When I was an undergraduate student, I made a video in which I ran naked around the perimeter of a closed room of Victorian paintings in Leeds Art Gallery. The camera was mounted on a turntable in the centre of the room, and it recorded a hundred laps before I collapsed. The footage was then looped so the running never stopped, making me appear doomed to continue the humiliating, nightmarish performance interminably. The video addressed the anxieties I felt about public exposure and how to develop a relationship to the histories and institutions that artists are supposed to situate themselves within. I was terrified of being trapped in a perpetual state of inbetweenness.
'Untitled' revisited the video’s themes twenty years later, but through the form of an exhibition rather than an artwork. Exhibitions generally allow for a more stratified approach to making, and for the possibility to consider a variety of situations in which such anxieties and fears can be addressed. Solo shows can exert similar pressures, as they aim to present a unique vision that has been honed and perfected through practice, that connects an artist’s inner world to the world at large.
'Untitled' was an attempt to generate a space of uncertainty between a group exhibition and a solo show. It contained drawings that are based on, or directly represent, the work of other artists, a strategy that perhaps made it appear at times like a “fantasy exhibition” of objects that I could never hope to gather together at the same time. Alongside these drawings were works by contemporary artists, some being peers with established practices, and others by younger artists with whom I have worked in my role as a lecturer at Glasgow School of Art. It also contained historical works and archival material that I encountered whilst researching the exhibition, some by well-known artists and some by artists who sit outside dominant historical canons. In its totality, 'Untitled' was an attempt to unpack how subjectivity and artistic identity is produced, and to represent creative practice as a set of personal, political and institutional entanglements.
The exhibition took place across the entire first floor of The Tetley, Leeds, in eleven distinct spaces. The architecture of the building is such that in visiting each space in order, one travels in a full circle, arriving naturally back at one’s starting point after encountering the final space. 'Untitled' was organised such that that a visitor could start at any point along the way, and then follow the exhibition in order from thereon, rather than having a distinct "beginning" and "end".
The exhibition included work by or collaborations with:
Jess Carnegie, Marguerite Carson, Richard Dadd, Albrecht Dürer, Sarah Forrest, Noel Griffin, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Helen McCrorie, Joan Moore, Marcantonio Raimondi, Scott Rogers and Harry Thubron.
Works were lent by Leeds Art Gallery, The National Art Education Archive at Leeds Sculpture Park, and The Whitworth in Manchester.
