Sally Madge - Nowhere better than this place
Saturday 28th January - Saturday 25th February 2023
Open: Thursday - Saturday, 12 - 5pm
This retrospective exhibition celebrates the work of renowned north-east contemporary artist Sally Madge (1946-2020). Her rich multimedia output embraces ceramics, painting, sculpture, collage, film, installation and performance in countless contributions and collaborations in solo and group shows at home and abroad.
Recurring themes of power and identity, our sense of animality, and the magic of coastal spaces are manifest in ground-breaking installations, rousing performances and more modest pieces where surprising juxtapositions deploy unusual, scorned or neglected materials skilfully crafted and grafted to reflect impulses drawn from intimate resonance and daily life.
Seasoned with characteristically mischievous wit and wisdom to intrigue and delight but also unsettle and challenge, Sally’s work aims to nurture reinvention and reimagination in the practice and reception of artistic endeavours as well as wider society – illustrating the potential unlocked if arbitrary rules and distinctions constraining personal relations and creative expression are transgressed in exploring new ways to operate in the world.
More information about Sally’s work can be found on her website.
Click here to download a PDF of the exhibition handout.
Tom Jennings has written an essay about Sally’s work and the exhibition, ‘Installations, Institutions, Inhabitations’, which you can download a PDF of here.
‘Sally Madge: Traces’ contains a selection of exhibition texts, artist’s statements, images, records and reviews of some of the most important projects, and can be downloaded here .
A video tour of the exhibition filmed by Paula Blair can be viewed here.
Events
Tues 7th Feb, 6 - 8:30pm: Claytopia / Pedagogic Practices: How did Sally facilitate?
Tues 21st Feb, 6 - 8:30pm: Feminist Practices: What Do We know About How Sally Made Work?
To listen to the recording of the Feminist Practices discussion, click on the event title.
Interview with Helen Smith, recorded by Kaleidoscope CFA
Commissions
Michael Davies
MadgeMerz
Mixed media (2021-2023)
Evoking the colours, textures and make-shift, ramshackle presence of this shelter and its predecessors; MadgeMerz was fashioned as an anchor point for the ‘Nowhere better than this place’ aspect of the exhibition. It is a maximalist stage set to display ‘shelfies’ - arrangements and arrays of the beachcombed detritus (treasure) gleaned from the island’s liminal shoreline by Sally. Following affinity with these beach finds; the collage of construction materials used to dress the structure of the Merz are largely serendipitous finds. They were foraged from hedges, parking bays and skips in travels between the artist’s home, studio and the show’s gallery during its construction.
Michael Davies is a visual artist and community arts practitioner based in Newcastle at the NewBridge Project Studios. He exhibits nationally and internationally with VANE Gallery. A friend of Sally’s, he appeared as the eponymous creature ‘Granfer’ in a film made on Lindisfarne for her Shelter project. During and after the filming he frequently visited the shelter and its environs. A while later, he assisted in the eventual obliteration of all traces of its vandalised ruins.
Foundation Press
Imaginary Vessels (For Sally)
Installation containing 21-panel risograph-printed wallpaper, ceramic mugs, participatory drawings, table, chairs, plants, 5 ceramic vases made by Sally Madge.
Imaginary Vessels (For Sally) riffs on a number of pieces made by Sally Madge at Ouseburn Pottery between 2017 and 2020 (several of which are on display within the installation). The shapes and textures of these pieces inform a risograph-printed wallpaper made up of precariously stacked, variously decorated vessels. Sally originally studied ceramics at London’s Central School of Art and returned to the medium frequently over the course of her career as an artist. Influenced by Sally’s interdisciplinary and fearless methods as a maker and educator, Foundation Press have also made a number of ceramic cups – engaging with an unfamiliar medium as an act of play and creative learning.
A secondary reference for the installation was thinking about Sally Madge’s kitchen – a celebrated spot for good conversation and cheese scones, which many artists from the region will remember. Sally wrote that a consistent interest of hers was ‘mixing the ordinary and the extraordinary, using strategies and techniques which merge conscious and unconscious processes in creating unexpected qualities and associations from everyday actions, objects and places’. Inspired by this, the installation explores ceramics both as a medium for the fantastical and the functional – viewers are invited to draw an imaginary pot design or have a cup of tea.
Over the course of the exhibition, the installation will house a number of talks and workshops. On February 7th, 6.30-8pm, accompanied by Dr Judy Thomas (Assistant Professor in Fine Art, Northumbria University), Foundation Press will be looking at Claytopia, a workshop designed by Sally which challenged participants to build worlds with wet clay.
Foundation Press, led by Adam Phillips and Deborah Bower, develops community publishing and collaborative art and design projects. They collaborate with a wide network of artists and communities, creating publications, educational projects, collaborative artworks and graphic design.
