Shrewsbury Arts Trail is a festival of art in my hometown of Shrewsbury. Last year the theme was Movement and I had three photographs selected for display, one in the Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery and two in the Parade Shopping Centre which was once the old Royal Shrewsbury Infirmary. It felt special to have a piece of work hanging up in the same space as many works by illustrious artists such as Dali, Matisse, Banksy, Hirst, Hockney Hepworth and Lowry.
My post about Arts Trail 2023 can be read here.
Time Trail
This year (2024) the Arts Trail was back and the theme was Time. I submitted three pieces of work, the same that I had on display for my end of year exhibition with University Of Wolverhampton but they were not chosen for display. My logic behind linking these to the theme was it was during the shutdown period, after everyone had hit the end of day and left for home. It is a good representation of a time that the factory changes its presentation to whoever happens to be inside it.
Not long after the invite to submit work for the Arts trail, I was also contacted by Phil from the Arts Trail organisation with an invite to submit some photography to an adjacent exhibition which would be part of the Arts trail. I chose not to submit the same three in case I was successful in the main submission. the brief was to enter work that fitted the following bill.
‘Representations of Time’.
How can we represent the concept of time in a photograph? In one sense, all photographs capture a moment in time but beyond that how do we portray the passage of time, the past, the present, the future? How can we convey the measurement of time?
Phil Langstaff
Going through some of my more recent work I came upon my Japan project that featured many images made on the streets of Tokyo in the long hours after dark amongst the city dwellers.
I found three photographs from a short list of around 25 and then selected them for submission, To my delight they were selected by Phil and the team for display at the Photographic Arts exhibition in The Hive at Belmont, Shrewsbury.
They were tricky to whittle down as I had many photos that I liked and thought fitted the brief of representing time in a photograph. Whilst they do not show a sign of time, i.e. no clocks, no daylight or nighttime and only using available artificial light. To me they represent a time of the late evening and through to the early hours of the morning, when people are on the end of a late day slaving away for “the man” and are on their way home or to a bar to dispel the contents of the day.
At the time of the exhibition being selected, and creating/framing my prints I was caring for my wife who had been suffering a medical issue since mid-June and it was tricky to find the time to drop off the three framed images and then the follow up events. I was planning on attending the private view but this did not work out, and then I was going to do a presentation about my practice to the other artists who were also displaying in the Hive. Unfortunately this had to take a back seat for the reason that Family is First and focus was on them.
We did go to the exhibition once it was up and open to have a look at the works in the gallery and see what other artists/photographers had made of the theme for the exhibition. It was great to see other local photographers represented and at no point did I suffer from imposter syndrome, I actually felt like I’d earned my place on the wall and in the art community of Shrewsbury.
When the time came for the work to come down and be picked up I wandered to the Visual Arts Network in the Darwin Shopping Centre and had a chat with the volunteers who were there staffing the gallery/shop/space. They were telling me about the opportunity to have work in exhibitions and also pay to have a board for your own work. I found this to be a good idea and once home I joined up to the network and uploaded my profile details.
I think it will be good to have a connection with the other artists in the town, and some opportunities may arise from being a member. I’m looking forward to thinking about work for the next exhibition, whatever the subject might be and one of the conditions of displaying work is that you must volunteer in the shop/gallery to earn the right. This sounds like a positive experience too, people from the art community will no doubt gather there and then visitors to the town interested in art may pop by and take a look. It’s exactly the sort of place I wander around if I’m in a shopping centre.
The Full Arts Trail
The Arts Trail in the wider context was a great example of how art gets people talking. Some pieces of art proved controversial, not because they depicted nudity or anything but because, as Mandy Somers on Facebook writes:
“Well other than the one in the dingle lovely the one in the dingle is an awful eyesore spoiling a beautiful part of our town it’s disgraceful and in my opinion not art looks more like fly tipping.”
Mandy Somers, Facebook
This was typical of the comments about the work sited in the Dingle, which is a wonderful flowery haven in the middle of Shrewsbury’s Quarry park. The vitriol was particularly nasty in many cases or just people having a whinge because they “didn’t understand it”. It’s all super subjective and some people dislike it and some love it. I am on the fence, and like to understand where the art came from and what it represents but often don’t get it myself. This work in particularly was “Red Head Sunset Stack” by Almuth Tebenhoff and looked like this:
A page of comments below from a local facebook group show the distaste it was treated with.
Other works by Halima Cassell were placed in the Castle grounds and in St Mary’s Church and these seemed to be a little more acceptable to the majority. They are impressive sculptures made from cast iron, fibreglass and jesmonite. They were quite organic and were a result of some relationships that had ended recently according to Cassell on the MyShrewsbury website.
The works in the Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery were varied and based around the theme of Time. There were some great works in there as mentioned at the top of the post including a brown paper shopping bag printed with the Campbell’s soup by Andy Warhol.
I spent time gawping at all of these exhibits and then wandered up to St Mary’s Church to see another Cassell sculpture, before doing some random street photography about the town centre.
Shrewsbury as an Art Destination
Shrewsbury is a great place to go for art and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in artistic practices, there are open studios weeks, the arts trails, Belle Vue Art Festival, the Visual Arts Network, galleries and shops selling local artists works and a generally good vibe. Apart from the crowd on social media who just like to complain about change without trying to understand and see what the art is about.
Being involved in the art scene in Shrewsbury is a difficult thing for me to do in general as I do suffer in terms of being introverted and a little star struck by some of the work produced by other artists. I thin getting involved and continuing to push myself will enable me to stretch further for my uni course this year and for the next two after that.
I’ve still got the Bingley Camera Club talk to do in October about my Car Park project, which is getting close, and I’ve still not finialised my presentation. At least with University starting in the next week or two I’ll be able to run it by the course leaders for a sanity check.
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