Event type: Exhibition

The Bluecoat Display Centre are delighted to announce a selling exhibition of new work by talented north west sculptors Emma Rodgers and Johnny Vegas, which will run from 3 May – 15 June 2024.

St Helens-based comedian Johnny Vegas is perhaps best known for his surreal sense of humour, however he originally trained in art and ceramics at the university of Middlesex. during the covid pandemic, Johnny found solace in creativity, and three decades after he graduated, he returned to the studio following a chance encounter with Wirral-based sculptor Emma Rodgers. together, they have created new works inspired by themes of flight and metamorphosis.

“Confrontation, energy, curiosity, essence of a moment and interaction are the main elements that initially draw me to a new subject and are indicative of the very nature of the animals I have depicted.

“When approaching a new body of work i produce a large amount of visual research. sketching is particularly important as it provides me with a greater understanding of the form. I aim to interpret these drawn qualities into clay and remove the work from pure representation. a jagged line in ink is re-interpreted as a torn clay edge; an arc of soft pencil becomes a soft fold. the energy of the animal and the tautness of the pose are conveyed by a distortion in the medium.” – Emma Rodgers

“Currently, flight, faith, fear of failure and broken/tested faith, are the subjects most fluent in my work. emotional evolution and how best i can express that in 2d or 3d forms. a thought process, be it linked to hope or fear, captured in time. I’ve a head full of butterflies and all of them designed with unique intentions of distraction from the task at hand. when i think to exhibit i’m compelled to try and recreate in clay or oil what I’ve caught in my net that day… before it is once more set free to distract me from the hurried and sometimes ill constructed expectations of normality.” – Johnny Vegas

This exhibition is presented in partnership with the walker art gallery, who will showcase an installation organised by nicola scott, curator of decorative arts, of new works by emma and johnny inspired by the walker’s collections and exploring ideas of mental or physical transformation.

‘Metamorphosis’ will be on display at the Walker Art Gallery from 30 April 2024 – 31 March 2025.

Iconic works from the Tate collection turn the humble brick into the hero in Brickworks, a new display featuring works from the Tate collection at the gallery space at RIBA North.

Shown in Liverpool, a city known for its iconic brick warehouses and the first red brick university, Brickworks is a small display showcasing the transformative power of bricks in art.

Featuring sculpture, photography and works on paper from the Tate Collection, this show explores the many ways in which this material has been used to make art. Brickworks highlights how everyday materials can be transformed by artists to convey meaning and messages and can play an important role in our society.

One of the most famous British paintings is to be displayed at Birkenhead’s Williamson Art Gallery & Museum.

LS Lowry’s masterpiece Going to the Match has left its home at The Lowry, Salford and is currently on a tour of five North West venues. The Williamson is the only venue on Merseyside the painting is visiting.

Going to the Match, painted in 1953, is LS Lowry’s best-known and most popular picture. Although he painted football-themed scenes before and after this date it is Going to the Match which has become iconic – an enduring representation of what match day means to fans. The painting features Burnden Park, the original home of Bolton Wanderers Football Club. That year, the Football Association, celebrating its 90th anniversary, had launched a competition called ‘Football and the Fine Arts’ and Lowry’s painting beat 1,700 entries to win first prize.

Going to the Match will be displayed at the Williamson along with a selection of other works by L S Lowry loaned from The Lowry, Salford and private collections, showing lesser-known sides to the artist’s work and his approach. Also on display will be a selection of work from the Williamson’s own collections. These artworks will provide a broader survey of Northern art and artists, examining how Lowry sits within a wider context. They also explore how working-class leisure pursuits, and what they mean to their communities, have been portrayed from the mid-twentieth century to today.

This hugely important and much-loved work of art had been on public display at The Lowry, Salford since it opened in 2000, courtesy of a loan by the then owners the Professional Footballers Association (PFA). However, following the decision by the PFA in 2022 to sell Going to the Match, there were no guarantees that any future owners would share the commitment to keeping the work on public view and free to access.

Following a high-profile campaign, Going to the Match was purchased by The Lowry in Salford for The Lowry Collection at the Modern British & Irish Art Sale at Christie’s in London in October 2022, thanks to the generous support of The Law Family Charitable Foundation.

Supported by a £95,000 grant from Arts Council England through its National Lottery Project Grants programme and additional support from The Sir Bobby Charlton Foundation, the tour means that this iconic painting can be enjoyed by the widest possible audience across the region.

The exhibition will run from 19^th April – 27^th July.

Michelle Williams Gamaker: Our Mountains are Painted on Glass
Friday 3rd May – Sunday 30th June

Through her practice British-Sri Lankan artist Michelle Williams Gamaker explores race, identity, her love of cinema and the power of storytelling.

Known for her inventive filmmaking and screenwriting, Williams Gamaker draws on and celebrates the classic movies she watched growing up, and takes inspiration from early Hollywood and British cinema. The exhibition at Bluecoat will screen Thieves, a fantasy adventure retelling of The Thief of Bagdad. The Thief of Bagdad, a silent, black and white film from 1924, was remade in colour in 1940.

Williams Gamaker reimagines the marginalised characters as claiming leading roles in her film, played in the originals by Chinese-American actor Anna May Wong and Indian-born American actor Sabu. Now, both characters reclaim the story as their own, challenging the racial discrimination of the film industry. Told as a movie within a movie, in Thieves Anna May Wong is found on set by Sabu, but there is something wrong: she is in black-and-white while everything else is in Technicolor, and both find themselves trapped in their screen-images. Both must navigate the structural violence on set (in this case, the casting of white actors to replace actors of colour) by joining forces to overthrow the set and those in charge.

Thieves is a vivid retelling, blending classic analogue methods with contemporary practices. The artist celebrates the best of past and present filmmaking and shares her love of cinema through the stories she unpicks.

Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass was co-commissioned by South London Gallery and DCA.

Award winning moving image artist Michelle Williams Gamaker (b.1979, London) has developed Fictional Activism to interrogate 20th Century cinema, by retelling the histories of marginalised actors and by proposing critical alternatives to colonial storytelling in British and Hollywood studio films.

She is joint winner of Film London’s Jarman Award (2020) and has an extensive national and international profile, including prestigious BFI London Film Festivals (2017, 2018, 2021), Aesthetica (winner of Best Experimental Film, 2021, 2023) and LSFF (2022, 2024). Recent exhibitions include Our Mountains Are Painted on Glass at South London Gallery and Dundee Contemporary Arts (2023), I Multiply Each Day, Gus Fisher Gallery, Auckland (2021), The Whitechapel London Open 2022, Like There is Hope and I Can Dream of Another World at Hauser & Wirth and a major public commission Springfield Eternal in the atrium of Springfield Hospital for charity Hospital Rooms (2023).

Williams Gamaker’s work is in the Arts Council Collection, her films are distributed by LUX and her entire filmography has been recognised and preserved by the BFI National Film Archive. She is a Studio Artist at Gasworks, where she is also trustee. Williams Gamaker is Reader in BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is currently a British Academy Wolfson Fellow. She champions emerging artists, most recently as Selector for the prestigious John Moore’s Painting Prize (2020) and Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021.