ETCH the home for North East Creatives have asked us to help spread the word about these forthcoming dates,. They advise there’s a great line up planned and that ETCH has now grown to a community of over 800 and invite you to come along and expand your network and gain some business support. They look forward to seeing you all soon!!
We try to share exhibitions of many different types in the Art Gallery at Darlington Library, open Monday to Saturday with free entry during standard Darlington Library opening hours. The latest exhibition is by 77 year old artist Roger Birchall, and it was great to see so many people enjoying its opening with Roger on the evening of Friday 27th September 2024, and to read positive comments from those who’ve made them to date,.
Roger selected two works from Darlington Borough Art Collection for display alongside his exhibition, Carnival | Art UK and Well | Art UK, the latter gifted by the Contemporary Arts Society. We offer artists and groups mounting new exhibitions in the Art Gallery at Darlington Library the opportunity to select works for display from Darlington Borough Art Collection, in a small section of the Art Gallery that’s reserved for this purpose.
A selection of visitor comments on Roger’s exhibition, which contains includes a small selection of paintings and prints for for sale, to date is shown below, and it would be great to read yours on the exhibition, or on other aspects of the visual arts here in Darlington, if you pop into Darlington Library during standard opening hours.
TeesDance & Darlington Hippodrome are looking for dancers aged 13 – 19, or up to 25 with disabilities, who want to embark on an 8-month development programme to become young choreographers!
Apply by the 13 October via TeesDance website: https://teesdance.org.uk/move-up
To find out more about the programme, watch the full video from the last programme funded by Creative Darlington in 2022 https://youtu.be/CY4X66iczok
Repurposed, Recycled, Revealed, the new exhibition by Helen Winthorpe Kendrick will open at Darlington Library Art Gallery on Saturday 9th November and close on Thursday 19th December 2024. The Art Gallery at Darlington Library is open Monday to Saturday, during standard Darlington Library opening hours.
Helen has shared several exhibitions of her work in Darlington Library previously, and there’s an opportunity to meet the artist and ask questions about their practice in the Art Gallery at Darlington Library, from 1pm to 3pm on Saturday 9 November 2024. Each of Helen’s previous exhibitions in Darlington has explored different themes, and with Repurposed, Recycled, Revealed. she advises:
There is growing emphasis in todays’ society to reduce waste and to recycle wherever possible. There is a huge amount of energy required to produce fabrics and sadly, a huge quantity of clothing goes into waste. As a textile artist, I am aware of the great attraction to buy beautiful fabrics and interesting threads with which to work. As a result, I have a room stuffed with threads and fabric that I have not yet used along with textiles from many sources, and short lengths of thread that may one day become useful. In this exhibition my aim is to use what I have, to revitalise and finish projects from the cupboard, to give fabrics another purpose and to turn my stash into something useful. As William Morris said: ‘If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’
We welcome your thoughts on exhibitions in the Art Gallery at Darlington Library, where local artist, Roger Birchall, exhibition of paintings is on display until Thursday 7th November 2024.
Get ready to bring your creativity to life at the Wey Aye Lego Man 2025 Exhibition! Ngage NE Ltd are on the hunt for artists like you to join this extraordinary event, kicking off on Friday, 2nd May at the John Marley Centre in Newcastle.
This year, Ngage NE Ltd mixing things up! Alongside a stunning display of Lego-themed photography by neurodivergent artists, Ngage NE Ltd are inviting all artists across the UK to take part. Sign up, and they’ll send you a 9cm x 6cm Lego man statue to transform into a unique piece of art. Paint it, sculpt it, bedazzle it—let your imagination run wild!
How to Join the Fun:
This is your opportunity to showcase your creativity, connect with an inspiring community, and help make the Wey Aye Lego Man 2025 an unforgettable art event. Every customised Lego statue in the exhibition will be auctioned off, with all proceeds supporting projects for neurodivergent people in Newcastle and the surrounding region.
Don’t miss out on this creative adventure—sign up today and let’s make art together!
P.S. Don’t forget to check out the Wey Aye Lego Man Digital Gallery to explore all the Lego-themed portraits from the 2023 and 2024 exhibitions.
Middlesbrough Art Week returns from 28 September – 5 October 2024 with an eight-day packed programme of exhibitions, events and new commissions filling the streets in Middlesbrough town centre. Mark your Calendars and visit here to see the full festival programme.
