Author: Julie Chamberlain

I'm a freelance journalist and PR writer living, writing and working in Coventry. One of my interests is art, and this is my blog about the art world of Coventry, Warwickshire and beyond - and occasionally the other good things in life. Follow me on Twitter @JulieinCov

Happy housing exhibition shows inspiring vision for post-war homes

Homes that would just create happiness – it sounds a great idea and one that people could relate to today, when for many a permanent home is just a dream.

But the happy homes plan was one that was on the drawing board back in 1945 in Bilston, and there’s still just time to see an exhibition telling the story of this wonderful and fascinating plan.

Bilston’s Happy Housing: Otto Neurath’s Vision for Post-War Modern Living is on at Bilston Craft Gallery until May 2 and tells the unlikely story of how someone from the Vienna Circle and a leading sociologist and urban planner ended up in the Black Country.

Neurath was invited by the council in 1945 to be a consultant on plans to come up with ideas to replace the slum housing endured by many of the local people, with the area having the reputation as the slum capital of England. What was envisaged were state-of-the-art modern homes based on ones built in Vienna in the 1920s.

Neurath was born in 1882, and had experienced a successful career in Europe, then fled during the Second World War after the death of his second wife, and fears for his life. He got married again, to Marie Reidemeister who he had formerly worked with, and after a period of internment on the Isle of Man they set up the Isotype Institute in Oxford together, creating the sort of informative diagrams now so loved by newspapers and news websites seeking pictorial ways to represent information.

However they were so taken with the Bilston project that they planned to move there from Oxford. Neurath visited the town and talked to people about their new planned homes, and wrote policies which influenced the designs. People should be mixed up to avoid the creation of ghettoes, and the needs of children and the elderly should not be ignored were two of them.

Then – Neurath died suddenly and unexpectedly on December 22, 1945; a poignant letter written on December 19 and illustrated with an elephant is exhibited, mentioning no signs of ill health.

Marie used the Isotype plan to illustrate her husband’s plans for the town, and in a letter to Bilston’s town clerk said he husband’s hope had been to “provide maximum happiness for the people of your town”.

There were of course many others also involved in the plans; Professor Sir Charles Reilly had also been engaged by the council, and favoured homes around large greens, with many community facilities. He died in early 1948 with the work still unfinished. Ella Briggs, another Viennese émigrée who had worked with Neurath, had already designed some homes before the two men became involved, and it may be the final results were based on her work. The uneven land was apparently filled in partly with bricks from bombed sites in Birmingham and Coventry.

The exhibition includes lots of information on the plans for what became the Stowlawn Estate, with drawings and the Isotypes. There are pictures of what had been there before, and plans for the homes, with inside bathrooms, some with upstairs balconies, and different sized properties to cater for single people and families. Drawings show the large open spaces around the estate.

There are also books of memories and photos, mostly positive, from people who were the first to move into Stowlawn. A related part of the exhibition shows the designs of the time for items which would fill these happy homes, with stylish cutlery, ceramics, furniture, fabrics, radios and other technology to represent the ‘new look’ of the mid century style.

Nearby, Stowlawn estate still exists and the exhibition tells you which is the only street where the green space remains as planned – the others have all been infilled with buildings. You can drive round and see how the buildings stand out as different, more European than most.

It’s a fascinating exhibition at an ideal which should still be grasped today.

Poignant performance for works of talented composers killed in Gallipoli

A First World War commemoration event with an interesting approach is taking place in Warwickshire this week. It will remember the artistic creation of two people who died in the war, and what might have been had they survived.

A press release from the Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum explained that as part of the Gallipoli Music Memorial 2015, the gallery is hosting a free dance performance in the Royal Pump Rooms on Wednesday, 29 April from 6-7pm.

The London Central School of Ballet will perform The Comic Spirit, a short ballet by the Leamington-born pianist, organist, critic and composer William Denis Browne. This will be the first public performance of the ballet, which Browne wrote in 1912.

There will also be the first solo dance setting of Frederick ‘Cleg’ Kelly’s Elegy for Strings: in memoriam Rupert Brooke. An introduction to the performances will be given by Nick Peacey, William Denis Browne’s great-nephew.

