Eastercon Sunday

On Sunday morning durham_rambler and I walked to Lister Park, where we met D. and explored the art gallery there.

There were two temporary exhibitions downstairs. D. and I skipped the David Hockney (he'd spent the previous day in Saltaire, and was Hockneyed out; I just felt that since time was limited, that wasn't where I wanted to start); the other was work by Sophie Ryder, who uses various media to create figures with human bodies and the heads of various totem animals - like the minotaur and the hare flanking the entrance to the gallery. On her website, she talks about the importance she attaches to working on a large scale, and perhaps that's why the exhibition - a room full of small pieces - lacked impact. There were some impressive wire panels, like sketches scaled up and with each scribbled line translated into wire, but what I really liked best was the way the local children were posing for photos with the hare sculpture outside, subverting it into a giant Easter bunny.

Upstairs, the permanent collection is arranged into something called Connect. I thought Connect was a telecoms trade union, but according to the gallery's website "Connect makes connections between works of art from different cultures and times. This transcultural concept combines over two hundred Eastern and Western works of art displayed according to the universal themes of People, Place and Imagination." This sort of abstraction sets my teeth on edge: does it mean any more than "our collection is a bit of a hodgepodge"? Where there was a more specific theme it worked very well: one room brought together portraits of two rival nineteenth century textile magnates with textiles from the subcontinent and Armand Point's The Arab Weaver, a large painting which could so easily have been one of those Victorian paintings in which an exotic setting leads inexorably to women losing ther clothing, but refrains. Also Thomas Milne's wonderful coloured marble sculpture of The Alpaca and the Mohair Goat, probably my favourite thing in the entire exhibition, and I wanted to touch it, to feel that marble fleece.

My second favourite was a painting by Edward Wadsworth, a name I didn't know, called Trees beside a River, and here he is in the Tate. Imagine this Landscape taken further towards abstraction, more of a repeating pattern and a softer green palette.

There was also something about E. Reginald Frampton's A Madonna of Britanny - though I prefer another Breton scene in the Tate.

By now it was time to head back to the convention, in time to see la_marquise_de_ interviewing chilperic. A panel on Revolutionary fantasy, arguing that heroic fantasy might spring from epics about aristocratic heroes and the rights of kings but that it can also challenge the status quo, was entertaining enough, but might have been livelier with a dissenting voice or so. jemck kept things moving with good humour and stimulating questions, but there was a sense of open doors being kicked in. I ended the day by attending an author reading: that's what it was billed as, and that's what we got. Mike Shevdon and Emma Newman read, between them, for the best part of an hour, and it was, frankly, too much - I'd have welcomed some dialogue, either with an interviewer or just between the two authors. (Despite which, I bought a book, so it can't have been too tedious.)

The rest of the evening faded into the bar at the Midland, where we had something to eat and were defeated by the Easter prize crossword, which requires all too much knowledge of opera.