‘Laurence Kavanagh: October’, Gallery North, Newcastle, 21 October – 13 November 2015
Solo exhibition realised as part of the Warwick Stafford Fellowship at Baltic 39, Newcastle
I spent time at the Star and Shadow cinema co-operative in Newcastle.This cinema was closing in order to relocate. On one level it operated like any other arthouse cinema with themed seasonal screenings. The cinema also operated as a place of experimentation for the creative community in the city with anologue chemical processing and projecting equipment existing alongside digital forms of film production. As well as the collection of projection screens ranging from domestic to full cinema scale, furniture, projection equipment, floors, walls, ceilings were used as sites of experimentation.
This site was of interest to me because it offered a breaking down of the usual formal relationship we have to cinema. Working with the site of the Star and Shadow gave me an opportunity to work with ideas of expanded cinema and expanded sculpture. A physical response to a language of images that was quickly becoming assigned to history, with projection equipment and screens falling into disrepair and a crumbling environment. It felt like this was quite literally collapsing in on me. Importantly, it was a co-operative, a collective response to images.
I treated all surface in the building without a sense of hierarchy, developing a frottage technique to make a series of semi relief sculptures. The largest work from this series, shown here, was a layering and embedding of paper casts of all the now defunct projection screens given to me by the Star and Shadow, amalgamated into one suspended object. These liminal spaces made a sculptural form with an implied mass, weight and depth.