This fantastic festival showcases work by both established and upcoming artists, from near and far. Middlesbrough Art Week 2024 includes works by international artists Francis Alÿs, Kyriaki Goni and Karrabing Film Collective; new commissions by Natasha Thembiso Ruwona and Alia Gargum; performances by Amy Dover, Olana Light and a mass participation project called Uproot Collective. This year Middlesbrough Art Week been working with community leaders, migrant support networks and schools across the Tees Valley to form Uproot Collective. Uproot is this year’s festival hub at Pineapple Black.
Look out for artist talks by acclaimed artist and writer Jace Clayton, civil rights activist and author Gracie Mae Bradley. Alongside seed harvesting drop in sessions where you can learn about wildflower seed harvesting and have a go at gathering some of your own seeds.
Within the festival Summat for the Bairns offers fun FREE creative and playful drop-in workshops for families and kids of all ages. Discover what is ‘growing on’ at the festival hub. With multiple workshop stations where kids of all ages can get creative using drawing, sculpture and design.
Middlesbrough Art Week also sees the return of the North East Open Call and the New Graduate Award, both of which celebrate artistic practice across Tees Valley and beyond. Keep an eye out for new public artworks and participatory initiatives at this year’s festival, including Most Creative Station delivered by Navigator North, Comedown Comedy, SPARK and Words Per Minute.
Across Middlesbrough, visitors can expect an inventive and richly diverse programme of free exhibition and events by partner venues & cultural organisations including MIMA, Navigator North, Platform A, Hypha, Industrial Coast, Python Gallery, Eden Arts, The Word, 2b Creative, and Freestyle amongst many more.
CALL-OUT for talented young people for our MoveUP programme!
TeesDance and Darlington Hippodrome are looking for dancers aged 13 – 19, or up to 25 with disabilities, to take part in MoveUP 2024/5. This FREE programme at Darlington Hippodrome, takes place over 8 months to develop choreographic skills in showcasing your own dance creation on a 1000-seated auditorium stage in June 2025.
Find out more and how to apply via TeesDance’s website (linked in bio) https://teesdance.org.uk/move-up
Deadline to apply: Sunday 13 October, 5pm
MoveUP is produced by TeesDance, delivered in partnership with Darlington Hippodrome and funded by Arts Council England and Tees Valley Combined Authority.
The next exhibition in Darlington Library Art Gallery, opens on Saturday 28 September and is on display during standard Darlington Library opening times (Monday to Saturday) until Thursday 7 November 2024. It will include works from different decades of Roger Birchall’s life, including Late Sun, Oil on canvas, 2020, pictured above.
Roger is a 77-year-old artist, living in Darlington. After leaving art school in 1970 Roger had a varied working life mainly in education but he also earned a living for ten years as a graphic designer. He moved to Darlington in 2000 and was immediately impressed by the variety of landscapes and seascapes that you can visit so easily when living in the town. His response was to start painting again in a concentrated way. He regards his art education as vital to the way he works now but there are other influences. He says, ‘My ability to draw came from both sides of my family and oil paints were the commonest medium at that time but the way I combine these skills definitely depends on what I learned at art school’.
As well as landscapes, the other part of his exhibition features portraits of friends and family some of which date back to the 1980s. Roger works from photographs which help him achieve likenesses but he is also very concerned to create an image that adds to the experience of seeing the person, even if you don’t know them.
Roger advises Birchallreality ‘will be full of very approachable paintings that often contain small experiences we all can enjoy; light seen through leaves, a distant horizon or an old brick wall’, tries to do the ‘seeing’ for us and then attempts to duplicate that experience through the medium of paint.
The latest exhibition at Darlington Library’s Art Gallery, Places In Time: The Art of Kenneth Steel , is open during standard Darlington Library opening times (Monday to Saturday) until late September 2024, and contains brilliant depictions of places which may be familiar to many visitors, including Durham City, High Force, Lindisfarne and Robin Hood’s Bay.
Kenneth Steel (1906-1970) was a consummate printmaker who found critical acclaim during his lifetime. Yet today the Sheffield artist and designer, remains a largely unknown figure, outside a small group of dedicated enthusiasts and loyal collectors.
This exhibition hopes to further his reputation, not only as an important twentieth century figure in the field of British printmaking, but also an exceptional artist and designer in the fields of both railway art and commercial art.
Thankfully for us his keen eye for detail, colour and composition has left us with a unique record of areas of the British landscape, and those visitors to the Art Gallery who’ve left comments in the visitor comments book there, have been fulsome in their praise of Steel’s work.
