Sally Madge: acts of reclamation and renewal between site, studio, archive and gallery

ABSTRACT

This article arises from a collaboration between an art historian and a curator in forming an exhibition of work by artist Sally Madge, drawn from a long-accumulated collection of artworks and related materials existing in her basement studio, thereafter housed in a storage container on the outskirts of Newcastle upon Tyne in the North of England. The text is located within evolving discourses on both the curatorial and educational ‘turns’ in exhibition making and knowledge production, and perceptions of the gallery as a place of shared social and self-determined generative engagement. Emphasising relational interconnectedness, the curation underlines a border-crossing collapsing of categories and hierarchies. The nature of Madge’s own practice and the liminal sites she worked in throughout her life reflect a parallel artistic, political and ecological concern for creatively crossing and defying borders and boundaries. What emerges is a dialogue between artist, curator and art historian on questions of transformation and re-representation through the relations between site, studio, archive and gallery.

KEYWORDS:

• Archival
• curatorial
• studio
• gallery
• place
• border-crossing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Borderlands presented works by artists engaged with issues of boundaries and border zones; with hard borders which circumscribe mobility and more symbolic regions such as the Anglo-Scottish border. Alongside Madge it included the artists Sandra Johnston, Laura Harrington, Mike Collier, Allan Hughes and photographer John Kippin.

2 And who also, coincidentally, wore the bear suit and played the role of Wojtek the bear in the installation mentioned earlier.

3 Parts of Scatter were subsequently completed by her close friends Sara Braithwaite and Paula Blair.

4 Transformations: Cloth and Clay, NAEA Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 13 Jul–3 Nov 2019 https://ysp.org.uk/exhibitions/transformations-cloth-and-clay and Ruth Ewan & Oscar Murillo, Longside, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 13 Jul–3 Nov 2019 https://ysp.org.uk/exhibitions/ruth-ewan-and-oscar-murillo.

5 E-mail to authors, 2/2/2022.

6 Aside from the shelter on Holy Island, this idea of home or a house also recurs in How Can I Tell What I Think Till I See What I Say? (2015) a project Madge developed for Customs House Gallery, South Shields.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ysanne Holt

Ysanne Holt is Professor in Art History in the Department of Arts at Northumbria University. She has longstanding interests in landscape and in imaginings and experience of the UK rural north, especially its islands and border regions as registered across forms of creative practice through the twentieth century to today. Recent publications include ‘Place on the Border and the LYC Museum and Art Gallery,’ in Tim Edensor, Ares Kalandides and Uma Kothari, eds., The Routledge Handbook on Place, Routledge, 2020 and Co-editor with David Martin Jones and Owain Jones, Visual Culture in the Northern UK Archipelago: Imagining Islands, Routledge 2018. She is currently completing a monograph on interrelations between artists and the material resources of the Anglo-Scottish borders. [email protected]

Matthew Hearn

Matthew Hearn is a curator and lectures in Fine Art at Northumbria University. In 2007/08 he worked with Interface, University of Ulster to develop and curate a programme of seminars and workshops, Performing the Archive and contributed to the resulting publication, Arkive City (2008). In 2009/10 he was ‘Writer in Residence’ for Sophia Yadong Hao’s project NOTES on a return. Supporting the research and development of the exhibition programme he developed a chapter, Forgetting to Remember: Remembering to Forget in the resulting publication which he co-edited. He has curated a series of large-scale painting exhibitions Riff/T (2013/14), unpainting / resurfacing (2015) and A Deceptive Cadence (2016). [email protected]