Firstsite: Lunar Lullabies

This summer, an exhibition inspired by the timeless poem The Star (more widely known as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) by writer Jane Taylor (1783-1824) will send space enthusiasts, young and old, on a cosmic odyssey.

Opening today at Firstsite in Colchester, the birthplace of Taylor and her poetic masterpiece, Lunar Lullabies, commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Essex writer's passing. It traces the artistic journey of Taylor's nursery rhyme and its profound influence on contemporary media, including comics, video games, and pop culture hits like Will Smith's "I'm Not a Star" and Nicki Minaj's "Starships."

The exhibition transforms the gallery into an immersive playscape of imagination and discovery, featuring interactive space objects, immersive extraterrestrial landscapes, and robot sculptures. Visitors are able to touch and discover objects ranging from meteorites and asteroid rocks to Lego Star Wars sets and bring their own cosmic creations to life.

Showcasing stunning artworks, historical artefacts and contemporary cultural nods, visitors discover how science, art and imagination have intertwined over the centuries to shape culture and our collective fascination with distant galaxies.

The exhibition is the result of a series of workshops with Firstsite youth programme YAK and families participating in Firstsite's innovative Holiday Fun programme – where they provide families facing financial challenges with fun, free days out full of art and sport along with a free family meal. YAK members and Holiday Fun families have made their own work, alongside producing collaborative artworks with commissioned artists.

The exhibition features a range of books and poetry by Taylor and her sister Ann to kick off a journey through the next 200 years.

The Star became hugely successful and a mainstay of childhood imagination, in part because of the etchings of the nursery rhyme. This art technique was impacted by science and space visions. A range of 19th-century etchings of comets in the night sky features in the exhibition.

There are a wide array of multimedia projects on display, all connecting space with the imagination. These include fantastical futuristic spaceship animation rooms by Mark Garlick, paintings of space rockets that move when viewed, and a ceramic work by British icon Grayson Perry with Alien Baby (2008) inspired by a maternity ward that he likened to a spaceship.

The work of Colchester-based Peter Elson (1947-1988), an illustrator who spent a career bridging childhood wonder of space with explorations of the future, is prominently featured. Decades of science fiction paperbacks from the 20th century have Elson's renderings on the cover, featuring planets, spaceships and star systems. Hugely influential on a new generation of sci-fi depicters, with brightly coloured backgrounds and sleek designs, he has been widely credited for providing the visual aesthetic to early video game productions in the 1990s.

Contemporary artists also show how the artistic obsession with what lies beyond the Earth's sky continues today. Essex-based artist Jackie Burns is a Fellow of the International Association for Astronomical Artists; her earlier works include science fiction book cover designs, and throughout her career, she has created work based on the scientific reality of space travel, such as through portraits of astronaut Tim Peake, as well as popular culture imagery such as characters from Star Wars. Burns led some of the workshops to develop the exhibition and her depiction of one of the most iconic spaceships in human history will feature; the one that fulfilled Blake's dreaming and took humankind onto the moon. The acrylic work Saturn V, Apollo 11, on Crawler to Launchpad 39A consists of different-sized circles of various colours that slowly reveal the image the longer you look.

In the 21st century, artists can now be found alongside scientists working towards space exploration, and the exhibition includes a number of paintings produced by British artist Matthew Turner during his residency at NASA.

A number of artists whose practices have developed at Firstsite will also be featured. The futuristic Colchester landscapes of local artist and Level Best alumni Henry Linstead will be shown, as well as work by those who attend Holiday Fun, including models of science fiction and gaming figures by the artist known as 'S' whose room installation which features over 1000 models, will immerse visitors into a world of dinosaurs and creatures whose fate was changed by an asteroid from space.

In total, the exhibition features over 100 artefacts and more than 100 artworks, the majority by artists from East Anglia, which explore our need for discovery, from the dreaming and wonderings of poets to the reality of scientific endeavour. Through a changing programme during the exhibition run, art and content from community groups and activities will also be on display. With this ambitious approach, Lunar Lullabies at Firstsite charts how the first nursery rhymes laid the foundations for the current stories that can be found in today's comics, video games and consciousness, with Colchester at the centre.

