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Weighting Times is now across two Sunderland venues

AN exhibition from a renowned British artist, photographer and filmmaker has now opened across TWO Sunderland venues.

Fiona Crisp’s Weighting Time exhibition, which explores 30 years of her work, is currently on display at both Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA).

The exhibition features elements of Fiona’s large-scale installations from the last three decades – her photographs and films explore how people connect to spaces and ideas beyond their own lived experience.

Included are works made in the Early Christian catacombs of Rome; a Second World War underground military hospital in the Channel Islands and a Dark Matter Laboratory underneath the North Sea.

Weighting Time at Sunderland Museum, which opened on April 1, explores Fiona’s long-term engagement with the construction and framing of a ‘view.’ Through her large-scale photographic works, visitors can see Fiona’s preoccupation with thresholds. For instance, in her Still Films series from the 1990s, life-sized figures are suspended in action, caught on the thresholds of buildings.

These works are brought together with a new large-scale commission, Belvedere, made by Fiona for the exterior of the Museum overlooking Mowbray Park. This work 4m by 5m photographic work was captured at Lanthwaite Hill in the Lake District where the artist JMW Turner worked. The site was purchased by the National Trust in 2019 as the first acquisition made by the charity specifically for a view.

Belvedere is an architectural term used for a room or structure on the top of a building to deliberately frame a view. Fiona explained: “At Sunderland Museum there are two works from the series ‘Belvedere’ that I made throughout the 1990s by taking model spaces to high points around London and photographing ‘through’ the space to the view beyond.

“The film Randsfjorde revisits this technique, this time from on top of a high vantage point above a fjord in Norway in 2015.

“For the Belvedere work in Mowbray Park I used a simple hand-held device or ‘belvedere’ to cut-up and frame the landscape, drawing our attention to the act of looking as well as reminding us of the multiple screens that mediate our modern experience and construct our points of view.”

The NGCA Weighting Time show has just opened and brings together several bodies of work created by Fiona within enclosed, hermetic or subterranean spaces.

This collection of still and moving images, made in mines, theatres, laboratories and catacombs, come together to form a trope of ‘otherworlds’ or ‘underworlds.’ This includes a film installation from Boulby, North Yorkshire, through which exhibition visitors can experience the intense sights and sounds of a truck travelling through tunnels underneath the bed of the North Sea. Edited together with an animated simulation taken from the Hubble telescope, the film also allows viewers to reverse time-travel as we fly back through the formation of galaxies towards the moment of the Big Bang.

Fiona added: “Across Sunderland Museum and NGCA we have chosen elements from past, large-scale installations that I have been making since the mid 1990s. In each space, there are works from across the last three decades, including some new works. All the works sit alongside each other but there is no chronology or time-line in either show and no order in which the exhibitions should be viewed.

“All of the works are a part of much larger installations (often the size of the entire gallery) so I had to find a way of reconfiguring these elements so they could ‘live’ alongside each other.”

To compliment Weighting Time, there are a number of related family activities for NGCA and Sunderland Museum visitors.

As visitors enter NGCA, they will be offered headsets to hear an audio narrative from Fiona as she describes her work and her journey as an artist. Family backpacks are available at both venues - with tasks and exercises that invite viewers to look differently.

Meanwhile, in the National Glass Centre (NGC) café and outside the gallery at Sunderland Museum, customers can decorate their own Belvedere frames and use them to re-frame their view as they explore the exhibition and wider surroundings. For a chance to win NGC vouchers, visitors can take a photo and upload to social media using the hashtags #Belvedere #Fionacrisp #Weightingtime.

Visitors are also invited to a Ways of Looking interactive wall, just off reception at NGC where you can interact with the wall’s infinity mirrors, mirror balls and upside-down glasses.

Fiona’s work is held in national collections including Tate Gallery, the Government Art Collection, the Arts Council Collection, the British Council and The National Trust. She is currently Professor of Contemporary Art at Northumbria University in Newcastle.

Weighting Time at SMWG closes on Friday, June 3, while the exhibition at NGCA is on until Sunday, September 3. Both exhibitions are free.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Rob Lawson .