Angela Kingston reviews New Art West Midlands 2015

The first year or two after doing a fine art degree are critical. Students put everything they have into their final show, and they have support, equipment and camaraderie. And then…

…the ground disappears from under their feet. They now have to make it on their own as artists. It’s something I’ve been through myself: like a Looney Toons cartoon character who had run off the edge of a cliff, suspended in mid-air, realisation dawning, toes casting around for something to prevent my fall. And for graduating students today, not least because of their debts, the canyon they hover over is ever deeper and wider.

New Art West Midlands is a multi-venue exhibition that has taken 30 newly launched artists from the region and given them a precious toehold. For the visitor, the reward is a kind of exhibition-as-newspaper: the chance to see the right-here-and-right-now of contemporary visual art. For a wider view of the programme and the artists it has launched, see our guide to new art west midlands.

Key Takeaways

• New Art West Midlands functions as a bridge between art school and professional practice, giving recent graduates a first serious public platform across multiple regional venues.
• The 2015 edition showed 30 newly launched artists; the 2016 edition, selected by Sonia Boyce, John Stezaker and Katharine Stout, featured work by 43 artists.
• The work on show rewards slow, second-look viewing: several pieces (Megan Sheridan’s Squid, James Turner’s John Millais) deliberately mislead the eye before resolving into something else.
• The exhibition’s emotional register is unusually broad, from Lisa-Marie Williams’s family-meltdown tableau to the cooler, more conceptual interventions of James Turner.
• For collectors and curators, the annual exhibition is a research tool — a way to see the region’s emerging talent before it is widely exhibited or priced.

Why the post-degree moment matters

The gap between graduation and a sustainable practice is the single most precarious stretch in an artist’s life. During a degree, the infrastructure is invisible because it is everywhere: a studio you don’t have to pay for, technicians on hand, a cohort to argue with, deadlines imposed from outside, and a final show with a built-in audience of tutors, family and visiting curators. Remove all of that at once and the loss is not just practical but psychological.

What replaces it, for most graduates, is a patchwork: a bedroom or shared studio, part-time work, and a self-imposed discipline that has to be manufactured from scratch. Add student debt and rising studio rents in cities like Birmingham and the arithmetic becomes brutal.

This is the context in which a scheme like New Art West Midlands matters. It does not solve the structural problem, but it interrupts the silence at exactly the moment when an artist is most likely to stop making work altogether.

It is worth being precise about what such an opportunity does and does not provide:

• It provides: a deadline, a professional selection process, a public venue, a line on a CV, and — crucially — a peer group of other artists at the same stage.
• It provides: the experience of installing work in a non-studio space, which is a distinct skill from making it.
• It does not provide: income, studio space, or a guarantee of representation. Those remain the artist’s own problem to solve.

Understanding that distinction is part of maturing as a practitioner. A group exhibition is a platform, not a career.

Reading the work: a chapter of a graphic novel

I am gripped by a chapter of a graphic novel by Shijie Hai called Sleep Paralysis. Told from the artist’s perspective, it depicts the state of being semi-awake and yet completely unable to move. Many of the individual frames of the story are filled with complete darkness, or edgy, psychedelic patterns, or a lampshade that’s multiplying on the ceiling. In the final frame, there is a haunting plea: ‘Remember, last time/ if you see my fingers turning into gold/ you must wake me up.’

The artist’s dream-state has messed with time and logic, and it has also supplied a kind of riddle. And as Sigmund Freud proposed, phenomena such as dreams and art, and also riddles or jokes, contain mechanisms that enable us to look into the unconscious.

Fingers turning into gold? At face value about flesh and bone becoming metal, Shijie Hai’s strange phrase is surely also about that burning desire artists have to transform what they have in their hands into something with new meaning – a mysterious transformation that for them is as precious as gold.

You must wake me up? This last phrase of the artwork strikes me as having to do with artists’ predicament of needing an audience. Without which, making art is a one-way street, a dead-end – a kind of paralysis.

That reading is worth dwelling on, because it names something the exhibition as a whole enacts. The graphic novel is a form that depends on the reader turning pages; the artwork is incomplete until someone arrives. The same is true of every piece in the show. The audience is not a passive consumer of the work but a necessary component of it.

The alchemy of the second look

The pressing of Megan Sheridan’s finger on the shutter-release button of her camera has resulted in precisely the kind of alchemy that Shijie Hai’s dream alludes to, and her photograph, called Squid, certainly grabs my attention – and other people’s, I noticed when visiting the exhibition. There’s a bright orange space-alien, with a bulging head, hooded eyes, and a forked front limb.

