Chris Day’s glass work at the Walker continues their responsive programme, inviting Black British artists to respond to their collections, with a particular focus on archival representation of Black history.
Chris Day is a mixed-race glass artist who, having retrained after a career as a heating engineer, is playing willfully and purposefully with glass to stretch the boundaries of the medium as a contemporary art form.
Now You See Me uses copper cages as controllable materials, forming a structure in which the less predictable glass is blown. The results are spectacularly beautiful vessels viscerally swelling and expanding beyond their tight restraints.
Bound in chain and bursting through bars, these glass works present the resilience of one previously background character to a work in the Walker’s collection.
On display at the same time as Karen McLean’s Stitching Souls, elsewhere in the gallery, this exhibition has a similar aim; to tell the story of an anonymous Black character in a portrait of 1700s British wealth.
This glass work tells the story of an unnamed character in The Card Party, a 1725 painting produced as a copy of one by Gawen Hamilton. A Black servant is seen in the background of a portrait, painted to show a comfortable family surrounded by their favourite possessions – implying the servant as one.
But the initial trigger for the work was ‘Success to the Will’, a 1783 ceramic dish made by John Pennington to commemorate and celebrate the launch of the Will, a ship setting sail from Liverpool to Africa to transport enslaved people to the West Indies. The bowl features paintings of captives awaiting their journey.
Like other responsive works presented by the Walker this year, Chris Day seeks to give voice to the unnamed servant. The results are visceral, soft and characterful at once. Bound in crates, in a room of their own, they get something that their subject never did; our attention.
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Now You See Me by Chris Day is at Walker Art Gallery until 24th November 2024
Words, Kathryn Wainwright