| The white walls and open floor of the modernist gallery simultaneously liberate and repress cultural conversation. The pristine 'neutrality' — a buffer zone safely containing and nurturing selected icons — offers sanctuary from a harsh unselective public. Within its walls legitimated audiences legitimise fragile cultural statements, transient materials, forms and practices. Comfort is afforded by awards confirmed for an acceptable but stimulating challenge.
The white walls absorb the extraneous chatter from outside and leave the selected contents in controlled dialogue with the alignments and hierarchies of vested interest groups.
The exhibition programme running at George Street this academic year has brought together diverse groupings — Root 97 and the festival following; the RIBA and Hull School of Architecture; the Cheltenham Open Drawing Competition and new publics, colleges and schools; Coastwise Europe — a multi-media statement on large-scale collective collaboration; the Association of Illustrators making public their professional profile; and other individual presentations. All share in common the value a 'gallery' space conferred in creating a platform for exchange.
Susan Adams' Proposals for Saints — a collection of work generated whilst artist-in-residence at Gloucester Cathedral — is not comfortably or comfortingly contained. The dialogue is with walls and floors as oppressive and conservative forces of conformity.
Susan's 8 foot hangings share more with the jostling mobile moments of banners and carnival than with the stricture of gallery walls. Hangings and figures share also the schematic illusion of images generated to ape likeness but which also struggle to stabilise another reality.
Susan has recently been artist-in-residence in India and travelled in Mexico; for her the presence of commodified faith is not so strange. Though her work is touched by these, it is still generated in a Northern context. The suppression of overt manifestation vies with need to manufacture expression for notions like soul. Contemporary life-force filtered through long-established vocabularies does not produce harmony and easy assimilation. In a gallery the work is difficult, static and locked in an uncomfortable argument with what becomes oppressive gallery space. It is a location that obviously denies dialogue with the daily-life and rituals of Gloucester Cathedral, but also through its institutional weight insists on the dominance of the Academy above all else.
Kathie Jenkins
Curator/Manager
EICH Gallery
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