But look again, and the photograph is actually of a fishmonger, with a pair of squids hanging in front of his face, his left arm distorted by being caught mid-motion, artificial lighting making the colours sci-fi strange. It is gloriously bizarre and unsettling. One of the selectors, Bedwyr Williams, writes that it ‘made me sit up and feel sick at the same time’.

That double-take is a useful lens for the whole exhibition. Several works here are built on a deliberate delay between first impression and understanding:

• Megan Sheridan, Squid — reads as science fiction, resolves into documentary.
• James Turner, John Millais — reads as a familiar Pre-Raphaelite image, resolves into a jukebox-coloured intervention.
• Jade Simpson, The Spirit Collection — reads as soft toy, resolves into something more predatory.

This is not gimmickry. It is a way of making the viewer aware of their own habits of looking — the assumptions they bring, and how quickly they are willing to revise them. For anyone learning to write about or collect contemporary work, the practical lesson is simple: never trust a first glance, and always ask what the work is doing to you before you decide what it is.

Ordinary materials, extraordinary weight

Lisa Marie Williams demonstrates consummate skill in combining the most ordinary objects and materials to create her own kind of gold: sculptures that pulse with humanity. At the epicentre of her tableau, Fluoxetine – named after a drug for depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder – is a gargantuan ‘breast’, made of kapok-stuffed tights with blue cord and red thread ‘veins’, which has wedged itself underneath a broken table.

In front of this, some jointed lengths of wood resemble a pair of legs, their stance partly protective, partly panicked, which are shod with men’s shoes, the laces of which have come undone. To one side, there’s a tiny child with an oversized pom-pom head, sad witness to it all. Narratives sympathetic to family meltdown seep through and around it all.

The choice of materials here is not incidental. Tights, kapok, cord, thread, a broken table and a pair of men’s shoes are all domestic, cheap and loaded. They carry the residue of the body and of the home. By scaling them up and recombining them, Williams turns the furniture of everyday life into something closer to a stage set for a domestic drama — and the title, borrowed from the brand name of an antidepressant, anchors that drama in the language of mental health.

I picture Jade Simpson as an artist who fidgets and fiddles with things, running cloth through her hands, gathering up odd items, holding them in different ways and examining them from a variety of angles. Until something unexpected – and precious – occurs.

Her sculpture The Spirit Collection is an imposing grouping of composite animals, more than two metres high, made by draping fabrics over wood and cardboard. There’s a polar-bear-snake, a wild-boar-cricket-frog, a walrus-starling, and favourite of all, a gull with splays of wooden clothes hangers for beak and claws. On one hand, the creatures have enormous appeal, and on the other, they frighten: The Spirit Collection seems to be both a commentary on human sentimentality and a portent of nature as vengeful.

Both artists share a method worth naming, because it recurs across the exhibition: improvisation with cheap, found and domestic material. It is a strategy born partly of necessity — graduates rarely have budgets — but it is also an aesthetic choice with a long lineage in British sculpture, from the assemblage traditions of the twentieth century through to the present. The trade-off is real: such work can be fragile, hard to transport, and difficult to sell, but it can also carry an intimacy and immediacy that cast or fabricated objects rarely match.

A counter-voice: irony and the found image

There is a lot of emotion in New Art West Midlands, and James Turner’s artwork John Millais comes across as a counter to this. He’s mounted a transparency of Millais’ famously emotive painting, The Blind Girl, on to a light-box. An ‘Aztec’ head replaces the blind girl’s, and patterned curlicues wrap around her and enter her companion’s eyes. Besides which, these additions light up in a sequence of colours, giving the effect of a Wurlitzer jukebox.

The move is clever because it targets the emotional machinery of the original. John Everett Millais’s The Blind Girl is one of the most sentimental images in the British canon — a double rainbow, a destitute girl, a lapful of flowers. Turner does not destroy it; he re-plays it, turning a painting into a light-box and a light-box into a fairground attraction. The sentiment survives, but it is now visibly manufactured, and the viewer is invited to notice how easily they are moved.

For a group show, this kind of counterweight is essential. An exhibition composed entirely of heartfelt, handmade objects risks becoming monotone. A cooler, more conceptual presence gives the emotional work something to push against — and gives the visitor a change of register.

How to look at a graduate showcase

If you are visiting a show like this — whether as a curious member of the public, a student, a curator or a collector — a few practical habits will get you much more out of it.

