Expanded Interiors Restaged

Catrin Huber, a visual artist and Professor in Fine Art at Newcastle University, will re-stage her striking geometric artworks. She will also introduce new pieces in physical and digital formats, setting the installations in a fresh conversation with the architecture of the Hatton Gallery, and incorporating an incredible real-time 3D environment that will enable visitors to virtually ‘walk around’ ancient houses in Herculaneum and Pompeii. The exhibition will also include a brand-new commission by fellow Newcastle-based artist, Rosie Morris.

The large-scale installations incorporate replica 3D-printed Roman artefacts that are integrated and re-assembled within the contemporary setting. Artefacts recreated include statues of Roman women, face cups and oil lamps. As with Roman wall paintings, the exhibition conjures up a balance between real and imagined space, inside and outside space, and the past and present, creating a dramatic succession of rooms that contrast and link with each other.

Art and history lovers in the North East will now be able to explore these themes in a city and region that boasts a wealth of Roman sites, from Hadrian’s Wall and Roman forts such as Vindolanda, Arbeia South Shields Roman Fort and Segedunum Roman Fort, to aspects of Newcastle itself.

Reconnecting Newcastle and ancient Rome via a time just before Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79AD, Expanded Interiors includes an interactive 3D digital artwork that virtually recreates Huber’s three installations, originally presented within the Roman houses in Herculaneum and Pompeii. The 3D digital artwork features several audio pieces, one of which is a fictional dialogue between a female Roman wall painter and Huber.

Rosie Morris’ atmospheric new commission for Expanded Interiors Re-Staged brings a theatricality to the experience of crossing spatial thresholds. She has playfully reimagined a small, dimly lit space, with domestic-scale illusions of incisions and openings. Borrowing from the principles of Roman Wall painting, Morris’ installation negotiates an exchange between the viewer, the artist, and real and imagined space, as well as multiple visual languages including colour, painting, drawing, photography, light, filmic projection and dioramas.