We've decided to start a new, and occasional, series on the blog, documenting our visits to various galleries. This time, a visit to: Eastside Projects, Digbeth, Birmingham, West Midlands.
We ended up combining a visit to see relatives with a bit of photography-related goings-on recently, involving a trip to Mordor (sorry, Birmingham New Street Railway Station) and a gallery visit. Travelling to Birmingham always reminds me that much as I like photographing trains, I somewhat hate actually using them, especially if the target destination is the subterranean concrete hell which is Birmingham New Street. A little walk across town though took us to Birmingham Eastside in Digbeth, home to a lot of the cities art and performance related effort.
I’d last properly visited the are around the Custard Factory some years ago, and was pleased to see it still flourishing. Lots of nice retro shops, little galleries, and cool sculpture pieces centred around these wonderful old buildings, tucked in amongst brick viaducts and old industry. After visiting a rather nice exhibition showing drawings of dead celebrities (sounds gruesome, was actually very educational, with some brilliant drawings on display in a friendly show) we headed for the target for this little trip into Brum, Eastside Projects:
Eastside Projects is a gallery set up a few years ago, and is located in a very large ex-industrial building which has been converted into a nice space for displaying large-scale artwork. I was rather taken with the slightly utilitarian, factory-atmosphere of the place combined with the classic white/grey colour scheme.
An old friend of ours, Bethan (who I’ve known since sixth-form) works for the gallery, and has been inviting us down to visit the place for nearly a year now, but the day-jobs have always prevented us putting in an appearance up until now. Very pleased to have been able to get there finally to see this space.
The gallery was showing an abstract-themed mix of artwork, though typically for my tastes I was rather more taken with the simply fantastic shed-like piece below, which is upcycled from an old piece of large-scale interactive sculpture. Does rather make me wish I’d gone for something more adventurous with our own garden shed, but I digress. I love the upcycling idea that this gallery pushes as its philosophy, using old works to create new, as its very much something we do ourselves to avoid too much wastage with our work.
Rather than my rabbiting on about the show and the gallery, its probably better to let you read their own info about it all, so here's the link to the site: http://www.eastsideprojects.org/
I have to say that as good as the art was (and I did enjoy the show), it was the space I was most interested in- as much as I like visiting the ‘big’ galleries like the Tate Modern, I do prefer these sorts of smaller galleries- as regards Birmingham itself, Eastside is slightly more improvised, perhaps a little less polished compared to places like the Ikon which tends to steal the limelight a bit. I’ve always found places like Eastside a more comfortable viewing experience; less pretencions, more friendly and welcoming. Personally I’d love to see more places like this, especially in West Yorkshire where there doesn’t really seem to be a middle ground between the relatively small but enthusiastic places like South Square and the giants like Impressions Gallery. I suppose Handmade in Bradford in the centre is the nearest equivalent in our neck of the woods… I have to say though that I really enjoyed our visit to Eastisde, and thanks to Bethan for inviting us and giving us the tour, and such an informative visit. The gallery is a little off the beaten track for a lot of people in Brum, but the whole area around Digbeth is great for artists, and we will definitely be popping back to see other shows around there, and badgering people relentlessly to go see stuff at that gallery.
In related news, I have dropped off some pics with South Square for an upcoming show back up here in t’North- more on this soon… And we will be doing more of this gallery-pimping-articles soon, next probably a bit about Cupola in Sheffield who have been fantastically friendly to Amy and myself over the last 18 months. One of the problems we found when setting out into the big wide world after Uni was that we never had any proper guidance about approaching galleries or exhibiting, so we kind of want to share our experiences a bit as regards the matter, in the hope that it might help some other people...
Ben
In the snow, in Yorkshire
No comments:
Post a Comment