Creative Programmes
Connect : People, Place and Imagination
Redisplaying the Collections of Cartwright Hall Art Gallery
An Alchemy and Bradford Museums , Galleries and Heritage Services partnership
“The collections at Cartwright Hall are world class and reflect some of the best artistic expressions from Britain , the United States and South Asia . Connect illustrates how connections in art can be both local and international”.
Connect has been awarded Stage One funding by the Heritage Lottery Fund of £132,000 in order to further develop Connect. The estimated cost of the project is just under £2 million and if successful at Stage 2, HLF will award Connect an additional £1 million. Seed funding has already been secured from Bradford Council and Renaissance Museums Hub.
Connect is a capital project based on a concept devised by Alchemy involving a major redevelopment of the first floor permanent gallery spaces at Cartwright Hall .
Cartwright Hall would like its permanent collections, in the way they are displayed, interpreted and acquired to better reflect the changing needs and interests of the 21st century.
Cartwright Hall has a rich collection of paintings, prints and sculpture as well as ceramics, textiles and jewellery.
Three themes have been identified that will articulate the Collections across the gallery spaces, have a universal resonance as well as chime with the Bradford experience – People, Place and Imagination. Areas of initial focus within the themes will be:
People |
Place |
Imagination |
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Icons: sacred and secular |
Near and Far |
Beauty and Form |
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Emotional Realms |
Landscape & Environment |
Visual Languages
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The following are examples of the approach being taken
PEOPLE
Icons: Sacred and Secular
This sub-theme would explore sacred and secular icons for example Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe which is literally referred to as a modern icon. Radically different to this image, although intellectually linked, is an early twentieth century ‘mochi’ embroidered silk from Gujarat in Western India, depicting a pair of feet in a symbolic Hindu allusion to the divine. Through these images a Hollywood actress who arguably defined vibrant sexuality in the 50s and a symbol of devotion so profound that it depicts not the form but the feet of the Lord demonstrate the wide trajectory of what defines an icon today.
IMAGINATION
Visual Languages
The literal content of a work of art is underpinned by the purely visual formal elements of its construction and making. Universal qualities such as colour, line, form, tone and texture, both reinforce a work of art’s meaning and have other hidden, culturally encoded meanings. On an abstract level, artworks may have specific political, religious or social meanings which are only apparent or understandable in particular contexts. Brigit Riley’s screenprint, Untitled, 1971 draws on the traditions of European Modernism and explores the aesthetics of colour as an end in itself, while Bashir Makhoul uses the aesthetics of colour to convey powerfully poignant messages about displacement and the angst of diaspora in his work An Inch of My Sand.
PLACE
Far and Near
This is a particularly pertinent theme for Bradford with its myriad cultures. How do people regain a sense of place if they have moved across countries and continents in order to resettle? Why do people feel threatened about their sense of place when new groups move in? What does a sense of place mean in today’s world? Is it about a relationship with a particular area, village or district or is it about a much larger canvas, which relates to the entire country itself. When does patriotism shade into the murkier territory of xenophobia?
Lowry’s Industrial Landscape and Sylvat Aziz’s Exodus Lahore are about both people and place but approached very differently. Lowry’s painting looks at the impact of the industrial landscape on people, where the brutal edifices dwarf human beings. Aziz, on the other hand, looks at the enforced relocation of entire communities of people, as a result of political and religious imperatives. Salima Hashmi’s Zones of Dreams takes a different line in its almost mythic approach to notions of geography and identity.