Firstsite Director Sally Shaw says, "Lunar Lullabies shows the true power of art and creativity—charting the journey from Jane Taylor's imagination in 1806 to the realities of scientific exploration today. By combining art and science, the exhibition brings STEAM to the heart of Colchester, using art as a method of learning and discovery to help us connect with the science of space exploration in a meaningful way.

"Working with local families and young people to make this exhibition has brought new voices and ideas, which are reflected in the vibrant and diverse selection of works – some which will spark nostalgia and others which will immerse you in a whole new futuristic world. Most importantly, this approach has created a really fun, inclusive space where our visitors can let their imaginations run wild!

“We hope Lunar Lullabies will inspire everyone to explore their creativity, with the knowledge that something imagined today may spark a creative chain reaction that ignites future explorations and discoveries, much like Jane Taylor's influence has done for centuries."

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Electric Light Orchestra - Mr Blue Sky.

Norman Adams @ Marle Place Gardens & Gallery

In Brenchley, near Tonbridge in Kent, Marle Place is a peaceful, privately owned Wealden garden, ten acres of formal planting and many more acres of woodland and orchard. It is a plantman and artist's garden, featuring a Victorian gazebo, Edwardian rockery and walled fragrant garden. A restored 19th century greenhouse with orchid collection, a mosaic terrace and ornamental ponds. The 17th century house with a massive chimney is of architectural interest, but not open.

The Gallery houses varied exhibitions throughout the season by contemporary painters, sculptors, potters and makers, on show and for sale. The current exhibition is Norman Adams RA: Spirit in the Garden. The exhibition consists of nine large watercolours all painted in the last 15 years of Adams' life. The exhibition examines the symbolism of Adams' abstract works and the origin of these forms in the emotional intensity of these religious and spiritual paintings. Adams' vast watercolours are alive, saturated, even baptised, with colour and passion.

This exhibition is part of a larger group of exhibitions called Cross Purposes and instigated by Mascalls Gallery, which includes Santiago Bell, Susan Shaw, Maggie Hambling and Craigie Aitchison. Centering on Chagall's drawings for the windows of nearby Tudeley which are coming to the UK for the first time, this exhibition explores the uses of the crucifixion by a broad range of artists featuring the work of many artists including Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland, and Eric Gill. The exhibition addresses both meditative religious works as well as more horrific secular works. The exhibition tours to Ben Uri Gallery, London's Jewish Museum of Art. To listen to a review of this on Radio 3's Night Waves click here to go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00rpwkh/Night_Waves_Ideas_Election_Maggi_Hambling/

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Brian Kennedy - Hollow.

Cross Purposes (2)

Cross Purposes is not only an excellent survey of crucifixion images found primarily in Modern British Art but is also an exploration of the extent to which the crucifixion has become a universal image of significance to those who do not hold the Christian faith.

The principal means by which this issue is explored is through the inclusion of work by the Jewish artists, Marc Chagall and Emmanuel Levy. Chagall provided the initial impetus for the exhibition through the proximity to Mascalls Gallery of Tudeley Church, the only Church in the world with a full set of stained glass by Chagall (see photographs above).

Their crucifixions, which include Chagall's previously unknown ‘Apocalypse en Lilas, Capriccio’, emphasise the Jewishness of the crucified Christ and equate his suffering to that of the Jewish people throughout their history and, particularly, during the holocaust. These paintings, therefore, are not based on and do not seek to explore the Christian doctrine of the Atonement but gain much of their force and power by deviating from that doctrine and would not exists or have the resonance that they do possess without it. These are images therefore that universalise the image of the crucifixion by exploring its resonance outside of the specifics of the Christian faith but which rely on the particularity of Christian usage of the image in order to give these wider uses their emotive power.

