cultural savvy and loquaciousness was one of the catalysts for New Arrangements, a project bringing together works by artists and former colleagues Jenny Baines and Anna Macdonald, both of whom Morrison got chatting to whilst she worked in a coffee shop opposite the artists’ then workplace, Manchester School of Art (MSA). Morrison’s broad connections combined with PINK’s reputation and the demand for creative support means that curating the gallery’s programme can draw on a diverse pool of practitioners, forming a varied schedule from live performance to ‘Drag and Draw’ with Underbank Studios, Stockport, and more in between.
Baines, a Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking at MSA, enters this project from a fine art background, working predominantly in experimental 16mm film but with a background in sculpture that becomes evident in New Arrangements. Macdonald, meanwhile, is a course leader on the MA Performance: Society at Central Saint Martins, and brings experience in screen dance, choreography and performance. Despite these differing CVs, their practices are ultimately both performative, durational and interested in the relationship between film, body and space. Over the course of four weeks, Baines and Macdonald took over PINK’s newly renovated gallery space and transformed it into a dynamic studio for thinking and making through creation, participation and experimentation. They brought their separate bodies of existing work together and identified where they converged, diverged or anything in between. It was here that being straight-talking friends came in handy – reinvigorating the enjoyment in some works and ruling others out.
The exhibition on show at the opening and the following few days would be its most fixed form after considerable time reviewing, selecting and moving works around the space. Though this set up had only been decided upon two days prior, the artists had already identified changes they wanted to make the following week leading up to the next live performance – ideas fizzing between them even as they stand with private view drinks in hand.
In this iteration, the show features three films projected onto screens housed in freestanding metal structures, plus two large wall projections which hold the space, projected onto the largest two walls, turning this from an exhibition of film to a space that almost becomes it through layering and absorbing scale. Nothing here is hidden – digital projectors sit in the middle of the space, whose original function is evident through the retention of ceiling tiles and banks of plug sockets. The former is highlighted as the eye traces the journey of 16mm film which spills out of two analogue projectors, meandering across the ceiling before returning to the device, whilst the latter becomes both absorbed by the installation while remaining a practical convenience as a source of power. The sound of this old-school technology is the overriding one of the exhibition – a warm, mechanical hum, breathing, the lifeblood of the work.
Baines’ box section structures are reminiscent of Eva Rothschild’s minimal, geometric sculptures, holding space whilst remaining porous, punctuated with voids and apertures, providing vistas through to works behind and allowing an organic layering of content within one field of vision. With several projections in a modest space, their throws cross and sometimes the shadow of a frame makes its way into one of the films adding to the idea of layering, of coming together and of these works being re-examined afresh through this collaboration. Two of Baines’ three structures show her films, described as ‘repeated, often absurd actions…pushing the limitations of the mechanism and her own physical endurance’. The beautifully cropped sequence of her laying on lush grass, attempting to suspend a ping pong ball in the air by blowing it upwards – think Maltesers advert – is shown close to the ground, reflecting the action itself. In contrast, the film showing only her feet teetering through the air as she stubbornly tries to sustain an unseen headstand is projected much higher on its respective structure, bringing an anthropomorphic proportion to the work through the considered positioning.
Macdonald shows three films. The first is shown on one of Baines’ sculptural screens and, at one and a half hours long, captures the artist alone in a room with merely a simple table, chair and, later, a can of drink. Throughout this endurance performance Macdonald attempts what should be simple actions, like opening the can, with frustrating difficulty, purposefully making basic actions unnecessarily hard for herself, such as opening said can with her mouth alone. The only text in the whole exhibition is laid over the footage, individual sentences that switch between truisms, absurd claims and humble brags – ‘I am a professor’, ‘I created the Harvard system’, ‘I am interested’. In this, Macdonald asks what is truth, what is enough, can we have it all, what about when goalposts are moved, and what of the effect of time? – some statements weren’t true at the time of filming but are now. She provides no answers or advice but such questions provoke thought, especially in a time of fake news, biased coverage, photo editing and social media, as well as debates around social mismemory. In contrast, Macdonald recalls a recent anecdote where her teenage daughter saw this film and found it ridiculous – ‘it’s good to just lean in to being stupid sometimes too though’, she retorted.
The shared element of absurdity cloaked in aesthetically pleasing imagery and hypnotic movements is just one example of several ‘serendipitous crossovers’ that the artists find between their practices. One of Macdonald’s proclamations goes: ‘I recreated every Nancy Holt work’. Nancy Holt was an American land, installation and public artist whose 1976 work ‘Sun Tunnels’ heavily influenced Baines’ interest in the use of apertures. The apertures created by Baines’ sculptural forms in turn chimed with Macdonald’s interest in activating the space through performance and making these inanimate objects performers too, whilst they both speak of film’s sculptural qualities.
There are, of course, areas where their works contrast greatly but, rather than jarring, these aspects have been carefully considered and purposefully juxtaposed to draw out nuances in the pieces that might not have been obvious otherwise. On a fundamental level, Baines works in analogue whilst Macdonald works digitally. This difference is not immediately apparent – to the untrained eye at least – but when you view them butted against each other the contrast is sharp, like how your eyes become accustomed to normal television then are taken aback upon the flick to HD. Like the imperfections and tonal quality of a vinyl record, the visual character of analogue film brings an almost tactile nature, a nostalgia and, certainly in Baines’ case, an ethereality. This calm sentimentality, evoking younger years and summer days when headstands and pointless games helped languidly pass the time is, again, contrasted by Macdonald’s more sprawling, restless films.
On one wall she shows collaged footage of pairs of hands, each dancing around each other, fidgeting, focusing on examples of individual ticks and habits we all possess but likely do not notice. These kinds of subtle movements are the artist’s recurring love – ‘here to there’, ‘holding’ or ‘getting slower’ – and were donated to ‘Ways of doing things’, a project with Wellcome Sanger that examined issues of donation, consent and pattern in both art and science, one of many science collaborations on the artist’s CV. Opposite this, another film shows lines dancing across the wall in organic, sweeping movements before rewinding, undoing their journey and erasing their own trace in a shaky, etch-a-sketch manner. Macdonald ironically recalls, with a sense of glee, that this basic film was, in fact, the result of a very intense, high budget residency where her movements were tracked by a top of the range motion capture suit as she performed contemporary dance. The fondness with which she speaks of the work seems to emanate not only from a genuine passion for the projects she has been lucky enough to participate in, but largely the abstracted nature of the work that sees dance turned into something purely formal. ‘Dance is often sidelined or absorbed into fine art’, she laments and, though the duo recalled taking pleasure from showing works that inverted expectations of them – the filmmaker showing more performative work and the ‘dancer’ exhibiting in the vein of contemporary art – movement remains very much at the forefront.
What is, upon first glance, a relatively simple exhibition, is in fact a beautifully produced comma in an dynamic project that benefits from its experimental, open-ended nature, dedicated space for dialogue and the dynamic relationship between Baines and Macdonald. As I watch the films unfold side by side, behind and in front of each other, more captivated than I expected to be, I think about two disappointments. Firstly, that the artists cannot give every visitor the additional detail and glimmering anecdotes that were bestowed upon me and, secondly, that we are in fact not in Berlin. Stockport is pretty good though.
New Arrangements was at PINK, 9 – 24 March 2024.
Laura Biddle is Assistant Curator at Tate and writer based in Manchester.
This review is supported by PINK.
Published 09.04.2024 by Jazmine Linklater
1,810 words
