National Glass Centre

Four arts organisations will be representing the North East of England at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

The initiative, led by The National Glass Centre at the University of Sunderland, brings together the Laing Art Gallery, Locus+ and mima, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, with Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea in Venice to present “Interloqui”, an exhibition coinciding with the 54th Venice Biennale of Art.
 
Each of the four organisations has been invited to select artists that represent their own specialities:
 
Paul Noble (selected by the Laing Art Gallery) will be showing his large-scale villa joe wool tapestry that was until recently the centrepiece of his “Paul Noble Marble Hall” installation at the Laing along with some of his recent work in ceramics, collaborating with Italian artist Flavio Favelli on their presentation in Venice.
 
Cerith Wyn Evans has been commissioned by Locus+ to create Permit yourself… (2011) a glass panel mirror engraved with text from an essay by Stephan Pfohl which is being created at The National Glass Centre.
 
Neil Brownsword (selected by mima) will be showing Transition, a ceramic installation of five low plinths with ceramic objects that reflects upon the decline of British ceramic manufacturing in the artist’s home town of Stoke-on-Trent, by re-inscribing industrial waste from the factories with a beauty that references the decorative traditions that brought this industry world domination.
 
Rose English (selected by The National Glass Centre) will be showing STORYBOARD, an archive of her ongoing research Lost in Music a part of which, Flagrant Wisdom, exploring the parallels and dynamism of glassmaking and Chinese acrobatics, was produced and shown at The National Glass Centre in 2009.
 
Claire Fontaine, in a collaboration between Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea and The National Glass Centre, will show La Société du Spectacle brickbat, a series of bricks wrapped in book covers from texts of radical literature, and Dignity Before Bread, a new work scripted in Arabic neon, created in response to the recent uprising in Tahrir Square, Cairo.
 
The exhibition will also feature work from mima’s permanent collection – Edmund de Waal’s The Thing in Itself and Lawrence Weiner’s preliminary sketches for his A line is a line for all that, a vinyl work that covering the 500msq glass façade of mima, conceived for the Drawing in Progress exhibition earlier this year.
 
“Interloqui” was conceived and curated by Grainne Sweeney, creative director of The National Glass Centre at the University of Sunderland.  It is supported by the Arts Council of England (North East), who regional director Alison Clark-Jenkins said: “Artistic innovation is at the heart of our Grants for the Arts funding programme, and we were delighted to support a project with such a high level of international artistic ambition.”