Another approach is seen in an image by Scottish artist R Hamilton Blyth. Here a broken and hollow crucifix hangs from a cross set in a shattered wartime landscape. This is not a depiction of Christ's crucifixion but instead the destruction of all that has stemmed from it; the end of Christendom and the failure of Christian faith in the face of worldwide conflict. Again, Hamilton Blyth's image moves outside of Christian understandings of atonement but depends on those understandings in order to do so.

What we see in these aspects of the Cross Purposes exhibition is the vital importance of understanding and valuing what the artist may ultimately seek to subvert or critique in order that that subversion or critique have relevance and resonance. This is also the way in which Susan Shaw's Dispersal, a linked exhibition at Capel Church, also works (see photographs above). Shaw's mass produced Virgins grouped on a pallet for distribution but located in a church as a worshipping collective raise issues of the commercialisation of religion and the religion of commerce but rely on the actual and emotive power that the image of the Virgin has had in Christianity in order to give the installation and the issues it raises their force.

In this way, the exhibition seems to demonstrate, all crucifixion images - whether subversions, explications or critiques - are predicated on the real and raw power that the crucifixion possesses within the Christian understanding and imagination.

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Julie Miller - How Could You Say No.

Cross Purposes

The Cross Purposes exhibition at Mascalls Gallery in Kent and then in June at Ben Uri examines how and why artists of different religions, or of none, use the crucifixion as a central motif in modern and contemporary practice.

Only five miles away from Mascalls Gallery is one of the UK’s finest examples of religious art and a moving example of the crucifixion as a 'conduit' for a very personal tragedy. The church in Tudeley is renowned internationally as the only church to have all its windows decorated by Marc Chagall which fulfilled a long term ambition of the artist. The windows were commissioned by the family of Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid as a commemoration of her tragic and untimely death. Chagall’s drawings for Tudeley Church are being seen for the first time in Britain at Mascalls Gallery courtesy of Centre Pompidou. Chagall’s previously unpublished and haunting ‘Apocalypse en Lilas, Capriccio’, will also be shown at both Mascalls and Ben Uri.

The 20th century has seen some of the most important and interesting depictions of the crucifixion interestingly in a time when the church’s influence waned measurably. One of the best known religious artists of our time was Graham Sutherland. Images from the concentration camps proved to be a catalyst for some of the most powerful depictions of the crucifixion. This exhibition shows a bloody and haggard Christ whose body bears witness to the “continuing beastliness and cruelty of mankind.”

The two world wars are represented in a number of works within the exhibition as artists look towards one of the few symbols that could contain the potency of their emotions. The 20 artists represented in the exhibition create narratives both of the artistic traditions of the time from Eric Gill to Maggie Hambling, Norman Adams and Tracey Emin and by doing so navigate a way through the major events of the century. The works show the crucifixion as both a symbol of shock and also as an object of contemplation: from the hollowed out scarecrow figure of Christ on the battlefield of Europe by Scottish artist R Hamilton Blyth to a rarely seen, life-size drawing of Duncan Grant’s crucifixion for Berwick Church in East Sussex.

The exhibition is curated by Nathaniel Hepburn. 5 March to 29 May 2010 at Mascalls Gallery, Maidstone Road, Paddock Wood, Kent. 15 June to 19 September at Ben Uri Gallery, The London Jewish Museum of Art. Other related exhibitions include: Easter Images: Maggi Hambling & Craigie Aitchison, 27 March - 6 April, The Kentish Barn, International Study Centre, Canterbury Cathedral; 1st April to 29th May, Norman Adams RA: Spirit in the Garden at Marle Place Gardens and Gallery; Susan Shaw - Dispersal, 5 March - 25 May, St Thomas a Becket, Capel, Tonbridge, Kent, TN12 6SX; Santiago Bell: Chilean woodcarver in exile, 5 March - 29 May, St Andrews Paddock Wood; From the Darkness ... light in contemporary art at St Peter's Church, Preston Park, Brighton, 1 May – 23 May.

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Sam Phillips - Where the Colours Don't Go.