Sculptures and photographs form equal parts of the same enthralling exhibition
Sunderland’s Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art is about to host a new joint exhibition of photographs and sculptures from Nick Evans and Lorna Macintyre. The project, which runs from Saturday 16th April until Saturday 25th June was initiated in response to the work of Nicholas Pope, who will simultaneously be exhibiting a series of new sculptures and drawings in NGCA’s other gallery as part of Baldock Pope Zahle.
The exhibition, Ur Phenomenon, started with Nick Evans’ formative experience of seeing Pope’s sculpture The Apostles Speaking In Tongues Lit By Their Own Lamps’ (1993-96) at Tate gallery, back in his student days in the late 90s. After recalling the event recently, Evans invited Macintyre, in conversation with Pope, to take a series of photographs of the sculptor’s house and studio in Herefordshire. While Pope’s work inspired a conversation between Macintyre and Evans, the documentation of his work remains oblique. It’s a portrait of an artist through an idiosyncratic landscape of objects as much as through their work. The sculptures and photographs sit alongside one another, amplifying the shared sensibilities between each artist, filtered through the implied, if absent, work of Pope.