Alice Hawkins
All the world is a stage
23 May – 11 July 2009
Alice Hawkins moves between the worlds of fine art and fashion. This major exhibition of her work includes images taken across the last decade as well as specially commissioned new images.
Hawkins’s images are always portraits, and her sitters occupy a vast range of social situations and geographical locations. Some are produced for her fashion world employers, while others Hawkins has discovered through her own research. The photographer Nick Knight has described Hawkins’s work as capturing “the everyday burlesque”, the theatrical or outrageous in ‘ordinary’ life.
Hawkins’s photographs include celebrities, the rich and famous, and people who would normally never appear in a fashion photograph whether because of age, appearance, status or geography. Hawkins is led by her own ideas of beauty and glamour, which are often excluded from the space championed by the mainstream media. Hawkins’s role as a photographer has been to expand our understanding of what is desirable or interesting, and to bring new subjects and situations into fashion photography and the main stream.
The exhibition includes a new body of work on Blackpool entertainers. Organised in collaboration with Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland.
Collection
The good and the bad
or the loved and the unloved
23 May – 11 July 2009
This is the second instalment of an exhibition that brings together a diverse range of objects from Grundy’s permanent collection, placing works of disparate qualities within the same show. It highlights the complexities of the collection, which ranges from Victorian painting to Japanese ivory, and gifts from the Contemporary Art Society to gifts from the Blackpool Art Society.
Grundy’s collection preceded the building of its gallery spaces. In 1908 Blackpool Council received a bequest of thirty-three artworks from brothers John and Cuthbert Grundy on the condition that a gallery be built to house it. The gallery opened in 1911. A purchase fund for new artworks was set up in 1912, and the collection now contains close to two thousand objects.
The collection was originally built through the efforts of Council dignitaries and the generosity of individuals. The lack of an acquisitions policy until relatively recently meant that the collection grew organically rather than strategically and it contains an eclectic mix of objects, which include works by amateur artists, as well as works of recognised historical importance.
By bringing the objects together in this way, the exhibition disregards the orthodox curatorial values of the collection and instead presents a platform upon which to allow its viewers an opportunity to determine their own values on the works on show.
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