Jill McKnight - The Many-Limbed Machine of my Ancestral Makers - as part of Life in a Northern Town - NewBridge Project

For the final exhibition of Life in a Northern Town, Leeds-based artist Jill McKnight has been paired with Newcastle-based artist Rene McBrearty. Both artists draw upon their individual and family history and experiences to explore themes such as identity, memory, family, women and gesture.

McKnight has created a sculptural installation in which a number of large scale mixed media sculptures are accompanied by a spoken text that visitors can listen to on telephone headsets. Through listening to the text, we are provided with a potted version of McKnight's family history. 

"McKnight’s ancestors emigrated from Ireland to Liverpool, then Sunderland, where they found employment in Northern industries, including shipyards, fish shops and a telephone factory. Born in Sunderland, McKnight now lives in Leeds, which is characterised by buildings that were once major sites of production, prior to deindustrialisation."

As we walk around the gallery listening to the spoken text and looking at the sculptures we are introduced to anecdotes that explain the significance of some of the elements featured within the sculptures. For example, the fact that McKnight's nana opened and ran a popular fish and chip shop that sold wet fish by day and takeaway fish and chips by night influenced her decision to make a sculpture using giant laser cut acrylic fish and chip shop disposable forks.



The dedication, commitment and hard-working nature of McKnight's ancestors has certainly been passed onto the artist. This is evidenced in the spoken text and is directly visible in one of the sculptures. In the spoken text she gives a detailed account of some of the time consuming menial tasks such as arranging economical transport for the work from Leeds to Newcastle and ordering materials online, that she does as part of her art-making process. I'm sure that many an artist listening to this will let out a groan in sympathy or nod their head in agreement as they hear about McKnight's exhaustion, and frustration with online shopping.

If visitors need further proof of McKnight's artistic work ethic they will find it in a sculpture made from printed CV's and job applications. Again, McKnight reveals the reality of being an artist - the need to have paid employment to be able to afford to practice as an artist.


I hope that I haven't given the impression that this is a 'doom and gloom' exhibition. The text is humorous and the sculptures are bright and playful. They clearly demonstrate that along with the hard work that goes into making the work, the artist gains pleasure and satisfaction from what she does. Long may that continue!

For more information please visit

https://thenewbridgeproject.com/events/rene-mcbrearty-jill-mcknight-life-northern-town/

Motsonian // Becky Peach – Life in a Northern Town at The NewBridge Project:Gateshead

Motsonian // Conical Earth
Becky Peach // Moving in (un)familiar places

Today I am invigilating at The NewBridge Project: Gateshead. It is the final chance to see the first of three Life in a Northern Town exhibitions all of which feature work by emerging and early-career artists living and working in the North of England. It has been programmed in partnership with Assembly House (Leeds), Islington Mill (Manchester), Caustic Coastal (Manchester), Bloc Projects (Sheffield) and The Royal Standard (Liverpool).

For the first exhibition of Life in a Northern Town, Motsonian and Becky Peach use sculptural installation to subvert and challenge peoples perceptions of, and interactions with space. Motsonian’s work explores the post industrial landscape of the North East, and the boundary between the physical and virtual worlds, and Peach invites audiences to reinterpret the space around them through wearable sculptures.

Motsonian’s Conical Earth explores the culture surrounding the Kiviõli hillclimb as a compelling metaphor for the transformation of the North East of England, where she now lives and works. The Kiviõli hillclimb is a motocross spectacle that takes place in the artist’s home country of Estonia on top of man-made hills created with the ash from oil shale mining which took place from the 1920s until the ‘90s. In the annual event, competitors ride modified motorcycles in an attempt to be the fastest to reach the summit of a steep incline.

In this new work Motsonian suggests the Kiviõli hillclimb as a way of articulating a comparable identification with the North East of England: from historical traces of landscape and industry to the transformation of Newcastle into a leisure city and Gateshead into a cultural hub. As a symbol of the leftovers of industry reborn as spectacle and leisure, the work encourages questions at the heart of post-industrial northern identity and utility.



In Moving in (un)familiar places, Becky Peach draws from aspects of child’s play to create intimate sensory experiences, that re-evaluate the familiar, and provoke dissonance between space and action. Taking inspiration from recent visits to sensory rooms, Peach invites audiences to explore their spatial awareness through tactile interactions with shapes and textures that relate to the local surroundings.

As an advocate of arts for health, she is interested in how engaging in creative practice can enhance cognitive ability and further personal and collective consciousness. Curious to what point this is revealed and how much experience is shared.

Motsonian is the username for Monica Maria Rohtmaa (b. 1995. Viljandi, Estonia), an artist based in Gateshead, UK. Motsonian’s practice combines contemporary technology with sculptural installation by using virtual reality, drone footage and concepts from video games to create installations about the intersection of the physical and virtual worlds. Recent work uses projected video onto physical structures, in reference to what’s known in 3D digital environments as texture mapping, along with the visual symbol of knitting, a tradition drawn from her Estonian heritage, as a metaphor for a video game aim system or player’s view.

Motsonian has recently exhibited with Goldtapped (Newcastle), Baltic 39 (Newcastle), Northern Charter (Newcastle) and Exchange Rates (New York). In 2017 she was shortlisted for the The Woon Foundation Painting and Sculpture Prize. Her writing on video game space in contemporary art recently appeared in IsThisIt?Magazine.

Becky Peach is an artist, facilitator and current director of The Royal Standard.She is the print assistant and engagement assistant at The Bluecoat. Concerned with hierarchies, codes and values that govern behavior, Becky explores community alongside autonomy through engaging in processes that are harmonious among the fine arts, design and craft disciplines.

Recent exhibitions include; Space and Sensibility, Surtsey Projects, Liverpool (2017), Paper #32: Tracing Paper, Paper Gallery, Manchester (2016), and The Royal Standard, Temple Du Gout, Nantes, France (2016). Recent residencies include theInternational Visiting Artist Residencyat Cork Printmakers (2017), At the Library, Crosby Library (2017), and a 5-day Bookmaking Residencyat Open Eye Gallery (2015).