From the wave-worn bricks on Crosby beach to Liverpool’s famous drag queens, Laura Davis picks five shows that invite us to take a second glance.
LOOK Photo Biennial 2024: Beyond Sight, Open Eye Gallery, until September 1
Crosby Beach at low tide resembles the remains of an ancient civilisation – lumps of decoratively carved sandstone poking out from under a jumble of sea-worn ruddy brick as if remnants of a once proud and fierce people.
Whatever archaeologists of the future may make of such finds, we know that it is of course nothing of the sort. The cause of the rubble is still (just) within living memory – the May Blitz of 1941 when Luftwaffe planes dropped 870 tonnes of high explosives and more than 112,000 fire bombs on Liverpool, and the post-war clean-up that moved the resulting wreckage to the beach to create a sea wall.
In Stephanie Wynne’s Erosion, one of the series of works in this year’s LOOK Photo Biennial, she invites us to look at the rubble anew. Her images were taken in 2021 to contemplate 80 years since the end of World War II, using torchlight and long exposures as a nod to the searchlights of the German bombers.
Once alien to their natural environment, the dumped bricks and pieces of masonry have become naturalised, their sharp edges smoothed by the friction of waves, their chips and cracks a safe home for the roots of coastal plants. It’s a fitting subject for the festival’s theme Beyond Sight, which highlights how our actions reverberate through the world in visible and invisible ways.
Like the bricks, the silver and palladium considered in Melanie King’s Precious Metals project are also hanging around, affecting their environment. She offers more sustainable alternatives to their use in photography, including a series of bewitching cyanotypes made with green tea.
Mattia Balsamini’s Protege Noctem is less subtle in the execution of its message – the peril of light pollution. Alongside images of fireflies forced to adapt to their brightening habitat and a woman having her brain activity measured while asleep, is a satellite image of Europe at night, the continent’s outline clearly visible in a pattern of lights.
Port Cities, Space Liverpool, July 12-20
A full-scale charcoal drawing of a wall from an abandoned building in the industrial area of Liverpool’s North Docks will be combined with original imprints of damaged walls from a Tunis hotel in this exhibition exploring port cities.
Launched as part of Liverpool Arab Arts Festival, before travelling to Tripoli (Lebanon), Tunis (Tunisia), Rabat (Morocco) and Alexandria (Egypt), the show is the result of a 10-day research residency by Arab artists Mohamed Abdelkarim, Laila Hida, Nadia Kaabi-Linke and Siska.
heir new commissions will look at the past and future of port cities in Liverpool and the Arab region, and consider how their social, economic, political and cultural heritage is so deeply connected to their roles as centres for trade and migration.
Projections of wavering water lines will be projected onto the scratched windows of the abandoned Liverpool building in Kaabi-Linke’s Heartbeat Wavelines (2024), in motion with the pattern of heartbeats heard from the windows.
Hida’s Reversed Landscape (2024) uses a series of installations and sculptural works to investigate Sefton Park Palm House’s multiple identities as a man-made botanical ecosystem, a commercial cultural venue and a depository for displaced colonial commodities.
Abdelkarim has created an audio installation Nobody Remembered the Ark, Said the
Sea (2024), which tells a fictional narrative from the perspective of sea water.
Meanwhile, Siska uses a 16mm film and performative intervention to highlight the Liverpool city centre streets named after slave traders to show the turmoil that lies beneath a seemingly stable facade.
Queen by Magnus Hastings, Walker Art Gallery, July 27 to August 25
Since he was a feather boa-wrapped little boy trying to walk in his mum’s heels, drag has felt like home to Magnus Hastings. So we can expect an exhibition full of love, admiration, ferocity and glamour when his new exhibition Queen opens at the Walker Art Gallery at the end of this month.
Some of his most famous images from his book Rainbow Revolution, including portraits of Bianca del Rio, Courtney Act and Trixie Mattel, will be displayed alongside newly-commissioned photographs featuring dozens of Liverpool’s own fabulous drag artists.
Danny Beard, Sister Sister, Brenda LaBeau, Naya Thorn and Violet Pain are among those shot in the city’s Pride Quarter in a celebration of their artistry and the scene’s collective spirit.
World Building, Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, until September 29
Work experience – two words that strike fear into the heart of teenagers everywhere. But not everyone’s fortnight in the real world involves incessant tea-making and vowing you will never get a ‘proper job’.
Former Penketh High School pupil Curtis Jobling’s work experience started him off on a career that would result in the creation of Bob the Builder and Raa Raa the Noisy Lion, as well as his Wereworld novels that are being made into a Netflix series.
His week at Aardman Animations – clinched by him writing a letter on the off-chance – involved Nick Park telling him to go to the supermarket and draw washing powder boxes.
Some 30 years later and he is inspiring a new generation of future animators in an exhibition of his work at Warrington Museum and Art Gallery.
The show takes you right through his creative process, from never-seen-before sketchbooks with early designs of characters to stop-motion puppets and models. There’s also an exclusive first-look at images from his upcoming Wereworld-based animated series, Wolf King.
Eternal Summer: Paintings by Philip Connard, The Atkinson, until November 30
Southport-born Impressionist Philip Connard is under the spotlight in an exhibition at The Atkinson in Southport, which charts his career from painter and decorator to war artist and muralist.
Born in 1975, Connard took art evening classes before winning a scholarship to study textile design at the Royal College of Art in London. As a war artist, he served on the Royal Navy’s first submarines.
His murals include a series at Windsor Castle, painted on the four walls of the room containing Queen Mary’s dolls house, and a decorative panel depicting “Merrie England” for the Queen Mary ocean liner.
An accompanying exhibition will show the work of his Edwardian contemporaries, including Philip Wilson Steer, Walter Sickert, Wilfrid de Glehn and Henry Scott Tuke, which belong to the Atkinson collection.
Together, the two shows explore how British artists responded in a whole range of different ways to continental influences including Impression and Post-Impressionism.
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Laura Davis is the writer of Stored Honey, a twice weekly newsletter celebrating the arts and culture scene in Liverpool and the whole of the North West. You can read and subscribe for free at www.stored-honey.com