During the exhibition there will be an opportunity to view a Gallery copy of the Kenneth Steel. Catalogue Raisonné of Prints and Posters publication in the Art Gallery, with hardback copies of the publication on sale from the Hive at Darlington Library, and visitors can also try their luck at completing a jigsaw depicting one of Kenneth Steel’s works, with the original on display in the exhibition.
If you do pop into Darlington Library Art Gallery we hope you’ll enjoy this exhibition.
and and and also,
Sophie Seita
9-14 August 2024
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a body might
tilt
cavort
peal
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Sophie Seita’s solo exhibition and and and also presents a series of textile pieces that depict experimental graphic scores for imaginary queer voices and bodies.
Graphic scores are alternative forms of notation for sound and performance. They move away from the traditional notation of the five-lined musical stave in favour of more expressive, unconventional, and often abstract notations that bring art and sound, performance, and movement together. Given their experimental non-normative nature, the scores remain unfixed, in process, and open to interpretation by and for different bodies and voices.
In Seita’s textile installation, the scores capture so-called Klangfiguren, German for ‘sonic bodies’ or ‘figures of sound’, which is both a musical term and a literary stylistic device, which brings the senses of hearing and seeing closely together. These Klangfiguren are conceptual sounds or allegorical bodies. An allegory is a form of ‘veiled language’, an image or story that captures new concepts but never explicitly; or it’s a material object and visual representation which makes an idea or feeling visible and tangible. These allegorical bodies, then, represent a queerness we do not yet know. In the origin of the word allegory also lies a suggestion for how it may be used. It’s a Latin word that originates in the Greek and combines allos ‘other’ or ‘different’ and agoreuo ‘to speak in the assembly’. In performance, these scores find their other-speaking in a new assembly, in a different (queer) community.
Scores, for the artist, allow reflection on process, on bodies, and (il)legibility. Listening, sound,
movement, and performance in this project are not limited to normative understandings of how we can or should use our bodies. The scores can be interpreted by all bodies, all voices, in all languages and don’t assume a primary language, form of expression, or range of ability.
The work is informed by a drawing and sound workshop with queer young people hosted by Curious Arts, and the artist wishes to thank the young people for their curiosity and open-mindedness. It is also informed by the singing method the artist learned in Germany (The Lichtenberger® Method in Applied Vocal Physiology), and includes prompts inspired by the method’s playful and poetic somatic pedagogy.
The textile works will be accompanied by the artist’s own creative audio descriptions as well as a short performative text that imagines and translates what these scores could sound like and what kind of queer relations or desires they intimately perform.
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‘Sophie Seita’s ‘creative audio description’ is a lush, poetic, evocative sister piece to the physical artworks. It offers so much more than ‘description, achieving inclusion through words that aren’t simply a translation of the work, they are the work, in another form…a form that works beautifully regardless of your level of vision. Strangely liberating, the artist’s words do not require a mental visualisation to enjoy her art, it’s all there, crafted in its own right.’
— Richard Boggie, visually-impaired North East writer
Find out more about Sophie’s practice here: www.sophieseita.com/
And here: www.instagram.com/sophieseita/
BIO: Sophie Seita is a London-based artist and researcher whose work swims in the muddy waters of language, and explores materiality, gesture, and the speculative potential of the archive. She regularly performs and exhibits work across multiple media, publishes books, makes textiles and graphic scores, leads workshops around voice-work, experimental writing, and queer performance, and teaches in the Art Department at Goldsmiths. Often working collaboratively, she’s expanding and deepening her ongoing socially engaged and conceptual project with the musician and conductor Naomi Woo, to give voice to untold queer archives, alongside other international artists, academics, activists, gardeners, designers, and writers, as part of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions. Their recent activities involved a queer performance ritual in Xochimilco, Mexico City, a workshop in the art research garden at Goldsmiths’s Centre for Art & Ecology, and an irregular zine, called The Minutes. Seita’s latest book, Lessons of Decal (87Press, 2023), is a queer meditation on reading and listening; the things and experiences that leave an imprint on us in unpredictable, messy, and desirous ways. Currently, she is an Artist in Residence at Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) in Berlin.
Creative Darlington is keen to share exhibitions which explore the connections between language and visual art within the Art Gallery at Darlington Library and thank Darlington Culture Volunteers for their support in stewarding this exhibition.
