It is a great opportunity to work with the curators at The Turnpike and learn how they organise an exhibition. For Mary Griffith’s show, there are three main sections in the gallery room which are the fossils, artefacts from the Astley Green Colliery where the artist’s residency has taken place, and Mary’s drawings.
Fossils Display
The fossils were chosen by Mary and loaned from the Museum of Wigan Life. They arrived at the gallery in boxes. Before the fossils were put on display, we had to organise them in order of size to create a better visual experience. The idea was to put them on a shelf which is nailed to the wall. Because some pieces are very heavy, it has to be considered how the shelf can support their weight. To solve this problem, Helen Stalker, the curator, suggested that the fossils can be hung with metal brackets. To protect the objects from damage caused by pressure and gravity, it is necessary to place sponge between the hanger and fossil. The fossils are lifted by metal brackets nailed to the wall along the level of the shelf so that it looks like it is the shelf which is supporting the objects.
Large-scale Wall Drawing
Unlike conventional shows, this exhibition presents Mary’s latest work Wild Honey, the large-scale wall drawing, which was produced during the exhibition as a site-specific installation rather than brought into the gallery. I was luck to have participated with the production of this abstract work. The drawing is made of graphite applied with many layers and burnished with metal spoons or other tools. Then the artist scratched the wall with a scribing tool to create geometric lines. Working with Mary, her assistants and I were dressed in blue working suits and our faces were covered with carbon dust. At the end of each day, Mary took a photo of the working group and kept a journal for the production. It is interesting that a group of women produced the drawing because women were involved in the mining industry in the past. On the adjacent wall we hung Sapling which contains 5 steel pieces found in the former colliery. They are painted in bright colours red, green, and blue, which references the typical colours of industrial machinery. These colours are reflected in the shiny surface of the graphite wall.
Sketches and Small DrawingsÂ
On the opposite side of the room to Wild Honey, Helen decided to hang a selection of Mary’s sketches. It seems that the curator wants to display these two artworks facing and echoing each other to represent Mary’s focus on how industry meets nature. The selection is called Colliery Pigeons which is a series of sketches Mary drew during her residency in the colliery. The sketches represented what she had explored in the landscape of the colliery which includes the nature and engineering materials. Her observations express the movement of the birds. In her sketches, some of the pigeons were flying and some of them were perching on the branches. The selection also includes sketches of helicopters and mining machinery. The organisation of these sketches is very interesting. They are arranged in random instead of being in order one after the other. The curator seems to create a sense of landscape that the helicopters and birds are flying in the background to make the audiences feel like they are looking from a distance and facing the colliery. The rest of the space in the gallery was occupied by Mary’s other small graphite drawings. Instead of gathering in the same area, they are scattered around the gallery. The idea is to enable the audience to look at different objects when they walk around the gallery and then refer to Mary’s abstract drawings and see how different works are connected with each other.
Reading Resources
In front of the gallery reception desk, there is a small seating area for audiences to sit down and watch a film about Mary’s experiences and thoughts about the exhibition. There are also some reading resources for the audience to read and achieve further understanding of what the exhibition is trying to convey. As I witnessed during my invigilation of the gallery, many audiences are interested in watching the film.
The theme that Wild Honey explores includes many aspects of the mining industry in the Astley Green Colliery. The organisation of the exhibition makes it much easier for audience to clearly see the connection between each work in the visual way and the significant way.