Steve_Bamlett_blog

What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?

This is possibly a non-question for me since, being retired, I have no thoughts of a career in anything. My past is littered with the search and pursuit of alternatives but I doubt I would want to pursue them now or their alternatives, even if they were available to me. Of course, the blogging interests may constitute a picture of a dream career.

How glorious a life might be paid to visit and reflect on art, theatre or read novels to consider them? But I wonder if that is so because sometimes I only want to write when something so stuns me with its urgency of message, truth or beauty that I feel I want to write about it. And that is possible if you write in the last analysis only for the sake of your own learning and the maintenance of your thought processes. Being paid too means serving an agenda that you may or may not identify with and playing a part it demands of you other than sitting at home.

Instead, think of the happenstance of moments of some learning and associated joy in retirement. Yesterday, I visited, with my husband Geoff, Newcastle in the pouring rain to see a play I saw two weeks ago, Lemn Sissay’s moving adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The play was as beautiful as then, seen at York (see my blog on it at this link), but I noticed more nuance than previously if not enough to re-blog on it. But on the way to the theatre in Northern Stage, set in the middle of the campus of Newcastle University, Geoff suggested we ‘pop into’ the Hatton Art Gallery in the university to shelter from the now angry storm brewing.

I did not know the artist whose retrospective show this was. Associated with Victor Passmore, Matt Rugg, taught at Newcastle a course called ‘Basics’. It aimed to show the ‘anatomical’ (the word they used) elements of art to students and to test the art made of them. We had only time to skim the exhibition. The paintings, called Anatomies of painting more than once, need time. I bought a book and will revisit them in order to blog about that art.

But the sculptures called Anatomies gabbed me immediately. They were in a room alone and could be photographed by visitors.

I will return to them too, after reading the book. It is, by the way by Michael Bird & Harriet Sutcliffe published in 2023 and called Matt Rugg: The Many Languages of Sculpture and published by Lund Humphries.

But here a taste of the intriguing images from that room of the complete set of none Anatomies of Sculpture, the whole room inadequately pictured above. I need to discover the materials that created the standing capacity of forms that seemed incapable of independent standing. The rope structures seemed on first glance to consist of some fortified metal material. See this below.

But the look of them is less grounded than that detail suggests.

They seem magically suspended or upheld, generating basic shapes (forms the sculptor suggests to be the right term).

Even when very solid looking, this can be an effect of colouring, at least in part. Compare above how limp hangs one ground loop of the structure compared to that in front of it. And in this room, one painting one could take a photograph of that is painted to demonstrate forms cognate with the sculpted ones.

I need to read up and revisit and will blog. No-one would pay me to do that, even travel expenses, but Ido receive payback of a sort anyway: not only joy but learning and the exercise of neural networks that truly need it. And, maybe, this idea of networks will help me to think about this exhibition in more than one way.

With love

Steve.