Nick Evans / Lorna Macintyre. Ur Phenomenon

About

The project has been initiated in response to the work of Nicholas Pope who will simultaneously be exhibiting a series of new sculptures and drawings in the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art's (NGCA) other gallery as part of 'Baldock Pope Zahle'. The starting point for 'Ur Phenomenon' was Nick Evans' formative experience of seeing Pope's sculpture 'The Apostles Speaking in Tongues Lit by Their Own Lamps' (1993-96) at Tate gallery in the late Nineties as a student. Recalling the encounter recently, Evans invited Macintyre, in conversation with Pope, to take a series of photographs of the sculptor's house and studio in Herefordshire.

The silver gelatin prints are displayed alongside Evans' sculptures and studio ephemera, creating an environment that amplifies the shared affinities between each artist, filtered through the implied, if absent, work of Pope. By invoking the studio, the installation blurs the distinction between the privacy of production and the publicness of display. While Pope's work inspired a conversation between Macintyre and Evans, her documentation of his work remains oblique. She presents a portrait of an artist through an idiosyncratic landscape of objects as much as through their work. The lyrical photographs gesture towards his influence, forming a type of formal and conceptual reverberation across generations. The title of the exhibition is lifted from Hannah Arendt's introductory text to Walter Benjamin's 'Illuminations'. Arendt's quote below, served as inspiration, articulating the affinities between Macintyre and Evans' respective practices.

"...derived directly from the only world view that had any decisive influence on him, from Goethe's conviction of the factual existence of an Urphänomen, an archetypal phenomenon, a concrete thing to be discovered in the world of appearances in which 'significance' and appearance, word and thing, idea and experience would coincide" (1968)