Senior Curator Vicki Slade said: “William Denis Browne had a promising career as a composer before the First World War broke out. 100 years after his death at Gallipoli, it is fitting that the first ever performance of his only ballet should be given in his home town.”

This event is free, though places are limited. They must be booked by phoning Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum on 01926 742700, or calling in beforehand.

This event runs in conjunction with Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum’s exhibition A Leamington Musical Meteor: The Life of William Denis Browne (1888-1915) which runs until Sunday, 10 May. The exhibition, which was organised by Nick Peacey for the Gallipoli Music Memorial 2015 project, brings together family archive material alongside compositions by Browne, to celebrate his career.

Browne was born in Leamington on 3 November 1888 and grew up at Lynnwood, a large house on Lillington Road. He attended Greyfriars Preparatory School in the town and Rugby School, before attaining classical scholarship to study at Clare College, Cambridge.

It was there that his talents developed as a performer and composer. After university he was building a successful musical career, with performances at 10 Downing Street and Westminster Cathedral, when the First World War intervened. Browne was killed fighting at Gallipoli on 4 June 1915, aged just 26.

*The Gallipoli Music Memorial 2015 is a unique project looking at the vastness of the First World War through one battle. It will tell the stories of nine men who fought at Gallipoli and will set their wartime experiences against their peacetime lives. All nine men pursued artistic careers, and although they fought for different causes, they were united by their experiences of the battle. The Gallipoli Music Memorial 2015 project is funded by the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Faye Claridge’s Kern Baby is striking sight at Compton Verney this year

A haunting vision greets visitors to Compton Verney art gallery in South Warwickshire all this year.

Kern Baby is the creation of Warwickshire-based artist Faye Claridge. She stands five metres tall, wears a long white gown – and has just wheat for her hands and head. The lack of a face as you approach and realize there is none there is the most striking thing.

The installation is backed up by an exhibition in the café area at the gallery, which explains where she comes from. Faye has had a residency at Library of Birmingham where she was working on the Sir Benjamin Stone photograph collection. Stone was a former Birmingham MP and Mayor of Sutton Coldfield who also travelled widely in the UK to photograph important historical places, festivals and pageants to record them for future generations in the late 1800s and early 1900s.Thousands of his prints are at the V&A and in Birmingham.

Faye said growing up with her Morris dancer father and folk singer mother she can remember a book of Stone’s photographs in the house as they gained a temporary popularity in the 1970s. She said: “To me they are very much about personal identity. Painting was felt to be in decline and photography was the new way of capturing something that was going to be lost.”

One of Stone’s photographs was of a Kern Baby, or corn dolly, from a festival called The Harvest Home in Northumberland in 1901. The community celebrated the wheat harvest by using the last gathered crop to create a human shape dressed in good clothes, and called it the Kern Baby. It was then kept over winter, then buried the next year: “It was buried in the first ploughing and planting in the new ground so the spirits of harvest went back in so she would grow again. I decided it should be revived.”

The work also chimes with the large British Folk Art collection at Compton Verney, and with the “Britishness” theme of the first two other new exhibitions of the year, Canaletto: Celebrating Britain, and The Non-Conformists, photographs by Martin Parr of Hebden Bridge in the 1970s.

The tall Kern Baby can be seen from the distance as you approach the gallery, and from a distance looks like she’s just escaped the building. She’s striking and unsettling, and worth circling to see from all angles and against different backdrops, some including the house and others just the trees and lake.

The structure is Faye’s biggest work to date, and involves more than 30 metres of theatre-grade polyester in the dress, which she sewed herself “on my ancient sewing machine”, and later added an underskirt as the structure underneath could be seen too easily. There is a yellow sash to reference the oilseed rape so prevalent these days.

The metal and water tank ballast which holds her in place was made with the help of a structural engineer and theatre design company, and she took four people six hours to put in place. It is hoped she will withstand the weather between now and December, though she will weather a bit and some wheat might be replaced.

Ironically, the Kern Doll was not conceived as the main part of the exhibition.

