News from Nowhere

On Saturday, we were planning a trip to Middlesbrough for a poetry book launch at mima (there is much to be written about Middlesbrough, and why an Institute of Modern Art is at once an incongruous thing to find there and not incongruous at all, but for tonight let's just take it as read). Not only has mima recently opened a new jewellery gallery, it is enticing visitors in with an exhibition of the work of Wendy Ramshaw, whose ingenious sets of rings I have coveted for decades.

I'll confess right up front that I spent so long looking at the Wendy Ramshaw exhibition that I ran out of time and energy for the permanent collection: and the jewellery gallery demands both time and energy. Only a minority of the pieces are on display, above ranks of drawers waiting to be pulled open and the treasures within inspected. And the photo gallery on mima's website reveals that there are indeed treasures within, though I would have appreciated the help of their model in explaining how some of what I saw was to be worn (in the case of this Susanna Heron 'Wearable', for example, the object itself made less sense, was a less real piece of jewellery, than the photograph). In some extreme cases, I won't believe it until I see it.

( The Wendy Ramshaw exhibition, at some length, with pictures: )

The poetry launch was of Joanna Boulter's Blue Horse, a fine collection but likely to be Joanna's last: she wasn't able to be at the launch, and the poems were read by members of the Vane Women collective of which Joanna was a founder member, and who had worked with her to make sure it was published. So it wasn't exactly a celebratory event. Opening the book at random, I was snagged by these opening lines of a poem called Lichen:

I am the unassuming
licker of stone
I call myself double-tongued
slow voiced...

(Here's more about Joanna and a whole poem).

There must be places to lunch in Middlesbrough, but we've never found them. So we took the slow road home, and discovered the Vane Arms in Thorpe Thewles: very gastropub (it had a gin menu) but perfectly satisfactory.

After our day of dramatic weather, we were ready for something more indoor: so last Saturday we took the Bears to Middlesbrough.

I'll pause there, so that anyone who feels the need can fill in the jokes about how they can't have deserved such harsh treatment. For all Middlesbrough's problems, I've found plenty there to like: some fine old buildings from when it was a prosperous industrial town, the transporter bridge, the Bottle of Notes...

On Saturday we visited the Dorman Museum, a classic municipal museum - fine Victorian building, random objects of local interest, room full of stuffed birds - but very well done.

There is a large collection of ceramics from the Linthorpe Pottery, Middlesbrough's Victorian art pottery. It's an odd experience, to be surrounded by hundreds of pieces from the same company, which have a distinct common style, a family resemblance, and to feel that some of it is very attractive, in an Arts & Crafts sort of way, and some of it is heavy and Victorian and to my taste completely ugly, without being able to explain what separates one group from another. There was, for example, a set of decorative plates each with a different flower pattern, which divided between the good and the ugly.

And then there was this:



The explanatory notice reads "Pair of decorative legs, made unofficially by Joseph Wright, an artist / decorator at the pottery." Because which of us has never had the urge to steal a few minutes to model - and fire, and glaze - a pair of legs?