Double delight for art exhibition that’s well worth Weighting for
An exhibition from a renowned British artist, photographer and filmmaker has opened at not one, but two Sunderland venues.
Fiona Crisp’s Weighting Time exhibition explores 30 years of her work. It is on display at Sunderland Museum & WinterGardensandNorthern Gallery for Contemporary Art in the National Glass Centre.
The exhibition features parts of Fiona’s large-scale installations. Her photographs and films explore how people “connect to spaces and ideas beyond their own lived experience”.
Includedareworksmadein the Early Christian catacombs of Rome, a Second World War underground military hospital in the Channel Islands and a dark matter laboratory beneath the North Sea.
Weighting Time at Sunderland Museum explores Fiona’s “long-term engagement with the construction and framing of a view”.
Through large-scale photographic works, visitors can seeFiona’spreoccupationwith thresholds. For instance, in her Still Films series from the 1990s,life-sizedfiguresaresuspendedinaction,caughtonthe thresholds of buildings.
Theseworksarebroughttogether with a new large-scale commission, Belvedere, made
by Fiona for the exterior of the museum overlooking Mowbray Park.
Fiona explained: “At Sunderland Museum there are two works from the series Belvedere that I made throughout the 1990s by taking model
spaces to high points around London and photographing ‘through’ the space to the view beyond.”
TheNGCAWeightingTime brings together several bodies ofworkcreatedbyFiona“within enclosed, hermetic or subterranean
spaces”.
The still and moving images, made in mines, theatres, laboratories and catacombs, come together to form “otherworlds” or “underworlds”. This includes a film installationthroughwhichvisitorscan
experience the intense sights andsoundsofatrucktravelling through tunnels underneath the bed of the North Sea.
Editedtogetherwithananimated simulation taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, the film also allows viewers to reverse time-travel through the formation of galaxies towards the moment of the Big Bang.
Weighting Time at the museum runs until June 3, and at NGCA until Sunday, September3.Bothexhibitionsarefree.