Somewhat Abstracted

Charred Boards, Narrow Marsh, Nottingham, April 2014

A few posts back, I mentioned how spending any significant amount of time in an art exhibition can sometimes influence my perception of the world after leaving the gallery.  In the case of my recent visit to ‘Somewhat Abstract’ at NottinghamContemporary, (already discussed at some length), a similar process took place but this time, in reverse.  On my way to the gallery, and with time and Spring weather on my side, I spent a while exploring the surrounding area with my camera with the intention of concentrating on the walls, surfaces, and material fabric of the city in as abstract way as possible.

Charred Boards, Narrow Marsh, Nottingham, April 2014

There was a specific research agenda behind this, (and it’s hardly new territory for me, after all), but also, the general sense that, if ‘Abstract’ was to be a theme for the day, I might as well get into that mindset from the get-go.  In the event, I spent over an hour happily strolling around the dilapidated grandeur of the Lace Market area to the North of The Contemporary, and the more workaday territory immediately to the South -between the foot of the sandstone cliff that the gallery surmounts, and the Railway Station beyond.

Both: Narrow Marsh, Nottingham, April 2014

Rear Service Entrance, Nottingham Contemporary, April 2014

Although adjacent, these zones differ greatly in both atmosphere and physical attributes and there’s quite a contrast between the worlds of above and below.  The Lace Market, once being the seat of one of the craft trades on which Nottingham’s prosperity was most famously built, is a maze of interconnecting streets lined with imposing and often ornate Victorian buildings.  In recent years it has adapted itself to the needs of young creative types or those in search of stylish inner-city living, and the identity of the area now takes its identity equally from its historic setting (and dilapidation that still prevails in places), and the incidents of slick design and gentrification now punctuating it.

Both: Narrow Marsh, Nottingham, April 2014

The tract below is even more obviously in a state of transition.  The elevated tramline running towards its terminus next to the railway station, which is itself currently in the throws of major redevelopment, bisects it.  Indeed, this whole area is a nexus of transport routes, with a major road in and out of the city centre and a canal cut both running through it.  Regular readers will recognise this as exactly the kind of location I’m routinely drawn to.

Both: Narrow Marsh, Nottingham, April 2014

Immediately to the west of the new tramway lies the bulky, faded Modernism of the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre, Bus Station and Car Park complex, with various entrances resembling the mouths of a somewhat forbidding bunker.  To the east sits an enclave of mid-twentieth century housing that always intrigues me in its inconguity.  Laid out, I assume, as a public housing estate, and punctuated by a network of secluded pedestrian cut-throughs, it feels like a surprisingly calm oasis of tightly packed gardens and something of a time capsule in a rapidly changing scene. 

Both: Lace Market, Nottingham, April 2014

In the shadow of the tramline lie the last vestiges of the old Narrow Marsh slum area and the ruins of a disused railway line that once ran through it.  This includes a couple of streets of abandoned, dilapidated commercial buildings, (some showing evidence of arson), which provided some of the richest pickings for my camera.  These seem to teeter on the very edge of events now, as lapping up against them is a recently cleared area, clearly awaiting development and denoting the regenerative processes overtaking this whole district.  I never tire of such locales where one can sense the last gasps of a previous situation, just prior to it being sloughed off like dead cells from a city’s larger organism.

All: Lace Market, Nottingham, April 2014

Narrow Marsh, Nottingham, April 2014

As was my intention, they tread a line between formal abstraction and the recognisable world, whilst remaining fairly 'straight in terms of exposure and focusing'.  They also contain less than usual of the textual content that habitually fascinates me.  I suppose one could argue that relatively little of my geographical description above is specifically discernible from them.  However, I never tire of the multiple ways that history, and changing events or usages, can leave evidence of itself on the surfaces of a city’s physical fabric.  The passage of thousands of lives and the activities carried out within them, are all to there to be read, along with the wider processes of entropy, material decay and socio-economic fluctuations, if one looks hard enough.

Prunella Clough, 'Samples', Oil On Canvas, 1997

It was a delight to enter the ‘Somewhat Abstract’ show a few minutes later and find many of these thoughts magnified and distilled by the work on show.  They were there most obviously in the paintings of Prunella Clough and cast reliefs of Karin Ruggaber, with their strong suggestions of weathered masonry and urban environments.  More obliquely, they were also there in Mark Lewis’s filmed meditation on the lost Utopianism of an outmoded vision of architecture and city planning, or indeed, in Wolfgang Tillmans’ investigation of just how photography might transform itself into a medium capable of conveying the abstract.

Narrow Marsh, Nottingham, April 2014

On reflection, I wonder if photography might, paradoxically, be one of the more interesting ways to explore the oft-stated idea of abstraction/representation as two sides of the same coin.  It can, of course never be abstract in the strictest sense, but like the exhibition itself, may offer plenty of scope to explore the points at which the recognisable begins a transformation into something other.  It also occurs to me that, despite my recent ham-fisted attempts to expand my 'range' by incorporating representational motifs within certain paintings, it's really in some variety of formal abstraction that I feel most at home.

Lace Market, Nottingham, April 2014

Somewhat Abstract: Selections From The Arts Council Collection', continues until 29 June at Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, Nottingham, NG1 2GB.