Walking along College Lane, the busy shopper catches a glimpse through the windows of a large moving crab, a strange thing to experience in the city centre along with an artistic chair, which looks inviting to sit on, while “Ferment”, “Hiccup” and “Craft” stand out in bold coloured letters on the wall in which a small doorway leads to the garden beyond. In the heart of the bustling shopping area, the oldest surviving building in Liverpool’s city centre houses the most contemporary art.
In the nineteenth century, Liverpool was second only to London as a centre for contemporary art in England with the Liverpool Academy’s annual exhibitions, continued by Liverpool Town Council after the Academy closed down in 1867. Today, the city is home to the John Moores Painting prize (which has been running for 60 years) and the Liverpool Biennial Festival of Contemporary Art. This ongoing relationship with contemporary art is explored in two current exhibitions at the Walker Gallery – “Pre-Raphaelites – Beauty and Rebellion” and a show of past winners of the John Moores prize as a taster for the 2016 competition.
It’s hard today to think of Liverpool as a small medieval town with a port that was second to its larger neighbour Chester. The growth in the town that started in the mid-seventeenth century with increased trade to the Americas and West Indies accelerated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1700 the population had grown to 6000 and by 1800 it was 80,000. In 1699 Liverpool became a separate parish and was allowed its own customs authority, in 1715 the first commercial enclosed wet dock in the world was constructed with a capacity of 100 ships and in 1725 the Bluecoat School’s new building was opened at the then huge cost of £2,300.
The building has survived threats of demolition when the school moved to a larger site in 1906 and in the 1940’s for a proposed inner ring road that never materialised, along with a serious fire during the Second World War. In the 1900’s it became home to the Liverpool School of Architecture and the Sandon Studios Society with the Bluecoat Society of Arts established in 1927 “to preserve the building for its architectural value and to establish a centre for the arts”.
These organisations brought new artists to Liverpool including Claude Monet in 1908, Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne and Van Gogh as part of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1911 and Yoko Ono in 1967, along with performances by Stravinsky, Michael Nyman and Doris Lessing.
Now the oldest building in central Liverpool, Bluecoat was renovated in 2005-2008 with a new modern extension designed by BIQ Architecten to improve accessibility and provide modern performance and gallery spaces in a contemporary brick and copper building that also provides a strong visual connection between the exhibition spaces inside and the street outside.
Three exhibitions are currently on show which by clever curatorship and grouping of the individual artists blend seamlessly together.
In “Left Hand to Back of Head”, curator Adam Symthe uses film, video, sculpture, installation and light from several artists that connect art to science, emotion and the environment around the artist and the viewer with a strong connection to performance which is supported through the exhibition by a parallel programme of events. The crab seen through the window is part of Hannah James’ installation “The Wrestler and the Crab” where the voice of an Iranian student with his uncertainty of the English language is played along with a video of a crab which is also uncertain about its unusual environment. Mary Hurrell’s “VOCAPELT” uses light and sound to create a performance in which the viewer becomes both actor and audience while Marie Toseland’s “Pushin’ Somthin’ Nice (Feat. Kinlaw)” has videos and objects which communicate together without words behind PVC curtains, asking the viewer to fill in the gaps.
Niamh O’Malley’s has her first major solo show in a UK public gallery with new sculptural works that respond to the gallery’s architecture while, in the performance area which rises all the way up the building, Melissa Gordon is showing the second part of her project which combines painting and performance with “Material Evidence” hung on unfinished plasterboard walls that suggest that both the paintings and the exhibition have yet to be finished and viewers should therefore add their own Interpretation to what is yet to come.
Bluecoat is a great discovery to find in the centre of the city, showing the most modern art in Liverpool’s oldest building – a happy combination.