In the exhibition, Benjamin Stone’s photo The Harvest Home, Kern Baby, from 1901 is shown, a three foot white-clad figure in a plant bed, and Faye’s is a much bigger version of it. There is also an image of children holding hands around a huge pile of wood, entitled Northumberland Baal Fires: St John’s Eve, the prepared faggots, in what looks like a very strange scene from 1903.

Faye said: “I decided it would be fun to make a great prop to produce a new photo and to create a sculpture, but it was incredibly naïve but it got commissioned. I’ve done nothing on this scale before.”

She has though involved local schoolchildren from Welcombe Hills School and Hampton Lucy C of E primary to make her own version of the photo, with the uniform-clad youngsters solemnly surrounding the Kern Baby on a cold February day at Compton Verney. The photo was taken after working with them so they weren’t spooked by it.

She said: “My children (aged three and five) saw it when it was going dark and it was a full moon and she did look pretty ethereal.”

They gripped her hands tight, asked why she didn’t have a face and turned down an offer to touch!

Other photographs of Faye’s in the exhibition come under the title of A Child for Sacrifice, again inspired by Stone and photographs he took of youngsters in the Warwick pageant, and of the Wroth Silver ceremony. These depict youngsters from Marton, in Warwickshire, posing for her camera. Faye received a Heritage Lottery Fund grant to work with Marton’s Museum of Country Bygones to use some off their items to recreate pictures by Benjamin Stone.

These are the ones, when I’m trying to find the right word, Faye suggests are “edgy”, though parents were always on hand, and the children photographed picked their costumes. It is their confidence in strange garb and poses which is quite unsettling.

In one, a girl sits on a throne in a cornfield, corn sceptre and orb in hand, and in some she has lace obscuring her face. A boy becomes a scarecrow with a blacked-up face, and another boy in Plough’s Demon has some anonymous arms reaching round him. Another very young boy in a field is Faye’s own son.

The Kern Baby is immediately impressive and striking in the landscape but the Stone photos, the stories behind them and Faye’s own photographs inside are also intriguing and throw out questions about traditions from the past and how we relate to them.

* Next year Kern Baby will get a new dress and go on show at Birmingham Library – changing her setting from rural to urban, and where visitors will be able to glide past her on escalators. Three showcases about Faye’s residency in the library are on show at the moment.

Coventry graduates among winners in New Art West Midlands 2015

New Art West Midlands is in its third year and getting your work into it is a prestigious draw for recent art graduates – last year 100,000 people are said to have visited the exhibition across three galleries.

This year there are four involved – the Herbert in Coventry, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the Barber Institute of Fine Art, showing the work of 30 people in total. All have graduates in fine art from one of the West Midlands art schools in the past three years, with successful works chosen by artists John Newling and Bedwyr Williams, and art historian Amna Malik.

There are four Coventry University graduates showing in the exhibition, and I spoke to them at the opening in Birmingham.

BA in Fine Art graduate Jennifer Shufflebotham’s work (top) had already been recognised before she was also selected for New Art West Midlands. She was offered a residency at the Pod in Coventry after her degree show last summer.

At the Birmingham gallery she I showing two paintings inspired by a box of slides she found in her grandparents’ attic in Burton on Trent about four years ago, showing family holidays in the 1960s, when photography was more of an effort than today when people can take pictures by taking their phone out.

She said: “I’d never come across them before and I was really interested in the balance of analogue photography and the easy access to photography and Instagram that we have today.”

She has re-layered them to create paintings, with blurred and slightly strange images produced. Foremark Reservoir II is particularly interesting, with one person reduced to a dark shape which could be deliberately cloaked.

Michael Carr’s work includes Instructions Not Included, a screen print of the instructions for looking after a vinyl disc, and A Message To You Rudy (above), a digital ink work showing Lynval Golding from the Specials depicted on a street map of Coventry. If you pick up the exhibition leaflet you get your own copy of this.

Michael came into the world at the Walsgrave Hospital in Coventry and said music of the Specials had been “a big influence on my life”, and puts the work in the context of “a vision of psycho-geography and how music can motivate and change lives and people”.

He started this work with an illustration of Lady Godiva on a map: “The Specials and Lady Godiva testify to the strength of the city. A lot of people speak badly about Coventry but if you look at the invention of cars, sewing machines, watches and all its industry there’s a lot of strength there.”

