Published on 19 February 2018
After closing at its former home on Fawcett Street 18 months ago, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art will reopen in a new 3,200sq ft exhibition gallery at National Glass Centre, part of the University of Sunderland, creating a spacious new home for the visual arts in Sunderland.
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2019 having been one of the very first contemporary art galleries in Britain. It has provided major international figures with their first UK exhibitions, including Harun Farocki (Germany) and Cory Arcangel (USA), and exhibited fourteen Turner Prize nominees.
Fiona Crisp's Material Sight uses photography, moving image and sound to explore how we might encounter spaces where the frontiers of knowledge are being expanded. This new, large-scale commission examines the environments where experiments that challenge the limits of our imagination are carried out.
For nearly two years Crisp has worked with three world-leading research facilities for ’fundamental science’: Boulby Underground Laboratory, sited in the UK’s deepest working mine; Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology; and Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, the world’s largest underground laboratory for particle physics, housed inside a mountain in central Italy.
Boulby Underground Laboratory is over a kilometre beneath the Earth’s surface and is, in the team’s own words, “a special place: a quiet place in the universe where studies can be done almost entirely free from natural background radiation.” Within environments such as these, some of the most complex questions about the structure and history of the universe are being trialled, yet the sites themselves, as well as the science that is performed in them, are often invisible or inaccessible to the public at large.
Indeed across all these sites knowledge is pursued at a scale and distance unseen by most - from the macro scale of the multiverse to the micro scale of the sub-atomic world. In Material Sight, Crisp explores how we might overcome this sensory remoteness by placing us into the spaces and laboratories where the science is performed; building a landscape of image and sound with large-scale photographs and moving image works.
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Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art at National Glass Centre, Liberty Way, Sunderland SR6 0GL
Open daily 10am – 5pm
0191 515 5555 ngca@sunderland.ac.uk (link sends e-mail) www.ngca.co.uk
THE ARTIST
Fiona Crisp is an artist known for creating installations of large-scale photographs that question the presence of the photographic object as an unstable and deeply equivocal phenomenon. Her projects have been created by spending intensive periods of time in particular locations. Previous projects have included working in the Early Christian catacombs of Rome, and in a Second World War underground military hospital. Crisp studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and has exhibited both nationally and internationally. The project Material Sight has been supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Crisp’s work is held by several national collections of contemporary art, including Tate, the British Council, Arts Council and Government Art Collection. Fiona Crisp is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.