Photography at UCLAN overlapped happily with social commentary in the work of Helen Stephens, who created portraits of young women aged 21-25 entitled ‘Adult Life’, and Mark Prescott who made touching composites of young teenagers on the thresholds of their homes and the places they like to hang out, all shot between 5 and 6pm as the boys returned home from school: the pieces had an engaging and charismatic flatness.
Christopher T. Finch showed a large scale photograph with portraits emerging in series that was both monolithic and playful.
UCLAN offers both ‘Drawing and Image Making’ and ‘Fine Art’, which perhaps suggests that contemporary Fine Art is so multi-disciplinary that other terms are required to describe a practice that is more contained and defined. Humble at first and with a rather dialogical bent, Yanive Waring’s juxtaposed photographs of dual cultures existing in the same space worked well. The artist spliced them carefully and consciously, mining the same vein that John Stezaker draws on in his work. Jonathan Pilkington’s ‘Road to Nowhere’ was a fantastic installation, showing the amorphous and blurred images we take for normal in surveillance, as well as beautifully rendered and presented drawings of careful noticings made during ‘site-specific bus journeys’, from fragments of buildings passed, to what always comes out tender: the back of a person’s head, the nape of a neck.
Georgina Burns’ subject was a new kind of snapshot; she painted small-scale and anonymous paintings (the faces are often washed out) of what are instantly recognizable as images taken from Facebook. Jean Alcorn made quiet and small-scale painings of lines of communication, telephone poles, which are images of a roaring silence, and reminiscent of Tennyson stopping under a telegraph post, “to listen to the wail of the wires, the souls of dead messages’. Amber Hewitt made really bizarre paintings showing both outlandish and banal scenes and details, all the stranger for the way she grouped the paintings together.
Alison Angior created pieces that used strategies of concealment and layering to evoke a very unusual experience of landscape. Combining myriad influences including Julian Opie, Paul Nash and Rothko, Angior aims to create ‘painting in a “printerly fashion, printing in a sculptural way”. Ange West combined anthropology with the found-object-as-sculpture, collecting objects that people had hoarded (sometimes for over 7 decades) and stories along the way. The artist unravelled the textiles, giving them a new form as well as a new context, writing of the “graphic quality of the unpicked yarn”. Peter Daviz painted modernist buildings in the style of the architect Philip Johnson and their curious limboed existence between exterior and interior. Angela Britton’s subject was bathos, and the descent from the sublime to the ridiculous, with the artist as subject – glamour degenerating to a rumpled loneliness.