Michael has just finished an MA in Contemporary Art Practice but his undergraduate degree was in graphic design, and he hopes to get a studio and have some links to the university still. I’d already seen his work at a couple of exhibitions in Coventry, showing he’s getting out there already, and with his energy and enthusiasm he’s sure to go places.

Reece Kennedy’s work was inspired by talking to his Coventry University tutors about art education, studying, and the student’s audience. He chose to capture the paradigm of the art fair by creating an installation of a room from the Frieze art show entitled Greatness Engine Future Prospectus (above). Reece graduated with a BA in Fine Art and is running his own printing business in Birmingham.

Other works on show at Birmingham Art Gallery & Museum included Emily Sparkes’s self-portrait in a colourful costume, Ode to Christian Joy (above), and she also has some paintings on show at the Herbert of Pearly Queens, relating to cross dressing and gender roles. They are interesting and keep the attention. James Turner’s reworking of paintings from the gallery’s collection sees beams of light coming from the painted women’s eyes, distorting how they are viewed and turning them into light box works.

At the Herbert in Coventry, Andrea Hannon is showing her installation works. Housekeeper is a lightshade with things hanging from it, and Territory Formula features flowered wallpaper and cut outs of women from magazines. Puppeteer includes more cut outs, an old framed mirror, and little character cut-outs, including a Victorian woman.

Coventry born and bred, Andrea has recently completed a Fine Art PhD at Coventry University. She used to do large paintings, but has now moved into multi-media installation and collage works.

She said: “It was during the masters I became interesting in structures of knowledge and how we become defined as one thing or another.”

She uses a lot of magazine and encyclopaedia images, and this set of work is based on the idea of what it means to be the ideal woman, as seen through the media, being good at cooking and housekeeping. Andrea has now moved to live near Stratford, and is teaching at the college there and working with some other former Coventry University students.

Also at the Herbert are varied works including Megan Sheridan’s documentary-style photographs depicting British people on a traditional seaside holiday (above), or having lunch on the grass in Birmingham’s St Philip’s Square. There’s also an intriguing video from Jade Blackstock entitled In, In, In (below), in which she wears white and paints her skin white and is then sprayed with white liquid foam, an unpleasant claustrophobic experience which aims to turn ‘white’ from an adjective to an actual object.

I’ve visited two of the galleries and at first sight haven’t been as impressed overall with the selection as last year. Maybe that’s because there’s nothing as stand-out impressive as Lucy Hutchinson’s masks and wallpaper, James Birkin’s paintings, or the transformative sculptures of Sikander Pervez, who is currently exhibiting at the New Art Gallery, Walsall, after being selected for a solo show.

But only time will tell whose work from the 2015 exhibition we will be seeing more of on a larger stage.

*New Art West Midlands is on at Wolverhampton until April 26, both the Birmingham galleries until May 17 and the Herbert until May 31.

Designer of Coventry post-war icons is featured in exhibition – discovered by chance in Leeds

So, my first ever visit to Leeds, for a job, but of course I had to get there early so I could visit the city art gallery.

And just as predictably for me when trying to explore new places, the upper galleries were closed for work, but a wander into the attached Henry Moore Institute produced a surprising and enjoyable find. An exhibition about the work of Dorothy Annan and Trevor Tennant whose work I had seen repeatedly over the last twenty-plus years without ever knowing it.

Everyone who’s ever stopped to look at the Godiva Clock in Broadgate will have seen Tennant’s work in the Godiva figure which rides out every hour, and the Peeping Tom which watches her. There is a lovely photo of a long-lost Broadgate with the Godiva statue facing the clock and people sitting on grass to watch it being unveiled.

If you turn the corner to Broadgate House, those are also his carved figures displayed on it. Entitled People of Coventry they are supposed to represent people in a timeless feeling of continuity, an important aspect to the post-war rebuilding of the city. Broadgate House was a key part of Donald Gibson’s plan for the rebuilding of the city centre, and included in the exhibition is some correspondence between architect and sculptor. There’s also a great picture of Tennant working on the relief figures on a blitzed site in London’s Regent Park.

He also created the Levelling Stone of the Phoenix which now resides in Coventry, and a brick carving of a falcon which is described as being on the side of a Coventry junior school – though it didn’t say which one.

