Last day of Cheeseburn Open Weekends 2019

Today is the final day that Cheeseburn will be open to the public in 2019.

Come today to experience

- 72 sculptures around the grounds 
- Pop up design shop with Sustainable Ceramics selling a range of ceramic bird boxes

- Pop up design shop featuring work by Yvette Hawkins

- Video installation by Bennett Hogg and Merrie Snell in the Chapel
- Louise Plant 'Regatta' exhibition in the Stables Gallery
- a delicious range of refreshments including cakes, salads and the epic sausage rolls sold in the cafe

Be sure not to miss out!

http://cheeseburn.com/

Regatta by Louise Plant with soundscape by Bennett Hogg at Cheeseburn

The current exhibition in the gallery at Cheeseburn is Regatta by Louise Plant. The ‘Regatta’ series is inspired by Louise Plant’s observations of rowing. These sculptures simultaneously embody the vortices created by rowers oars being forced through the water and the controlled, explosive, cyclical, rhythmical drive and glide of the rower, connecting mind, body and water.

Sound artist Bennett Hogg collaborated with Louise Plant for the soundscape of the exhibition. The soundscape mostly consists of hydrophone recordings made at Fontburn Reservoire in Northumberland.



Bennett Hogg explains

"I was struck by the bright, almost glassy quality of the hydrophone recordings, and so have also done some convolution filtering with samples of crystal wine glasses. The piece is quiet and contemplative, playing with the idea that elements can transform into one another. Just as Louise has transformed forms observed in water into stone, I've tried to find a solid resonance to the sound of water."




Louise's exhibition will be open to the public again at the final 2019 Cheeseburn Sculpture Open Weekend on Saturday 31st August and Sunday 1st September at Cheeseburn Grange Sculpture Gardens, near Stamfordham, Northumberland.

Etudes and Fugues by Siu Ling Carter at The Long Gallery, Newcastle University

Etudes and Fugues is an exhibition of paintings by the late Siu Ling Carter, who died suddenly in August 2017. She is known for her ceramic sculptures and vessels, but for over a decade she had been working steadily on a coherent body of more than thirty paintings. This exhibition showcases a selection of these, none of which have been exhibited before.

A perfectionist, Siu Ling Carter thought that these paintings were not quite ready to be exhibited, and she even regarded some as being unfinished. Rarely are an audience party to an artist's work mid-process. I enjoy this insight into the artists working process, but do feel a little uneasy about whether the artist would have been upset that they are exhibited in this state.

The paintings have a great sense of rhythm and harmony, and the link to music is referenced in the exhibition's title, Etudes and Fugues. Siu Ling Carter spoke about the parallels between the construction of her paintings and the composition of a musical  score. 

When she was a Masters student at Newcastle University Siu Ling Carter collaborated with musicians Mick Wright and Bennett Hogg. For the current exhibition Bennett has composed a new piece of piano music which visitors can listen to as they view the exhibition.  

The paintings remind me of woven textiles or the patterns made when strips of paper are weaved in and out of each other to form a grid. The subtle variations in colour schemes between the works elicited different emotional responses. Some are fairly tranquil and soft, but others have a faster pace and have more of a relationship with the hustle and bustle of Newcastle city life.

The exhibition is open to the public between 26 June and 8 July and is worth a visit.

Lost Voices by Bennett Hogg at Cheeseburn Sculpture

Lost Voices; A Sound Installation by Bennett Hogg, using reconstructions by Magnus Williamson, of missing voice parts from sixteenth Century Church Music



It may be nothing more than a coincidence that some of the greatest English religious
music from a period when thousands of voices were silenced – through imprisonment, enforced hiding, or burning at the stake – has come down to us with one or more of its original voices missing. A coincidence, perhaps, a highly suggestive, poetic one.

Musical practice in the sixteenth century was for each voice to have their own copy of
the music containing only their particular part. The music for Robert White’s Lamentations of Jeremiah, one of the pieces used in Lost Voices, would have originally consisted of six separate “part books” but only five survive; the book containing the music for the tenor voice has been lost.

Magnus Williamson has recomposed many of these missing voices, and it is these
recovered voices that form the basic materials of Bennett Hogg’s installation Lost 
Voices. The piece recombines the music into a new polyphony, using digital sound
processing to extend and transform the sounds. Voices emerge from different places, always hidden, always on the move, and as the listener walks around different
combinations can be found.



As a counterpoint to this texts by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard meditate on
how intimate spaces – our homes, isolated cabins in the forest, priestholes perhaps -
connect in the imagination with sound, memory, and voice.

Cheeseburn, as a recusant house, may well have hidden persecuted Catholics. As we
enjoy our rights and freedoms in the present, we might reflect on these different lost voices, and on the renewed appetite in some places to persecute one another based on our religious affiliations, or, indeed, our lack of them.

Credits:
Soprano – Daisy Gibb
Tenor – Magnus Williamson
Bass – Patrick Owston
Reader – Martin Eccles
Recording engineer – David de la Haye

The spoken texts are from Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space, first published in French in 1958.

http://cheeseburn.com/events/lost-voices-bennett-hogg-and-magnus-williamson/

Looking forward to Cheeseburn this weekend

I am working at the July Open Weekends at Cheeseburn Sculpture, and I'm looking forward to seeing the new exhibitions that will be on in the gallery and the Stables project space.

Cheeseburn Stables Gallery - Fred Watson

Fred Watson has 5 stone carvings in the gardens at Cheeseburn and his exhibition at Cheeseburn’s Stables Gallery in July 2017 aims to showcase his fine still life carvings in wood.

Lost Voices; A Sound Installation by Bennett Hogg, using reconstructions by Magnus Williamson, of missing voice parts from sixteenth Century Church Music. 

There will, of course, also be the opportunity to see the permanent collection of sculptures within the gardens, Tyne Bridge Hinge by Alexander Devereux and Scurry by Dan Gough.

For more information please visit

http://cheeseburn.com/