Books given strange new life at Globe Gallery

Aug 9 2010 by David Whetstone, The Journal

NEW work by Paul Grimmer, who is up for a major international prize, and Yvette Hawkins gives David Whetstone food for thought at the Globe Gallery.

TWO installations of arresting strangeness and beauty can be seen in the contemporary art crucible that is the Globe Gallery in North Shields.

The former shoe shop on one corner of Howard Street has probably drawn more than its fair share of curious glances over the years.

Although the locals are probably used to it by now. There have been plenty of rare sights to behold since the first exhibitions in 1995, one of which featured the work of the Viz cartoonists, to break people in gently.

Currently visible through the windows is Yvette Hawkins’s No Land In Particular (pictured).

At first glance, and if forced to describe it after just passing acquaintance, you might say it resembled a log pile. Although some of the logs seem to be fixed to the walls in arcs and flourishes.

Go inside and you will see that they are not logs at all but relatively fragile things made from piles of old paperback books.

With each page folded in half and the spines broken so that the front and back pages can be glued together, the flat books become roller-shaped.

It took a team of volunteers hours to create the raw materials for the Yvette Hawkins work which is described as “an exploration of fictional landscapes using fictional texts as both object and line”.

It is, according to the accompanying write-up, “a three- dimensional map where recycled book sculptures draw lines that sometimes seem to follow the gallery’s contours but also have a tendency to meander”.

This seems right. It is easy on the eye but there’s also the slightly uneasy sense that this is a thing out of control. It has crawled up the walls in an unfettered way and where might it go next?

Also on show is work by Paul Grimmer which similarly lulls you with its prettiness before chucking a spanner in the works.

Changeling is a video installation which began as a performance at Dance City with the artist filmed as he moved and struck poses ... while painted gold and wearing a reptilian prosthetic tail.

The footage was then worked on digitally and is projected here onto a specially designed round screen which is suspended in the middle of the gallery.

As the literature says, the film “opens to reveal glimpses of a seductive yet repulsive body form that constantly mutates”.

It is actually like looking through a kaleidoscope. But the appealing shapes suddenly throw up recognisable body parts - arms or heads or glimpses of spine.

Then they merge into the swirling patterns again, making you wonder if they were there in the first place.

A large photo of the artist with his strange tail hangs on one wall, making clear that you weren’t imagining this at all.

Paul Grimmer is one of the artists selected for ArtPrize, a radical competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which offers a whopping $250,000 top prize.

There is neither curator nor jury. Anyone in Grand Rapids, established venues or otherwise, was free to pick an artist from anywhere in the world and collaborate on a potentially winning exhibition.

Voting opens on September 22 but you have to visit one of the Michigan exhibitions to be eligible.

The Newcastle man is represented there by a stunning work called Continuum which is on show in the planetarium in Grand Rapids. It will move to a venue in Birmingham later this year.

For more on the competition visit www.artprize.org

Nearer to home, the Globe Gallery exhibition runs until Saturday.