A fascinating series of photos also show Tennant giving a sculpture demonstration at Coventry Training College in 1947, creating a model of a woman sitter’s head in front of a live audience, seemingly all male, who are also shown peering closely at the finished work.

Trevor Tennant and Dorothy Annan were members of Artists International Association (AIA), a left-wing group established in 1932 whose aim was “Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development’. They were based in Leamington during the Second World War where they were also members of the Artists and Designers Group and worked on public commissions, influenced by their membership of AIA.

Dorothy Annan’s post-war work included a mosaic entitled The Good Earth for the Rugby Road Junior School in Leamington, an oil on brick mural design produced by the Artists and Designers Group, and showing a combination of industrial and pastoral scenes.

There are also images of her designs for the Neptune Tea Bar and another room at the Finham Park Hostel in Coventry in 1942.

This exhibition also covers the pair’s commissions in London and other parts of the country. Their Dorothy Annan and Trevor Tennant archive joined the Henry Moore Institute Archive of Sculptors’ Papers in 2012, donated by their family. This exhibition brings together photographs, sketchbooks and exhibition catalogues to give a chronological account of their practices and show the role of art in British society post-war. It’s on until March 1 in the Upper Sculpture Study Gallery, and I was glad to have found it.

* I also visited Yorkshire Sculpture Park, though with a bit of a mist about it possibly wasn’t the best day for it. And luckily I had the wellies in the car as it was pretty muddy and slippy and I was mindful of a friend who fell and ended up with a broken arm after a visit! The whole site was too big for me to do it justice in the time I had, but I’d like to return another time. Enjoyed seeing several large Henry Moore sculptures in the landscape, plus Anthony Caro’s large Promenade row of sculptures, Ai Weiwei’s Iron Tree, which was outside the Chapel and Julian Opie’s Galloping Horse lightbox work racing through the gloom.

Inside the chapel was also Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson’s Song for Coal, an “immersive audio visual work” created to mark the 30 year anniversary of the miners’ strike. It’s pretty impressive as music and visuals combine to form a stained glass window appearance of miners and their lives on the chapel wall.

An island on the lake also caught my eye – loads of herons perched on nests and flying around, closer than I’ve ever seen them, and near enough to hear their flapping wings. It seems a great place to combine the man-made and the natural in a day out.

Cardboard ‘canvases’ are a feature of Terry Williams show at Lewis Gallery

An unusual material forms the basis for a new set of paintings by Coventry-based Terry Williams.

Entitled An Old Bird Still Sings, the exhibition includes a number of works painted on what appears to be unfolded cardboard boxes.

Terry said he started off experimentally with the works, then decided they were good enough to keep and exhibit – but then of course began the problems with keeping them safe and in a condition to be displayed on the wall.

They were created at the Artspace Artists Studios in Lower Holyhead Road in Coventry city centre where he is the longest-lasting studio holder. He graduated from Coventry University’s Fine Art degree in the 1980s.

The cardboard-based works in question have an American feel to them – something that seems to be occurring a lot in Coventry and Warwickshire exhibitions recently. Using photographs from various sources, Terry has painted people at leisure, enjoying the sun. The rippling cardboard as the basis for some adds a depth of texture which works well with the ideas of sand and sea. Terry said they were part of a set where he wanted to capture people “in the midst of life”.

Some people are in rows of deckchairs on the beach, with plenty of sunglasses and overflowing swim suits on show, and one shows a cheerful couple in the sea, the man improbably dangling a fish he looks very pleased to have, and it’s called appropriately, Proud. A fat man from one of the pictures is shown in more than one image, including a facial close up, and Terry said he keeps returning to him for more works. A couple in a car, called To The Beach, have a stylish 50s look to them. Sunset shows children frolicking on the beach

Terry’s main interests are figurative, and these works are skilled and show an interest in capturing people at rest but in situations which when put in close focus do appear strange and rather unrelaxed.

The exhibition also includes a set of works which have been on show before at the Pluspace Gallery in Coventry in 2012. There’s Cadet with Flag, then the same young man with Roses, Poppies and Brown Background.

