Identity, memory and experience

Placed  includes new and recent works by Nancy Daykin, Mark Duffy, David Loftus, Marlene Rösch, Sumire Sakuma, Lauren Shakespeare, Annie Weatherley, and Freddy Williams. The exhibition explores the complex and multifaceted notion of place, investigating how it shapes identity, memory, and experience.

Within the exhibition each of the artists reflect on their own relationship to place; whether, personal, political, or cultural, to interrogate the ways in which place can be experienced, understood, and redefined. Weaving together a diverse range of references including queer experience and identity, nationhood, memory and community, the exhibition is also a collective enquiry into how the act of exhibition making mirrors and diverges from the mechanisms of placemaking itself. 

The artists

Annie Weatherley said: "I am really proud of how the team has worked cohesively on this exhibition, bringing together a diverse range of ideas of what it means to be placed."

Through the art of papermaking, Annie recycles her diaries into handmade paper reliefs that document her lived experience of place and memory. Led by themes of cycles, her current work is inspired by cell regeneration, thinking of the paper like skin, shedding and decaying through the shredding and pulping process, then renewing and growing through screening and casting. Her artwork depicts abstract bodily forms, in which she interjects the texture’s surface with painted soil mark-making and collage.

Nancy Daykin’s work is informed by water as a connector of bodies, across time and place. In the run up to Placed, their desires have been focused on a medieval Cumbrian sluice gate and ideas of transmission, mediation and control. 

Mark Duffy is an Irish artist working across multiple disciplines including installation, photography, collage and performance. Duffy’s artworks explore issues of politics, power and national identity. His artistic practice seeks recurring motifs through which to suggest alternative narratives on political phenomena. Duffy formerly worked as photographer for the Houses of Parliament (2015-2019) during which his photojournalism characterised many memorable front pages.

David Loftus is a painter who explores personal memory and shared history, and ways in which he can engage with this through material discipline. His practice uses analogue approaches realised in tandem through use of digital mediums. Loftus invites viewers to reflect upon the intricate relationship between the past and the present, emphasising the multitude of interpretations and the profound influence of memory in our contemporary society.

By bringing together different media such as video, photography, sculpture and text, Marlene Rösch attempts to reflect something of the complexity and contradictions of being in the world.  Subject and object or observer and actor are not independent of each other but are in constant interaction with each other. Inside and outside worlds are mutually dependent. In Placed, she explores the world that passes through her from the perspective of bins. A search for the spaces and places in the in-between, where the separation of supposed opposites such as those between artificiality and naturalness, human and object, landscape and city, day and night, inner and outer worlds dissolve.

For Sumire Sakuma, the act of making is a journey through the past and present—an ongoing exploration that is deeply personal yet seeking to connect with the universal. Taking shape through sculpture, installation, performance, and more, her process begins with fragments of the everyday and materials from her surroundings, unfolding without adherence to a fixed form of expression. To her, it is a kind of poetry that does not rely solely on words.

Lauren Shakespeare is a figurative artist who works with acrylic paints on canvas and wood panel to explore their experiences as a queer person within Newcastle's alternative scene. Shakespeare uses self-portraiture and religious iconography to blur the public and private moments of club bathrooms and smoking areas. Their practice portrays the high and low emotional moments of a night out through paintings.

As the ties that that once bound rural North Wales unravel, Freddy Williams considers the fading concept of community and connection to nature, place and each other. Drawing on the language of protest, found objects and elements of classic landscape imagery, he invites the viewer to reflect on what lies beneath the rural idyll.

Placed is on show between 21 and  29 March at Slugtown, 44 Wretham Place, Newcastle, NE2 1XU.

Press release adapted with thanks to Slugtown