The Northern Print biennale art tour

by David Whetstone, The Journal

IF you are looking for a new excuse to tour Newcastle on foot, the current Northern Print Biennale is a very good one.

It’s the most extensive print exhibition in the country for 20 years and it’s spread across three city venues – the Hatton Gallery, in the quadrangle at Newcastle University, the Laing Art Gallery and Northern Print on Stepney Bank in the Ouseburn Valley.

First you must ignore the voice in your head telling you these places are miles apart. For the fit and able-bodied, they really aren’t – as I proved to myself when I did the circuit in the interests of a review.

I began at the Hatton, whose third of the exhibition closes first, on August 15.

Here I quickly grasped the second thing you must get out of your head – the idea that prints are all paper-based framed images on walls.

The brief to artists from around the world before the inaugural Northern Print Biennale was that a broad definition had been applied to the word ‘print’.

Here you will find one room dominated by Between The Two, an installation by Cornwall-based Graham Guy-Robinson, which resembles a pair of barriers put up by workmen to stop the public falling into a hole or wet cement.

The two perforated friezes, each held upright by steel rods, show people from the knees down, walking or pushing buggies. Daryl Waller’s appealingly punkish, ‘in-yer-face’ trio of prints, one bearing a rude word which necessitates a warning sign, are accompanied by a digital film called The Fall of Tom, which shows a figure in a helmet being struck by arrows and falling over.

It was made in 2005 and the helmet looks like a bucket but it’s oddly affecting, like Agincourt reconstructed in your back yard.

Also noteworthy is an inkjet digital print called Beatles, by Richard Hamilton, the pop art pioneer who taught at Newcastle University in the 1960s under Victor Pasmore and whose students included Bryan Ferry.

Also defying our 2D assumptions about print is Abacus Keyboard, a beautiful little white object with 11 rows of printed glass beads bearing the keyboard symbols. It is the work of Yi Peng, who studied in Beijing and is now based in Sunderland.

London-based Elizabeth Magill won one of the Northern Print Biennale prizes for her set of three lithographs showing faintly disturbing rural scenes.

From here, the Laing is just a short walk down John Dobson Street and there you will find more assumption-busting wonders, among which, Finlay Taylor’s East Dulwich Dictionary takes the Biennale biscuit.

It is described as “dictionary, decomposed and eaten by snails for six months”. Despite the Laing’s expensive atmospheric controls, it’s getting a bit flaky; but it is the ultimate rejoinder to anyone who might accuse the judges of being too narrow in their entry criteria.

There is a large installation by David Osbaldeston, featuring a semi-constructed kiosk emblazoned with posters in garish, students’ union-type colours.

Helpfully, there is a poster which puts the installation in an historical context, summoning up the ghosts of Bauhaus luminary Herbert Bayer, Wyndham Lewis of the Vorticist movement and the woodblock followers of Thomas Bewick, whose own exhibition can be seen next door.

By contrast, Louise Bourgeois – born in Paris in 1911 and still working in her adopted home of New York – is history personified, although her series of 11 drypoint prints are probably not as simple as they appear at first glimpse.

Another prize-winner was Emma Stibbon for Abandoned Whaling Station, Deception Island. It is a large woodcut print on Japanese paper, meticulously detailed and full of pathos.

The Friends of the Laing Art Gallery know what they like. Their special prize goes to Tadcaster-based Glynis Mills for four charming woodcut images of boys swimming with horses.

In accompanying statements, we learn that Glynis rejects “all forms of pretentiousness” and “combines attention to detail with a strong urge to represent her surroundings honestly”.

Turn left out of the Laing, take the spiral staircase to cross the Central Motorway and it’s a 15-minute brisk walk at most to Northern Print headquarters, where you will find the final part of the Biennale jigsaw.

The first thing you might see is Barton Hargreaves’s In Situ (Newcastle), a life-sized digital print on aluminium displayed outside.

Inside you’ll find the work of the Biennale’s overall £5,000 winner, Brussels-based Wenhai Zhang, who was born in Shanghai in 1981. I assumed the images from his Embryo portfolio were fingerprints but they are actually cuttlefish.

I was much more taken with Alec Finlay’s pieces, which cry out to be called bird boxes, although that conveys quite the wrong image.

Arranged in a colony, they are little box-shaped images of birds, beautifully and brightly coloured. Not for sale, sadly.

Still, not far away is a piece that is up for grabs if you’ve got a spare £22,500. That’s the price for an unframed copy of American Jim Dine’s five-panel etching, published in an edition of 11, The Five Hammer Etudes (literally studies of five hammers). It’s a really nice piece of work but dwarfed by the price tag, which earns it the distinction of being the most expensive exhibit in a show where most prices are not sky high.

The Laing and Northern Print elements of the Northern Print Biennale run until October 4.

All in all, it’s a wonderful exhibition with a lot to love, to admire, to query and even to scoff at. It’s what print, so often regarded as painting’s poor relation, probably needs. Let’s hope it develops and grows.

And if you want even more stop off points on your artistic walking tour, you could also take in the Northumbria University Gallery, the Art Works Galleries and the Biscuit Factory. There are lots of refreshment points along the way and you will end up feeling better.

There is a website but I’ll only pass it on if you promise not to do a virtual tour instead. It’s www.northernprint.org.uk/biennale .

Pictured above right: Artist Barton Hargreaves with his In Situ (Newcastle) work displayed outside the Northern Print gallery.

Pictured above: Gallery assistant Lorna MacKay with a piece by artist Graham Guy-Robinson called 'Between the Two'