Other works are more abstract, representing his other favoured style, lots with heavy impasto. Crazy Golf Mark One is a strange piece with what look like rocky islands bursting out of the sea with little golf flags on them. Fecundity Mark One, and Two, are two small abstracts which work well.

The title, An Old Bird Still Sings, comes from one particular work, which features a fairly abstract pile of computer hardware – but at the opening Terry said rather dryly that people had decided to interpret it as being rather a more personal title.

The exhibition fills the Lewis Gallery at Rugby School in Rugby, and the exhibition is on this week, 2-5pm.

Nevinson war art shows fascinating creations of a rebel which enraged censors

If, like me, you’ve stayed clear of most things to do with commemorating the start of the First World War, you might like to change your mind where a current exhibition is concerned.

There’s only three more weeks left to see Rebel Visions, The War Art of CRW Nevinson at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham. Complementing it though very different is German Expressionist Prints from the Barber Collection, another fine set of works which were exhibited and held up to derision by the Nazis in the 1930s, frightened of their brutal honesty and power.

The Nevinson exhibition tells his story, from being alienated as pretty much the only British Futurist on the outbreak of war, to not being able to fight on health grounds to subsequently serving as a driver and caring for injured soldiers, experiences which soon put him off the futurists’ glorification of war. He returned to France to create art officially though as this exhibition explains, some of his works did not meet with full approval; an oil painting entitled A Group of Soldiers was not thought to be heroic enough, and other works were censored.

Another work was partly inspired by his work in France, finding a barn full of injured soldiers who had not been treated for three weeks; The Doctor shows an injured man being treated next to one already dead beside him.

The works combine futurist and cubist techniques; there are sharp angles and limbs, pointed weapons and a geometric neatness to images of loss, horror and futility. A couple of gentle landscapes appear too, a contrast to The Road From Arras to Bapaume, showing the road disappearing into the distance through empty fields, a few walkers and vehicles on it.

Those who profiteered from war were a target for Nevinson, and he painted a man sitting contemplatively in his living room, the photo of a soldier behind him; it’s called He Gained a Fortune But He Gave A Son. In another, War Profiteers, artificial lights turn the faces of women made rich by war a deathly pale colour. Women are also pictured working for the war effort at home.

The painting The Unending Cult of Human Sacrifice is the stand-out work for me, combining images of war with religious iconography, planes and modern war technology, painted in the early 1930s and depicting his fear that another war was coming which would destroy Europe.

It’s a powerful exhibition of works from an artist who was clearly an interesting and complex person.

In another gallery, a small display of German expressionist prints from the Barber’s collection includes works by Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Egon Schiele. Depicting war, emotion, loss and Jesus they were all considered un-German in the 1930s and exhibited in a bid to create nationalist fervour against them.

Happily for us they survived as a sobering reminder of what should never be allowed to happen again.

*The CWR Nevinson exhibition is on until January 25.

Coventry and Warwickshire’s art world in 2014 – a quick look back

A tour with Jeremy Deller, an evening with a KLF star, a camp parade, champagne on the terrace – and an embarrassing slip into an art work. Some of my memories of 2014.

As most galleries stay closed today, it’s time to look back at some of the highlights of the last year in the local art world – or my take on them anyway.

I can’t believe it’s nearly a year since I set out on a horrible January night to see George Wagstaffe and Michala Gyetvai’s exhibition at the Michael Heseltine Gallery in Middleton Cheney, near Banbury.

Their combination of sculpture and textiles work well together and it was lovely to see how they’ve inspired and revitalised each other’s art careers.

I ran into them several more times during the year too, at Ragley Hall where artist Dawn Harris had a residency which produced some interesting exhibitions and some fun openings, and where Michala was one of several artists working from studios in the stable block.

Champagne on the terrace outside the Hall in the sun before a tour of the first (and now only) Open exhibition was particularly memorable. It’s a shame that with a year’s worth of events planned Dawn and the other artists were asked to leave a few weeks ago – I hope they find somewhere else soon, but I fear it won’t be so attractive.

As openings go, the best had to be Qasim Riza Shaheen’s exhibition The Last Known Post at the mac in Birmingham. Vodka and orange, live Sufi music, a highly glamorous and camp parade – what’s not to enjoy!

