Part B - Be the Audience

I have really enjoyed this part of my Site apprenticeship because it has let me see galleries and works that I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise. For this task instead of being an audience at one event, I decided to comment on two events (A 'why you should go' review) as I couldn’t choose a favourite and they both offered me a different idea about types of gallery experiences and shows.

YAS:

The first place I went was Yorkshire Art Space (YAS). It’s a huge modern building with a gallery at the front and it houses different kinds of studios and all different types of craft people, from silversmiths to ceramicists. We got to look around the building and in various studios, and also got to look at work by a ceramicist called Emilie Taylor. I liked her work because she made these really pretty pots, but also incorporated contemporary messages into them. I really liked visiting YAS because we got a real insight into how people work in their studios and make a living.

Why visit? Because they do a wide variety of exhibitions, it’s friendly, free and a really cool state of the art building and because it houses many different artists and makers from Sheffield.

Bank Street:

My other favourite place is Bank Street Arts, which was where I was able to see the work of Susanna Gent who I interviewed for Part C. Bank St. is a quirky big old house in the centre of Sheffield. Very different from YAS. From the outside you wouldn’t know it was a gallery.

Susanna’s work went across 3 rooms (we only saw 2 as the cellar exhibition had been only for a few days). It included taxidermy pieces of ‘road kill’ rabbits, foxes and badgers. The work is based around ideas about how children's books often use animals as characters and about how people aren't really very aware of where their food come from. Which we don't really want to know about because it makes us think too much about death, and that we are also partly meat.

Although I am a little squeamish, I did like the ideas behind all her work and it was obvious that she really thought about it, and not just did it randomly. Her other work was more playful and consisted of a square gallery full of a wide variety of fake and comical deer heads (amounted as you would see them in a film but all were made of random stuff). There were taps as antlers, and ones covered in shells and interesting fabric and rubber. Anyway that would work. All really creative and fun.

Also, we were able to talk to Bryan Eccleshall about his work which we managed to catch him in the middle of in a small gallery. At the moment he is making line drawings of the Graves Art Gallery's favourite postcards, and is drawing them onto the actual wall, using an OHP to copy from. They will be the size of the paintings the postcards are of, but will be drawn from the postcards instead off the paintings. He talked to us about this and about copying and I quite liked this idea, because it will be an installation and is fairly original, despite the source not being. His work is about exploring ideas rather than finished produces which is new to me.