Dreaming of Dead Fish, 2018 (exhibition)

Dreaming of Dead Fish was an exhibition of newly commissioned work informed by research in Warrington Museum & Art Gallery stores and archives for Warrington Art Festival in 2018.  Amongst formative moments in my reserach were visits to the glass collections and in particular the frontage of three museum vitrines that contained taxidermy fish, and written record of ‘The Invisible Girl’ in a catalogue of the Warrington Town Hall 1840 exhibition, as an ‘object of curiosity […] a diminutive figure suspended in mid air in a globe appeared at certain times of day”.

Themes of (in) visibility, (in) betweenness, proximity and distance run throughout the work and exhibition; the materials and processes act like a series of extended moments and pauses; they attest to the fragility of experience.

Accompanying the exhibition is an essay by Craig Staff – Inbetweenness or the ever-failing attempt to let the orange orange

29.9.2018 – 27.10.2018, Warrington Museum and Art Gallery

List of works:

Intent on something yet undone ~ Two overhead projectors occupy a bench, where two people might usually sit to view work are positioned as if shoulder-to-shoulder, facing away from each other and towards adjacent gallery walls. Both project light through two uranium glass vanity trays; suspending the viewer’s gaze as the image reflects back and towards each other, further mirrored by the polished gallery floor.

Dreaming of dead fish ~ Three pieces of curved deaccessioned glass, that once belonged to vitrines that housed taxidermy fish in the museum collections lie on the floor, their shape reminiscent of the curvature of the fishes’ lateral line. The glass panes no longer function as protection or windows into a diorama, resting with their underbellies exposed the wrong way up.

And all these things I do not mention ~ A small 35mm slide projects an image of a pond. The angle of the image and its projection cast down onto the tranquil water but the eye is drawn back towards the material, the slide, which is damaged. Light has burnt the celluloid and melted the image shifting our focus back to the material but, at the same time, beyond the waters surface.

Interstitial repose ~ A series of glass vanity trays are covered in a thin layer of soot and positioned leaning on a shelf, their undersides face outwards denying their original function and implying a transitory state further emphasised by the temporality of the sooted surface. These are a development of the Interstitial Drawings series, in which I use a candle and its residue – soot – as my tools.

Image credit: Simon Liddiard