Walking art featured strongly at the start of the year, with exhibitions of various artists’ work at the Mead, the mac in Birmingham and a Richard Long exhibition at The New Art Gallery, Walsall. Long held an In Conversation in Walsall which showed his non-nonsense nature, and the thought of his long walks, carrying everything he needs with him, was very impressive. The New Art Gallery also held an exhibition dedicated to the history of its Garman Ryan Collection and it was great to see the influence of two women on Midlands art.

Nuneaton’s Museum & Art Gallery continued to offer up some little gems of exhibitions in its own quiet way. At the start of the year I enjoyed Shaun Morris’s exhibition of paintings mostly of the underneath of the M6, and later in the year explored the varied world of illustration and some expansive works by Paul Newman.

Romanian-born Coventry University graduate Mircea Teleaga exhibited his moody paintings influenced by his home country at the Lewis Gallery in Rugby School, an attractive gallery which often has interesting exhibitions but is unfortunately only open weekday afternoons.

Other Coventry University graduates were chosen to have their work exhibited as part of New Art West Midlands, and I’m sure we will be seeing a lot more of Lucy Hutchinson’s work in future. Her striking golden wallpaper telling stories of family across the world was a highlight of the show at the Birmingham Art Gallery and Museum.

At Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, Professor David Carpanini brought Welsh valley life into focus in gritty paintings. The Compton Verney the season opened with Moore Rodin, including some striking large works in the grounds which made a great impression, and continued with the Folk Art exhibition which moved up from London later in the year.

At Rugby Art Gallery & Museum the annual show of the Rugby Collection was enlivened with a focus on conservation work, and the end of the year show It’s A Wrap looked at the tradition of wrapping in Japan, furoshiki.

In March, I saw Bill Drummond begin his 12-year world tour at Eastside Projects in Birmingham, which was a fun and predictably wacky occasion – let’s hope we’re both back there for the planned end of it in 2025.

At the Mead, a personal highlight was being shown around the All That is Solid Melts Into Air exhibition by its creator Jeremy Deller, while I interviewed him, then also hearing him talk about it at the Herbert, before being bussed back for the official opening. Very entertaining and interesting.

At the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, the interactive exhibition Is This A Dagger? Was a good idea for an exhibition, and a nice excuse to visit the theatre again. And at Packwood House in the summer, Hilary Jack created some great installations to enhance a tour of the lovely grounds.

Coventry Artspace launched a programme of exhibitions looking at Coventry in the former Coventry Blaze shop in the City Arcade in the autumn, and at one event there I stepped back to clap a speech and ingnominously stepped back into Kathryn Hawkins’s installation, river …. splashing water all up the wall. Sorry about that (again).

There were closures too; the Gallery Upstairs in Henley-in-Arden, run by brother and sister Carey and Paul Moon, and previously owned by their parents, closed with a final exhibition in May and the beautiful building was put up for sale.

In Coventry, a group of artists calling themselves Through the Wall Projects, including another New Art West Midlands artist James Birkin, who paints great paintings of mostly derelict buildings, set up shop in one of Coventry’s fairly derelict areas in Bishop Street. Matthew Macaulay of Pluspace got involved to hold a couple more exhibitions there, but unfortunately the threat of business rates saw them having to move out.

The Lanchester Gallery Projects project ended at the building in The Hub after a varied and often challenging series of exhibitions but the university has continued to run it as a gallery, ending the year with a bright exhibition of paintings by John Devane including some influenced by American movies. The American influence was also strong in the closing exhibition of the year at the White Room in Leamington, in which Horace Panter – day job: bassist with the Specials – showed is growing catalogue of paintings.

So that’s it for 2014 – an interesting, if not stand out year. Here’s looking forward to more in 2015 – preview in the Coventry Telegraph, January 2.

The Shed – or Coventry Centre for Contemporary Art – has a new temporary home

The best travelled shed in the Midlands is back in one piece for another exhibition – though it was nearly claimed by Father Christmas!

