{I sound myself out loud}

[kaberett]

Among my other activities of the last few days, I managed to stick my head round the door of the Whitworth, an art gallery set in a park in Manchester.

Whereupon I promptly fell in love.

I'd actually rocked up to see Cai Guo-Qiang's Unmanned Nature, a landscape installation: I managed to time it such that I was the only person in the gallery it occupies as I paced very, very slowly around the lake, staring at the reflections of the mountains in it. Photographs don't really do it justice. I was absolutely stunned.

But that wasn't actually the first thing that caught my eye: the Whitworth's new landscape gallery is right at the back of the building relative to the entrance, so I walked past plenty else and was delighted. In the textiles gallery immediately after you walk in, one wall's currently given over to a set of suspended balls made of peacock feathers, green-blue-spray outward, quill points meeting in the centre. I have no idea what it's supposed to be for or even to mean, but it's gorgeous. And then in the next gallery: pictures all along the walls, and in the centre a small wooden-framed building, illuminated from its interior, the wall panels made of something translucent with quotations cut out of them, words dark against the light, about feminism and churches and, very definitely, intersectionality; you can open the door and step inside, some of the quotations being meant to be read from the interior, clear glass panes providing a floor over the lightbulbs.

Everything after that I was wandering past slightly more rapidly, on my way back out; most of what I paid attention to was Cornelia Parker's solo show. About which I have to say:

• I adored Rorschach (Vera) [2005] until I spotted the squashed musical instruments, which are... just a thing with which I cope astonishingly poorly;
  
• I am not entirely sure I get the point of her wrapping objects in a mile of string;
  
• War Room [2015] is an installation that gave me shivers: way before I got as far as refinding the plaque giving its name and a description of the material used for it, I was shivering about the bit where the walls were dripping with blood - i.e. I think that's a very evocative job very well done;
  
• and I also quite liked the things she was doing with pulling spent bullets out into fine wires and using them sculpturally.

Other items that particularly caught my attention, but whose creators I failed to note:

• definitions embroidered, in blue and black ink, as though on opposite sides of a translucent page: left and right, life and death, etc
  
• a series of ?silver ?lithograph-ish things that sort of reflected you and a lot looked like the moon.

... and then it was time for me to head home for dinner, but if you're in the area I strongly recommend the gallery and I will definitely be going back next time I'm up there with my chair (this time I was stick-only, which makes art Hard). The curation is excellent, the staff are friendly and helpful, there's a sculpture trail through the park (and on leaving I saw a couple of dudes playing music & dancing beautifully and fluidly in ways I totally don't understand underneath and around Christine Borland's Hippocratic Tree) and there's lots of light and seating and such. I fundamentally think of myself as someone who Doesn't Get Modern Art and I am still going back ASAP.

Comments

[kaberett]

(I note that Hippocratic Tree, of all the sculptures in the park, is the one it makes least sense to have a sign up next to about Not Climbing On The Sculpture: it fundamentally doesn't make any sense without people doing tricep dips in the branches while chatting to a friend perched on another branch, or people dancing underneath it.)

[cosmolinguist]

The Whitworth is awesome. :) I need to go there more.

[cosmolinguist]

P.S. If you're still in Manchester and would like to hang out, I'd love to see you. Fine if not, of course!

[kaberett]

Alas that was a short and pretty densely packed trip but I'll be back and a bit more leisurely in late May!

[chiasmata]

Hello! If you would like to meet up when you are here in late May, that would be lovely.

[calissa]

I've had my head buried far too deeply in work of late. Your post has reminded me to take time for beauty and art. And that I intended to pay a visit to the sculpture garden at the National Gallery of Australia.

So thank you. Your blog posts always have such poetry to them.