But Does it Speak?, the Bluecoat’s season of screenings, exhibitions and events exploring connections between writing, speech and the visual arts continues this spring with three new exhibitions. Joanne Masding’s The Movable Scene of the Page combines her written work with her sculptural practice, whilst Rowena Harris uses text, CGI and found footage in her 2023 film Long-Covid and the Culture of Disbelief. Showing alongside is Veronica Watson, who presents a series of portraits.
Joanne Masding: The Moveable Scene of the Page
Masding’s playful exhibition investigates how images, objects and words link together. Through a combination of sculpture, fictional writing and typography, Masding transforms the gallery into a space where language can mingle, collide and flow.
The exhibition presents new writing by Masding and follows her strategy of using fiction to explore the nature of objects, their physical properties and how they relate to us. In the gallery, visitors will explore sculptures made from metal, ceramic, plaster and shimmering textiles which are suspended from a series of elongated copper sculptures. Pages of Masding’s new works of fiction will hang from these copper frames, for visitors to tear off and read.
The Moveable Scene of the Page also features Masding’s new alphabet sculptures, inspired by, and in the shape of Monster Munch crisps. Masding’s ceramic letters become poetic sculptures, with phrases like “tongue tripping over a glazed ceramic marble” suggesting a collision of words and objects in our own bodies.
Fri 4 Apr - Sun 11 May
Rowena Harris: Long Covid and the Culture of Disbelief
Rowena Harris’s Long-Covid and the Culture of Disbelief is a single-channel film that explores the socio-cultural context of Long-Covid and ME (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis). The film, made over several years, draws on the artist’s personal experience of these related health conditions. It emerged as a film about ME before the pandemic, and then responsively evolved as Long-Covid emerged and took hold in the world and the artist’s body.
The film uses captions without an audible voice, to guide us through an examination of the history of ME. Taking us back to the 1950s when the disease was first studied and named, and then into the 1970s when it was reclassified as a psychological condition and linked to a misogynist idea of ‘hysteria’. The film asks us to consider this culture of disbelief in relation to Long-Covid.
Fri 4 Apr - Sun 11 May
All Together Now: Portraits by Veronica Watson
Veronica Watson has been chronicling the people who populate the Bluecoat for almost 20 years. As a founding member of Blue Room, the Bluecoat’s inclusive arts project, she has cast a steady eye over the ever evolving community of people who spend time working, volunteering and creating at the arts centre. Her portraiture practice has captured the likeness and spirit of many individuals through drawing and painting.
This accompanying exhibition features a selection of portraits of people connected with Blue Room and the Bluecoat, along with archive images of Watson’s long engagement with the arts centre.
Fri 4 Apr - Sun 4 May
The Bluecoat is also hosting a programme of events and workshops this Spring, including more Bluecoat After Hours creative sessions, Print Studio workshops, markets and more. Find out more below.
Funders and acknowledgements:
Joanne Masding, The Movable Scene of the Page at the Bluecoat is funded by Henry Moore Foundation.
The Bluecoat is funded by Arts Council England, Liverpool City Council, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and supported by Culture Liverpool.