The shed, officially known as the Coventry Centre for Contemporary Art, was originally used in a Bob and Roberta Smith installation at the Mead Gallery at the University of Warwick in 2009, and was then left for local artists to use. Coventry-based Martin Green and Lorsen Camps used it to exhibit with Joanna Rucklidge in Earlsdon, and the three reunited for an exhibition in the shed, rebuilt at The Herbert in Coventry, this summer.

It has now passed on to the Peapod Collective, based at the Pod in Lamb Street in Coventry, and has landed, in Tardis-type style, at Fargo in Far Gosford Street. However Fargo traders thought it could have a festive use as Santa’s grotto, but it was soon retrieved for its proper purpose.

Exhibiting in it are Eve Hyde-Davis, who graduated from Coventry University this summer, and sound artist HKid.

Eve is also one of three artists using studio space at the Pod which is made available to recent graduates of Coventry University’s Fine Arts degree course. Her work on show at Fargo was also in her degree show in the summer, but there it was hung up high, with other pieces around it, and at Fargo it fills the small shed space, and you just have space to walk around it. The work consists of several large sheets of paper, painted black and with different angular shapes cut out of them.

At a low-key opening Eve said they were typical of her work, “sterile, geometric and lacking in emotion”, which might partly fit in with her interest in brutalist architecture.

“This one was in the bigger show but it was in a much bigger space. It’s really interesting here, it’s got a different feel,” she added.

Eve will be working in studios at the Pod this year, alongside Lauren Heywood and also Jennifer Shufflebotham, who has been selected for the New Art West Midlands 2015 exhibition.

*Eve and HKid’s exhibition at Fargo continues until the end of January, and will be open Thursdays and Fridays from 5-6.30pm, and weekends 2-4pm.

Exhibitions are a delight of an escape from festive shopping

If you’re Christmas shopping in Birmingham and need something more stimulating to get you through the day, there are a few exhibitions which offer a bit of a respite. Well, they worked for me anyway.

At the Ikon gallery, Imran Qureshi’s exhibition is a mixture of his miniature paintings and site-specific installations made for the gallery.

Qureshi is known for using the disciplined miniature painting style of his native Pakistan in the Mughal courts of the sixteenth century and recreating it for the modern day. The miniatures look lovely, all delicate colours and shiny gold, but close up there’s more to see.

After watching on TV the aftermath of a terrorist attack on a marketplace in Lahore in 2010 Qureshi saw the blood-splattered surfaces, and felt a colour in his studio matched it. That red seeps into some of the miniatures, in splodges but also in delicate flower drawings or other patterns, overlaying the original image. In other miniatures, missiles are part of, and also not part of, what is drawn there.

There’s also red patterns across the floor, and on two huge gold ovals made from acrylic and gold leaf, called They Shimmer Still.

The image that has been most recreated from this exhibition in its favourable national reviews is the huge room full of thousands of sheets of crumpled paper. It’s called And They Still Seek The Traces of Blood, and is amazing in size and design.

The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery as usual has several exhibitions on show. True to Life? New Photography from the Middle East is interesting and thought-provoking, especially in its works related to depictions of women and gender issues.

Static: Still Life Reconsidered is easy to overlook in the Waterhall gallery, and is quietly attractive, with lots of detailed and skilled works. There are also some larger more striking works by Patrick Caulfield, and for me William Nicholson’s work also stood out.

The West Midlands Open in the Gas Hall is large and varied in type of work and quality. Shaun Morris’s large and dramatic painting stood out for me. It was inspired by the land under the motorway around West Bromwich, and painted in the year of Margaret Thatcher’s death. The caption says Morris was struck by how the landscape around there had changed after she came to power, moving from manufacturing to distribution centres.

Also of interest were works by Bethany Kane. Originally from Rugby, she studied at City College Coventry, then the University of Derby. Her photographs are part of a Hidden Hunger project which looks at food poverty in the UK today. Foleshill Baptist church in Coventry and the Chace Hostel feature in this exhibition, both lacking people but with facilities provided to hopefully feed the needy. They are stark and lack warmth, but provide the sort of help no one ever wants to need.

Other paintings might be more cheery, but as a touch of reality in the run up to Christmas both Shaun Morris and Bethany Kane’s works spoke volumes.

Private View II

A look at the art world of Coventry, Warwickshire and beyond by Julie Chamberlain