MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
4 February – 7 May 2023

It has been a long time since I have been to an exhibition that has inspired me as much as this one; one where I sat on the floor in each room and felt compelled to scribble my own thoughts, feelings and responses, before reading the wall texts (which probably overlapped with my own about 50:50). This is an exhibition to which you must respond viscerally, for as much as it is about the body, so it seems somehow to affect the body, as well as the mind, of the viewer. It is a show that can be felt, not just thought – and that, for me, is what art should be all about.

Entering the first room of the six-room group show, curated by Jes Fernie in the fabulously spacious MK Gallery, you would not necessarily guess the subject of the exhibition. Visitors are confronted by Alice Channer’s Soft Sediment Deformation (Iron Bodies) (2023), a wall-hanging comprising 30 panels of industrially pleated fabric, reaching from the ceiling to the ground, where it spills over like a waterfall. At first glance, the mottled, black-orange tyre-track-like pattern could be that of a tiger-skin; look more closely (or perhaps, necessarily, at the label), however, and it is a digitally stretched and distorted image of sandstone from the north Devon coastline, printed on to heavy crepe de chine, and pleated, as if formed from the scales of a fish. As Channer says: “[The surface] has glitches and ruptures and stretches all over it, a lot like my own skin.”

Η συνέχεια εδώ.