Cathy's Art Diary

Strange exhibition at the Streetlife Museum of Transport in Hull looking at the evolution of the Hull City football team’s kit. Maybe this just proved I’ll go and see anything but actually once you started to look properly and read the commentary it was quite interesting. I missed the bit which said why the team plays in black and orange however it has given rise to their nickname of the Tigers. I loved the slightly dodgy period when the kit imitated tiger stripes, a very 70s image. I liked the story that the team played in purple for a while but lost twice so never wore the shirts again. I was also interesting to see the strange sponsors they’d had over the years including Cash Converters and Flamingo Park. Closes on 2 October 2017  

Fun exhibition at the Humber Street Gallery in Hull looking at how play shapes our lives and the role of play in adult lives as part of Hull City of Culture. This was a fun interactive exhibition with lots to see, do and make you think. It explored the role of experimental play as part of creative thinking and making things. Fun objects included a take on the old penny drop arcade machine but using tokens based on those used by Hull merchants. I liked Richard Slee’s sculptures of the trajectory of ping pong balls as they bounce. There was a display of software which downloads model designs from a website and combines them to randomly build new works and installation of chairs with the bottom on one leg cut at an angel to enable you to balance them on one leg. I liked a slightly creepy robot which seemed to be able to see you and comment on what you were doing. The picture is of a knitted lamp which took energy from people coming near it and lit up and knitted a bit mo...

Small exhibition at the Kingston Art Group Gallery in Hull of sculptures by Simon Drury and Andi Dakin. The works were found objects reworked into new pieces. I liked the golf tees set into rolling pins and the sieves with plaster poured into them. Some were shown with the wire side facing out to show the pattern made by the plaster and it seeped though and other had other objects set into the plaster inside. Closed on 30 July 2017  

Innovative art trail around the Fruit Market in Hull of installations using paper from the Colorplan range of Hull paper merchant G.F. Smith. There were some delightful works in this trail but it was also a chance to visit unusual buildings such as smoke house. Some installations such as that by Adam Holloway which used the structural qualities of the strength of the paper to build a large spiral work in white and coloured paper. Others used the colour such as “The Fabric of Hull” which was hanging using the different coloured papers woven together and made by the employees of G.F. Smith. My favourite piece was Jacqueline Poncelet’s “Island Life” which placed folder shapes in different colours on the floor of a closed space. As you walked through it you could see the colours change as you saw them in different combinations. There was also a pop up shop featuring items in the World’s favourite colour, as researched through an online project. The colour was a called Mar...

Delightful exhibition at Ferens Art Gallery in Hull looking at the different ways artists have looked at how the sea has shaped our culture and imagination. I loved the mix of older, modern and contemporary work in this show and the fact it included ten new commissions developed with leading marine scientists. It looked at how we have viewed the sea and the environmental impact of our relationship with it. It was nice to see some Martin Parr photographs of the sea side included. His work seems to be appearing everywhere at the moment. Also to see some 19th century scrimshaw, carving on whale teeth. Tactica Dean’s “Roaring Forties” was there which I last saw hung alongside Turners at the Tate. Sadly we didn’t get to see the second half of the show over the road at the Hull Maritime Museum as we ran out of time. The picture I am using was a beautiful new work by Alexander Duncan which looked like a pile of rocks but was discarded polyurethane and polystyrene moulded by ...

Fascinating exhibition at the Ferens Art Gallery exploring modern and contemporary artists responses to the naked human figure. It looked at the greater honesty modern artists bring to the subject as they abandon the traditional ideas of the idealisation of the body and life drawing. It focused on three artists, Lucian Freud, Ron Mueck and Spencer Tunick, although it also used other works from their own collections and good loans to put these artists in context. It was a nice touch to include a preparatory study of Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe by Manet as this work caused such a scandal when it was first shown, depicting a nude woman with clothed men. It was also nice to see a Stanley Spencer of Patricia Preece. The first room was devoted to Ron Mueck strangely realistic sculptures despite being unrealistic in scale. I find them quite hard to look at as they seem to creep into your space and challenge your perceptions but I do find then beautiful and it was nice to see a collec...

Interesting exhibition at Ferens Art Gallery in Hull to examine the themes in a picture on loan from the Royal Collection, Rembrandt’s “The Shipbuilder and his Wife”. It’s a picture I know well from various exhibitions at the Queen’s Gallery but it was nice to see it stand alone and to see it’s various themes explored in more detail. What a lovely picture to lend to a sea faring town. It was a lovely chance to look in more detail at the picture rather than thinking of it in the context of other works. I’d not realised before that he is in the process of drawing the designs for a ship and I love the paraphernalia of his work on his desk. I also love the sense of his wife rushing into the room to give him a letter and of course the beautifully painted faces. It gave the gallery a chance to explore the theory that Rembrandt spent several months in Hull in 1661, an idea promoted by the antiquarian George Vertue. It was lovely to see Virtue’s original notebook there lent by...

Nice refurbishment of the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull. I have always been fond of this gallery and its gem of a collection and it was nice to see it looking spruced up. I was pleased that the space hadn’t been altered that radically. A new café and bookshop had been added but it was nice to read that most of the money had been spent on improving the lighting, air conditioning etc to protect the pictures and enable them to attract prestigious loans. The gallery shows the collection off well and I like the way the room designs reflect the art shown in them. I liked the room upstairs which looked at the history of the gallery and it’s collection, highlighting some of the main donors. It was nice to see some old friends such as the large Richard Carline of his family and friends including Stanley Spencer and his wife, Richard’s sister, Hilda and there is a nice collection of sea pictures reflecting the city it sits in. Review Times