New Faces, New Focus feels like two exhibitions. New Faces, introducing the mechanisms of socially engaged practice, community building, and community linking. New Focus, unravelling the methodologies of that practice.
I don’t mean two exhibitions, one after the other. I mean two exhibitions, viewed simultaneously. Perhaps worth viewing twice, once through each lens.
When we write about Open Eye Gallery, it’s almost always through a focus on socially engaged practice. That’s a given, but here, the exhibition actively allows visitors to note the methods of socially engaged practice, and processes of interpreting new histories.
There are five distinct groups involved in this process, working locally in Liverpool, Knowsley, St Helens and Sefton, and further afield in Armagh and Aberdeenshire.
The work in Aberdeenshire is represented both through new work by participants, in collaboration with Nicole Gildea and Max Creamer, and through the collections on loan from Aberdeenshire Council’s Museums Service. It’s that last part that feels new. It’s a direct representation, in cabinets and cases, of the objects that inspired the new work.
Archive, here, is an essential tool in connecting the artists to the space they’re representing. In most cases, new spaces. This new focus on a space the participants call home, explored through collections, is a chance for us, the outsider in the process, to understand their interpretations and representations beyond a celebration of community.
Simply that we can now go on that journey with them, and chart their creative journey from objects that inspired these new works, to the new works themselves.
The objects brought to Open Eye Gallery are diverse. They are agricultural, commercial, private, settled and migratory. They don’t tell a story by themselves, but paired with the resulting work by each group of participants, each in different mediums, they help to paint a picture of routes to settlement, and routes to feeling truly at home, and connected with ancestry of migration in their town.
It’s particularly prominent from the Aberdeenshire group, who have absolutely focussed on finding shared heritage with the collections, but it’s present in a more universal sense from the Armagh projects too.
In Armagh, the artists and collaborators focussed on domestic, everyday items, rather than those that shared specific cultural links. Unlike in Aberdeenshire, the responses are individual. New Faces feels like the more prominent strand here. We’re introduced to the personal responses, rather than collective interpretations.
Joanna Laba and Anna Kosek’s collaborative new work, ‘The Old Ways: The Wise Woman’s Book’, is filled with family recipes, and memories of recent heritage. The work was triggered by the documentation and preservation of everyday objects explored with Armagh’s museum service collection, but not focussed on it.
In St Helens, Abdullrhman Hassona supported a group of residents to create their own archive. The objects are museum worthy, with stories to match. Here, the relationship between new faces and new focus is clearest.
Instead of finding inspiration in objects themselves, while exploring The World of Glass collections, the group found ways to interpret objects. It led to a deeply personal series of interpretations of objects they have brought with them from Palestine. They remind them of the importance of holding their own history close.
One image, of broken fragments of tiles, rescued from the beach, near the site of their grandparents’ house, shares objects now recorded for us, that serve as reminders of lives lived, in spaces lost. The interpretation simplifies something that is no doubt worth a thousand more words, into a history of an object that can be digested. It’s the type of museum interpretation you can engage with, but here, it’s the result of processing that curatorial language to create a sense of personal history, and it grounds their experience, regardless of geography.
The artists who led these groups, and the artists who supported them, have done an outstanding job of presenting the tools of engagement without forcing them on anybody. Because of that, you read this exhibition as a contemporary history, rather than a social exercise, and the stories within preserved with both perspectives: the screen of the objects presented, and the routes to tell their stories.
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New Faces, New Focus: Stories We Share is open at Open Eye Gallery until 20th December 2026
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith
