More of a celebration than an exhibition, Evocation gave the staff at Tate Liverpool a final chance to work together and share the practices behind one of best loved galleries in the country, before it closes for more than two years this October.
Tate Liverpool is about to undergo one of the biggest gallery renovations in the country since, well, Tate Liverpool initially breathed new life into the docks in the 80s. Change is scary, but as this very gallery has shown us, it’s often invaluable.
However, for the staff who welcome you into the galleries, and those who keep it ticking from the offices, this change will mean an end to their time working there. We’ve known dozens of them through Art in Liverpool over the years, either for their own solo shows, or as part of Soup collective.
Soup, which I thought stood for something for a very long time (it doesn’t), was the first iteration of this group of artists, but they’ve moved in their roles, and moved on from the gallery over the near-twenty years we’ve known them. This group show is a renewal of that, and while some of the faces are familiar, others are new.
I doubt it will be the last time these artists work together, whether it’s as artists or colleagues in the iconic red brick walls of Tate Liverpool.
If you get a chance this month, the second half of their two-legged show is open upstairs at Avenue HQ with a bunch of fascinating work to get to grips with. A personal favourite being ‘Lost in the Uplands’ by Keziah Thomas-Mellor; a series of repurposed coffee cup lids. Each lid becomes a porthole into its own individually beautiful illustration of harsh landscapes, scribbled and scraped into the lids.
To view them, you’ll need to ask reception for some binoculars and get hunting.
At Elevator, now closed, Jonathon Beaver’s mixed-media textile work perhaps has the strongest links to Tate Liverpool past and present, and to the idea behind the exhibition, which asked the thirty artists to evoke memories and emotions triggered by experiences of working at Tate Liverpool.
Perhaps the work that will stay with us all though is the sketch of the chair from the poster. ‘We sit in the chair and watch’ by Stevie Cavanagh and Hannah Blackman-Kurz. The chairs weren’t just part of the furniture at Tate Liverpool, they occasionally became part of the art too. Richard Wentworth used it an installation, Reservoir.
Here’s hoping that Tate Liverpool opens back up in 2025 with an ode to that chair and its siblings.
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Evocation is open at Avenue HQ, Mann Island, until 21st September
Words, Kathryn Wainwright
