Grundy Art Gallery Autumn 2024 | Latest News – VisitBlackpool

Aligning with Blackpool’s season of light, Grundy Art Gallery presents a programme of exhibitions and events that explore light and the moving image as well as digital and analogue mark making.

 

Bringing together artists with and without lived experience of disability and neuro-divergence, the programme takes an inclusive and intersectional approach to showing how we individually and jointly experience, and respond to the world in which we live. 

 

The official opening of the exhibitions will be on 28 September 2pm to 4pm – all welcome. See gallery website for normal opening hours.

 

Cllr Lynn Williams, Leader of Blackpool Council and Chair of Grundy Art Gallery Steering Group said: “We are delighted to be welcoming the prestigious exhibition Stim Cinema to Blackpool as part of its national tour and celebrating work by Blackpool based artists and artworks from Grundy’s own collection alongside this.

 

“This continues Grundy’s ambitions to bring the best of contemporary art today to the people of Blackpool and beyond to position artists from the town into a national and international conversation.”

 

STIM CINEMA: THE NEUROCULTURES

COLLECTIVE AND STEVEN EASTWOOD

 

28 September (official opening) runs to 14 December

 

Stimming, is the practice of physical repetition as a way of taking sensory pleasure in recurrence, or of expressing and alleviating anxiety, and is a common trait of autistic experience.

 

The Neurocultures Collective was formed through participation in the Autism Through Cinema research project, funded by Wellcome Trust, and led by Steven Eastwood and Janet Harbord.

 

 

Co-created by members of The Neurocultures Collective – Sam Chown Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker – through years of co-development with artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood and Curator Gilly Fox, STIM CINEMA takes the action of stimming as its starting point, connecting delight in repetition to the birth of cinema and to contemporary fascination with GIFS.

 

Including zoetropes (early moving image / pre-cinematic devices), a 16 minute looped video, and props and ephemera from the production process – STIM CINEMA invites the audience to take pleasure in discovering hidden repetitive movements, and the ever-stimming details of the everyday world. STIM CINEMA encourages us all to remember the joy we share in seeing actions rock and loop, and revealing that such stimulation is not only common to autistic experience but it is in the DNA of the moving image.

 

The pARTnership + COLLECTION SPOTLIGHT + STIM CINEMA

 

28 September (official opening) runs to 14 December

 

Connor Gavin and Candice Swallow make work that is visually dynamic. It is saturated with colour and imbued with explosive energy. Their works are the result of hundreds of repeated mark-making gestures using their chosen tools of watercolour crayon, graphite, soft pastel, digital drawing tablet and stylus pen, paint, felt-tip pens, and oil pastel.

 

For this exhibition, the artists will be presenting new drawings in the form of works on paper and digital animation. Joining this work will be three screen-based pieces made by The Neurocultures Collective and two moving image works from Grundy’s own collection by Nicola Dale and Rachel Goodyear. Common to all these works is the use of repetition, and in the case of the screen based works, repeated actions and looping images, that remind us of our contemporary experience of GIFS, memes, and infinite scrolling.

 

Connor Gavin and Candice Swallow are founder members of the pARTnership, an ongoing creative and professional development project for artists with a learning disability. The pARTnership is led by Grundy Art Gallery and delivered in partnership with lead artist, Tina Dempsey, The New Langdale (Blackpool Council’s daytime service for adults with a learning-disability), and support from Venture Arts, Manchester. The pARTnership is funded by Arts Council England.

 

COLLECTION SPOLIGHT: LIGHT

Tony Heaton OBE and Amy Ellison

 

28 September (official opening) runs to 14 December

 

This display is part of Grundy’s ongoing series of exhibitions and activities that draw attention to artists and artworks held in the gallery’s permanent collection. To align with the season of Blackpool Illuminations and Blackpool’s Lightpool Festival, this autumn Grundy is pairing two works from the collection that use light as their medium and have been made by artists with lived experience of disability.

 

Raspberry Ripple, 2018 is by Tony Heaton OBE a disability rights, artist and activist who is currently showing work as part of Crip Arte Spazio at La Biennale di Venezia 2024 curated by David Hevey and produced by Shape Arts and. Cocktails, 2020 is by Amy Ellison, who is a Venture Arts, Manchester studio artist. Both of these works were acquired into Grundy’s collection with support from Art Fund’s New Collecting Award.

 

 

GARTH GRATRIX: MUMMY’S BOY

 

Extended until 14 December

 

As part of Grundy’s autumn light focus, Garth Gratrix’s 2024 neon work, Mummy’s

Boy, will remain installed above Grundy’s front door until the end of the Autumn season.

 

Mummy’s Boy was commissioned by Queer Amusements for Gratrix’s recent Grundy summer exhibition, Flamboyant Flamingos. Taking the form of flamingo pink flashing neon triangles, this work uses the system of Morse code to communicate the phrase Mummy’s Boy.

 

Referencing personal history, name calling and recent loss – this work is visually striking and thoughtful addition to Grundy’s autumn programme.

 

The autumn exhibition programme will be supported by a series of exhibition tours, events and workshops. Please see www.thegrundy.org for updated information.

Image Credit: STIM CINEMA, 2023 Copyright and Courtesy the artists. Photo: Rachel Manns