• Go twice if you can. First impressions in a group show are dominated by the loudest works. The quieter ones often only register on a second pass.
• Read the labels, then ignore them. Titles and materials lists are evidence, not instructions. Fluoxetine tells you something; it does not tell you everything.
• Ask what the work is made of and why. Material choice is rarely neutral, especially when budgets are tight.
• Note the installation. How a work is lit, spaced and sequenced is part of its meaning, and in a multi-venue show the same work can read differently in different rooms.
• Follow the artists afterwards. The value of a showcase is what happens next: the next exhibition, the residency, the studio group, the first sale.

For collectors, the calculus is different again. Work by recently graduated artists is typically the most affordable entry point into contemporary practice, but it comes with caveats: editions may be small or undefined, materials may be unstable, and the artist’s trajectory is genuinely unknown. Buying early is a bet on a person as much as on an object — which is precisely why seeing the work in the flesh, rather than online, matters so much.

The audience question

When you and I visit exhibitions, we are the audience that artists simply must have, not least in terms of psychological survival – and never more so than at this vertiginous, early stage of their careers. New Art West Midlands, with its depth and breadth of talent, is deserving of our avid attention.

That is not a plea for politeness. It is a description of how the ecology actually works. Artists need viewers, critics need artists, galleries need both, and collectors need the whole chain to be visible and legible. A regional showcase is one of the few places where all of those roles briefly occupy the same room. Turning up is not a passive act; it is participation.

Exhibition details and context

Exhibition 2015 — 13 November – 23 December. The SALON exhibition showcases contemporary art for sale at the Waterhall Gallery, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery.

Exhibition 2016 — 12 February – 15 May. A selected West Midlands graduates’ exhibition that takes place at venues across the region between February and May each year. The New Art West Midlands 2016 exhibition was selected by Sonia Boyce, John Stezaker and Katharine Stout and features work by 43 artists.

The presence of selectors of that calibre is itself significant. Boyce, Stezaker and Stout each bring a distinct sensibility — respectively, a practice rooted in Black British art and curation, a conceptual engagement with found imagery and collage, and a curatorial perspective from the institutional side. The result is a selection that is neither purely academic nor purely market-driven, which is exactly what a showcase of this kind should be.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is New Art West Midlands?

It is a multi-venue exhibition programme that showcases newly launched artists from the West Midlands, typically recent fine art graduates. It takes place across venues in the region between February and May each year, with an associated SALON exhibition of contemporary art for sale. Its purpose is to give emerging artists a first significant public platform.

Who selects the artists for New Art West Midlands?

The exhibition is selected by invited artists and curators rather than by open application alone. The 2016 edition was selected by Sonia Boyce, John Stezaker and Katharine Stout, and featured work by 43 artists. The 2015 edition showed 30 newly launched artists.

Why is the period after art school so difficult for artists?

Because the support structure of a degree — studio, equipment, technicians, peers, deadlines and an audience — disappears almost overnight. Graduates must simultaneously find income, find space to work, and build a professional network, often while carrying student debt. Many stop making work in this period, not for lack of talent but for lack of infrastructure.

How should I approach a group show of emerging artists?

Slowly, and more than once. Resist the urge to decide immediately which works you like. Read the labels for materials and titles, then look again at the work itself. Pay attention to how pieces are installed and sequenced, and note the names of two or three artists whose work stays with you so you can follow what they do next.

Can I buy work from a showcase like this?

Often, yes — the SALON exhibition at the Waterhall Gallery, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, is explicitly a showcase of contemporary art for sale. Prices for work by recently graduated artists are generally at the more accessible end of the market, but be aware that editions may be undefined and some materials may be fragile or unstable over time.

What does a review like this one actually do?

It places the work in a wider frame — art history, psychology, the economics of an artist’s early career — and it records a moment in a region’s cultural life. Reviews also function as a form of advocacy: they tell artists that their work has been looked at closely, and they tell audiences that the work is worth the trip.

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Angela Kingston Curator and visual arts writer http://www.angelakingston.co.uk

Editorial: Barbara Walker’s Shock and Awe reviewed by Andrew Jackson (Friday 13th May 2016); Trevor Pitt and the Preston Street Union (Wednesday 13th April 2016).

Subscribe: Friends of New Art WM — if you are interested in staying up-to-date with contemporary art in the region, or in buying and collecting, please join our mailing list. Curators’ Network — if you are a curator or visual arts professional and interested in the contemporary art landscape of the West Midlands, please join our mailing list.

Further reading

• Bedwyr Williams — Wikipedia
• Sigmund Freud — Wikipedia
• John Everett Millais — Wikipedia
• Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery — Wikipedia