Photographer Morwenna Grace Kearsley on her solo show: Apparatus
We spoke with photographer and former Govanhill artist-in-residence Morwenna Kearsley about Apparatus, her first major-scale solo exhibition at Strange Field – the old Dalmarnock print factory on French Street.
Words and photos by James McAleer
I meet Morwenna Kearsley in mid-afternoon the day before the launch of Apparatus, her new solo show at Strange Field’s gallery space at French Street. Morwenna worked with Greater Govanhill on the Fonds project during a two year community-based residency in Govanhill with Street Level Photoworks. Fonds documented evocative objects that people hold dear: a plaster, a wooden fish, a homemade holder for a snooker cue, each object set against luxurious, rippling fabric. As she walks me through the show (despite the looming launch, I find Morwenna generous and unhurried), I’m surprised by that same visual signature.
“A little nod to my last project with Greater Govanhill magazine. ” Morwenna confirms. The fabric is a royal purple, the object a light-splitting prism. “I just wanted to make a little bridge between [solo work and] the other side of my practice, which is participatory.”
As with those in Fonds, the choice of object is meaningful. “Light,” as Morwenna tells it, “is like the other author of the show”. In one work, a print titled Reflector, she invited light, normally an unwelcome guest, into the development process. “I'd make my print in the dark. You're doing it all by hand, just these ritualised actions. I’d roll it up like a baton. And then I have to walk down the corridor, which has got red lights on it, to put it in the colour machine.
“Normally you would put a lightproof bag round it. But instead I walked down the corridor and twirled it like a baton. And these – she points to streaks on the print “are the light leaks coming in. A couple of seconds, right. Again, it's like inviting the light to react with the pictures.”
Informed by a research project which focused on the industrial manufacture of albumen papers in the 19th century, Apparatus ‘centres around the tools and materials that make photography possible and the meaning we assign to our experiences through a system of signs and symbols’.
It is playful and surreal, disruptive and collaborative. The hues are very beautiful, sunset colours with an acetate quality. The show’s title emphasises the physicality of photography – tripods, box cameras, as well as Morwenna’s sculptural concerns. There’s something in apparatus, too, of the word apparition, and like an apparition the works in Apparatus flit over boundaries, interrupt linear, procedural approaches to the craft of photography. Once the borders of a print are literally torn ragged.
A body is scattered throughout like a deconstructed collage, eyes, palms, profiles split and interrupted and refracted in prisms; a surreal approach with which Morwenna consciously places herself in a feminist tradition dating back to the 1920s. The staging of two works, Camera Body and Mask, effectively dislocate her head from its shoulders, where it has been replaced by the larger than life cyclop’s eye of a medium-format camera (more than once, Morwenna fuses artist and apparatus, and when she specifies the titular Mask as one of death, she’s only half-joking) . Duplicates of Locus, a sculpted hand, disembodied, fingers partly closed, literally point the way to French Street from billboards on Duke Street and West Graham.
Images repeat in different sizes, different formats: I find them hung at different heights or almost sprawled on the floor. As Morwenna says, when working with a medium which is out in the world in so many different ways, “moving between all these different formats, sizes, between looking into images and looking at images”, changes the pace of encounter.I find it fluid, motion yes, and rest, too.
Morwenna describes herself as a process-based artist: for her, the work of photography takes place as much in the darkroom as behind the lens. Another reason she works with analogue photography is “because it invites some chance elements. I'm excited when I see an image because I don't know exactly how it's going to turn out. And I enjoy that” she says. “It keeps it fresh for me.”
The exhibition is situated on the ground floor of Strange Field and runs Saturday 2nd until Sunday 24th November, open 12-5pm Wednesday to Sunday, with late openings til 7pm every Thursday.
APPARATUS will also take place across the city, where in partnership with Jack Arts, works from the project will populate sites across Glasgow, including their West Graham Street lightboxes. This relationship between photography within the public space, and the history of the billboard advertisement seen through a feminist lens is explored through these site specific works and mirrored in the large scale photographic work housed within French Street.
