Fiona Crisp: Weighting Time
Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens
Saturday 1st April - 3rd June 2023
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
Saturday 6th May - Sunday 3rd September 2023
Mowbray Park (Public commission)
Saturday 1st April - Sunday 3rd September 2023
Weighting Time is a survey exhibition across two venues Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens (1 April – 3 June) and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (6 May – 3 September) exploring 30 years of work by British artist Fiona Crisp.
From the subterranean world of dark-matter laboratories to the midnight sun of the Norwegian mountains in summer, Crisp’s work explores how we might connect to spaces and ideas beyond our own lived experience. Her practice interrogates the ontology of the photographic image – a branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. Across the exhibitions elements of her large-scale photography and film installations will be reconfigured and recontextualised to reveal new insights into our changing relationships to space, place and time.
Crisp’s works are often generated over sustained periods of time in specific heritage or science locations including the Early Christian catacombs of Rome, a Second World War underground military hospital in the Channel Islands and the United Kingdom’s only underground Dark Matter Laboratory inside Boulby Mine on the Northeast coast. Weighting Time draws together photographic and film work from these series, among others, for the first time alongside new work and a large-scale public commission for Sunderland’s Mowbray Park.
Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens
Weighting Time at Sunderland Museum will explore Crisp’s long-term engagement with the construction and framing of a ‘view’ in visual as well as in political and philosophical terms. Across her large-scale photographic works, we see Crisp’s preoccupation with thresholds – liminal spaces or states where there is tension between public and private, interior and exterior or light and dark. In her Still Films series from the 1990s, life-sized figures are suspended in action, caught on the thresholds of buildings; within other projects Crisp uses cars, caravans or architectural models as framing devices to mediate our world view – or view of the world – all the time drawing our attention to the camera’s own ‘act of looking’.
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
Weighting Time at Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art brings together several bodies of work created by Crisp within enclosed, hermetic or subterranean spaces. This collection of still and moving image work made in mines, theatres, laboratories and catacombs, come together to form a trope of ‘otherworlds’ or ‘underworlds’ that re-order our coordinates of space, place and time. Both worlds come together in the film installation Boulby where we experience the intense visual and aural phenomenon 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 allows us to reverse time-travel as we fly back through the formation of galaxies towards the moment of the Big Bang.
Mowbray Park
Belvedere (Mowbray Park) is an image taken from the top of Lanthwaite Hill in the English 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. Around the world, questions of access to, identity with and ownership of land have been brought to the fore by the recent global pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis.
Photos: Colin Davison