On Thursday 2 March at 6pm on a quiet residential street in Longsight, three miles south of Manchester city centre, one shop front is illuminated; highlighting the throng of people inside, surrounded by little explosions of colour. This is the opening night of Abundance presented by Venture Arts for x3 at Longsight Art Space.
x3 is a three-year collaboration between supported studios ActionSpace (London), Project Ability (Glasgow) and Venture Arts (Manchester). The collaboration began during the 2020/21 lockdowns as a way to connect the three organisations in a difficult time of isolation for much of the population, but especially the studios’ learning-disabled artists. Having opened in Glasgow in October 2022, this second iteration runs until 2 April 2023 before moving on to its final tour destination in London.
Longsight Art Space is run by PROFORMA, a non-profit visual arts, performance and curating platform presenting and commissioning artist development, exchanges and opportunities in the Greater Manchester area. After a lengthy process with the local housing association, PROFORMA secured this spacious former shop unit, fitting it out not only for exhibitions and residencies but also community-centred projects including henna workshops, after school clubs and dedicated free workspace days. But, on this evening, the focus is on visual and performance art.
The exhibition features three artists, Erin Keogh (Project Ability), Chandrakant Patel (ActionSpace), and Kathy Wilmott (Venture Arts), selected by artist and freelance consultant for neurodiversity, Sonia Boué. Boué was drawn to these artists’ energy and colour ‘after the famine of lockdowns’, as she imagined audiences would ‘delight in the sensory feast’ of their work. The shared abstraction and performative nature of these works means that they are inherently imbued with components of the artists’ lived experiences – Keogh’s physical confinement, Patel’s repetitive tendencies and Wilmott’s love of music. They come together in a display of joy and vibrancy, and demonstrate innate understandings of material, composition and contrast.
Keogh shows five large canvases – ‘Springtime’ (2021), ‘Green’, ‘Blue Painting’, ‘Summer Colours’ and ‘Stripes’ (all 2022) – layered with bold, tactile acrylics. Though she deals exclusively in abstraction, her strokes and colours tempt the brain into interpreting them as familiar objects. I see an apple, David Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Splash’ (1969), or a bound wooden structure. The layering of paint and sometimes identifiable finger marks make it difficult to resist touching it for yourself. But, once you have inspected the acrylic terrain up close, stand an arm’s length away and let each canvas swamp your field of vision – these works are hung at not only an accessible level but one at which the rich colours can fill your peripherals too.
Patel often works on several pieces simultaneously, using inks, acrylics and pen to create crisp, organic lines on paper, evoking aesthetics of Hindu mandalas and golden ratio forms. Patel then collages and re-collages these images, combining and splicing his original ideas to form new compositions and relationships. To encapsulate this dynamic and organic process, the resulting wall-based montage ‘Installation’ (2022) is taped to the walls, mirroring Patel’s working method. On a nearby screen, the process of installing this instinctual, yet precise, roaming work is documented through film.
Wilmott works across several mediums, but always begins with drawing. The wall-mounted works are all pastel or pencil on paper, some worked into with stitches, which neatly ties them to the three textile sculptures also on display. Each of Wilmott’s works are adorned with the same cyclical motifs and fluid, repetitive forms which she creates surrounded by her beloved music – something reflected in the titles of works like ‘Shakin’ Stevens’, ‘Elvis’ and ‘Michael Jackson Thriller’ (all 2022). Though colour is paramount to Wilmott’s work – each piece tending to a slightly different palette: bright, pastel, grungy – it is the bold use of negative space, making nothingness into something, that differentiates her practice.
Each artwork label contains a QR code which links to a poetic audio description by Sally Hirst, a fellow Venture Arts attendee. Hirst is a multi-disciplinary artist, political contender and disability activist – all by the age of twenty-two. Here, Hirst’s descriptions go beyond that of offering imagery and atmosphere to those with visual impairments but are, in fact, beautifully written and delivered works of art in their own right – visceral and embodied depictions that bring the abstract works on display into tangible focus.
To complement the exhibition and respond to Wilmott’s work, Venture Arts commissioned two new works for this opening event. The first is by Hannah Buckley, a Leeds-based dancer and choreographer whose practice is grounded in notions of health, wellbeing, embodiment and how dancers can collaborate with artists and communities, making this project a fitting pairing. Like Wilmott’s work, which begins and ends beyond the boundaries of the pages, Buckley’s performance begins quietly and unassumingly as she slowly, and without announcement, meanders into the space, between visitors, many of whom do not even initially notice. When Buckley edges closer, the details on her tracksuit, and even socks, can be identified. Wilmott has marked them with more spheroid lines which now appear to spill from the walls and onto Buckley. High, low, taught, poised, expanded, tight, but consistently controlled and steady – as an increasing percentage of the crowd turns to watch Buckley, her form shifts delicately, moving along every axis to invoke the repeated circles of Wilmott’s works. Buckley uses her movements and body to physically manoeuvre the audience and shift her stage, gradually advancing around the space before disappearing through a rear door in the same understated way that she entered, performing until out of sight.
Finally, in a performance both analogous to and distinct from the former, Manchester-based Joe Beedles begins, again using Wilmott’s work to inform his piece. Cushions were placed on the ground around Beedles’ equipment – laptop, smoke machine, laser – and people gravitated to them, sitting down, eager to experience whatever was coming. The communistic floor-level seating method, usually reserved for children in the western world, brought a novel, experiential atmosphere. What comes, when the lights are out, is a dot, then several, then a single sinuous line whose form and changing colours immediately evoke Wilmott’s work. As these lasers wind across the bare wall, the speakers flanking it emit electronic staccatos, initially resembling electronic signals with jazz sensibilities and polyrhythms, allusions to call and response, and tones of improvisation. As the lasers build, so does the sonic accompaniment into which Beedles has inserted sections of Hirst’s words which suddenly claim the notes as beats, turning poetry into lyrics. Between the lasers’ sharp lines, fluid motion, luminous colours and emphasis using the smoke machine in parts, the performance is captivating, creating a collective trance-like effect on the audience.
Once the lights have come up, eyes readjusted and feet are found, the works can be seen anew. With the experience of the two performances still dancing in people’s brains, the trio’s work comes back into focus. The exhibition is a joyful visit in itself, but the evening’s performances added new dimensions, new connections and engaged more senses – the only drawback that it was a one-time event that not all visitors will experience but, for those who did, the works likely have even more life.
x3 presents Abundance, Longsight Art Space, Manchester, 2 March – 2 April 2023.
Laura Biddle is a curator and writer based in Manchester.
Published 22.03.2023 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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