Arts
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Wings of Time Shandy Hall, Coxwold
Arts editor, Pru Farrier, was invited to curate her own exhibition -
Here's Looking at You - at the Zillah Bell Gallery. In return, she asked the
gallery's John Bell to review a current exhibition
ONE of my favourite galleries is
hidden away at Laurence Sterne's
former home, Shandy Hall, which
in the last four years has mounted
shows by more than 20 Royal Academicians,
including Patrick
Caulfield, Peter Blake and Alison
Wilding, together with artists and
illustrators of the calibre of Patrick
Hughes, Andre Krauze (of The
Guardian) and cartoonist Martin
Rowson.
The theme of the present exhibition,
Wings of Time, is a passage
from Tristram Shandy beginning:
"Time wastes too fast ..." in which
Sterne's awareness that his life was
to be short is underlined by his
wish to live it to the full.
Central to the exhibition is a 15-
minute film by Thomas Newton,
who used his own ground-breaking
editing techniques on film shot
in Coxwold last year. The result is a
humorous, poignant and often
beautiful meditation on time,
landscape and human mortality.
The winding of St Michael's
Church clock by John Kendrew,
who has kept Coxwold accurate to
the second for the last 30 years, has
some magical effects on the surrounding
countryside: round haybales
rotate, road signs revolve and
a sundial disappears into an hourglass.
The film is brimful of memorable
and poetic images, such as a
stroboscopic flight of starlings or
the transformation of drops of dew
on a perfect spider's web into an elegant
ruby necklace.
Other artists have responded to
the theme in their own ways. Nigel
Hutchinson's mural on the ceiling
shows "light clouds of a windy
day"; Tom Phillips captures the
passage of time with a chronological
collection of picture postcards,
the same scene repeated over a
hundred years; in her installation
Dust to Dust, Carolyn Johnson has
taken every instance of the words
"you", "me" and "us" from Tristram
Shandy and exhibits them in a
showcase; while Les Coleman
takes a Zen approach in his mirror
which ticks like a clock, but tells no
time.
The exhibition is open every day
except Saturdays until June 23. The
film Wings of Time is available on
DVD. Catch it soon - life is short.
John Bell
1:16pm Friday 2nd May 2008
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