Exeter's West Quarter bottled for art

By PRSD, on Friday, April 30, 2010

The Stowage exhibition in the shops of Exeter’s West Quarter is an attempt to to build profile for grassroots visual arts activity in Exeter by bringing together artists from different parts of the country, says the exhibition’s co-curator Gabrielle Hoad on our Arts+Culture site.

The idea was to make art in and around old-fashioned sweet jars.

Gabrielle told Arts+Culture: “We chose this familiar shop item to stand in for the gallery vitrine – the glass case that separates the ‘work of art’ from the real world. It was small enough to appeal to retailers (whose window space is cramped and precious) and meant that we wouldn’t face enormous transportation costs when moving work around the country.

“What came back was an enormously diverse range of work. We have, for example, reflections on the exploitative elements of the sugar industry, miniature sculptures that draw on the idea of the ship in a bottle, and the results of a collaboration with the knitting community of Heavenly Yarns. Most works are designed for daytime viewing, but Magnificent Morse Mints consists of two jars that communicate with each other after dark using pulses of light.”

This self-starting exhibition coincides with the Spacex Gallery’s Random Acts of Art, which has the gallery’s residential artists interacting with the community to produce art work.

You can catch Stowage in Exeter’s Fore Street and New Bridge Street until Friday, May 14. It then tours to the Barnaby Festival, Macclesfield in June. A guide giving locations of all the works is available at participating shops or online at on the Found Space site

Read the full article on our Arts+Culture site

(image: You Can Take the ‘X’ out of Exeter, but you Can’t Take the Exeter Out of the ‘X’ by John Maxwell Goodwin in the window of tma2, the hairdressers as part of the Stowage exhibition)