Last weekend, I was back at Liverpool's Open Eye Gallery for the eleventh, and final, instalment of this year's European Poetry Festival. More on that in a future post, however, as I have other thoughts to share right now.
My visit to the Mann Island photography outpost in 2024 sparked me to write a piece to enter into a fancy art magazine competition. This pageant's details had been wafted under my nose by Roma Havers, who had been facilitating the Critics Collective, a Manchester Poetry Library initiative for which I was lucky enough to have been selected to join the ranks. Our six-week session series – which featured presentations and workshops led by guests including Khairani Barokka, Kit Fan and John McAuliffe – culminated in participants writing and placing (or attempting to place) reviews.
I have some incoming in PN Review (my second appearance sporting my jaunty new critic's hat) and The North. I've seen the proofs for both, so I guess they're imminent. I do not, on the other hand, have anything in the fancy art magazine. Unperturbed, I tinkered with the piece slightly and submitted it to another fancy prize, and that got me nowhere either.
Hey-ho. It felt a shame, as the exhibition I'd reviewed was fab, but as it was taken down in September, I thought it best to forget about it.
Then, as I say, last weekend, I was back at Liverpool's Open Eye Gallery, and I noticed that the photographer whose show it was, Stephanie Wynne, is involved in another project, and you have until 24 July to catch it at Crosby Library. Not All Who Wander Are Lost, part of the Photo Here programme, sees Stephanie as artist in residence collaborate with members of Crosby Camera Club to explore the "feel" of Sefton by combining photography with psychogeography. Wandering and pondering, what's not to like? Check that out here.
So here's the review I wrote of Stephanie Wynne's The Erosion. Better later than never...
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Stephanie Wynne's The Erosion, Open Eye Gallery. Install photo: Rob Battersby June 2024 |
Littorally Speaking by Sarah-Clare Conlon
The naturally eroding sands of Crosby Beach are gradually revealing a hidden human history, as documented by Liverpool-based photographer Stephanie Wynne in an exhibition commissioned by Open Eye Gallery
It almost wasn’t meant to be. Arriving with minutes to spare, I whipped out the two pairs of binoculars I’d lugged via tram, taxi, train and tube, located my collaborator, handed her one, then grabbed a seat in the audience and took a breath. It was instantly cut short as I gasped at the photographs to my left.
Here were five evenly sized, evenly spaced studies, each setting wave-worked orange bricks and hand-carved blocks of white marble against a bright blue letterbox of sky. These were broken homes and collapsed cornershopfronts, factory facades and grandiose gravestones. These were smithereens of Liverpool after Second World War air raids.
Creatively exploring Crosby Beach climbed into my must-dos in 2020 when I heard about its secrets gradually being revealed by time and tide, simultaneously learning that family had grown up within spitting distance, on the sandblasted terraced streets of Waterloo. But we were in lockdown and the coast seemed a long way from Manchester.
Stephanie Wynne, however, is local and has photographed the beach for years, she tells me when I get in touch. I’d outlined my encounter with The Erosion; that I was one of 14 European Poetry Festival performers reading in pairs at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery, that I was taken by our backdrop. I ask about the five warm-hued shots with light surrounds, a contrast to the strand’s dark story.
“The day images were taken on different days in different seasons,” Wynne tells me. “Most photography projects that have value are long term – you need to photograph and re-photograph. You need knowledge of a place to be able to represent it.”
On the opposite wall, beyond which the River Mersey flows out to the Irish Sea, eight black-mounted views elicit an ethereal, other-worldliness, and a sense of nature taking things back – spume-slippery seaweed slicking over once-windowsills, creeping gale-thrashed marram grass grasping footholds in crumbling mortar. “It is a poignant landscape,” notes the exhibition blurb. “Man-made but sculpted by nature.”
Wynne elaborates: “The night pictures were the first in the project, taken between 1 and 8 May 2021, to mirror the week of nightly bombing in May 1941 – the May Blitz. They are all long exposures with torchlight – referencing searchlights – exposing the foreground details.”
Eighty years before Wynne took her camera to the beach, the Luftwaffe pounded Liverpool. Nearly one-third of houses were damaged or destroyed, thousands of buildings in the strategically vital port city flattened. The resulting rubble was dumped on a mile-long stretch of shoreline, part coastal defence, part collective memory wipe.
Wynne researched war waste on Merseyside and beyond during a six-month residency with Open Eye in spring 2023, and, to give context to The Erosion, picked four black-and-white archive images from Sefton Library Service and Imperial War Museum, which oversee the exhibition.
At the far end of the room, I find myself drawn to two larger, unframed prints, very much focused brinewards. Watery themes run through my poetry (I used to keep a little yacht upstream at Brunswick Dock), and, to me, these feel different to the other groupings and their land-based gaze. It turns out they are part of a new series of pictures, explains Wynne: “To further the project since January I decided to look at how the water and intertidal life is affected by our interventions.”
This pairing – one calm, half-submerged; one rippled, kinetic, as if the swash is rushing in – was chosen by curator Max Gorbatskyi. “He felt two was enough to tell the story,” says Wynne, continuing: “Max wanted to create a narrative throughout the exhibition – the daylight wall shows the archaeological details, shifting bricks, plantlife, how people use the beach and construct playful ‘artworks’ – and I decided to create one of these makeshift sculptures.”
Spying this 3-D pile of debris – cobbled masonry necklace-linked with a ribbon of rusting steel reinforcement rod – was another highlight at our event, one of the poets hiding behind it, then reappearing. My poetry partner and I delivered our ebbing and flowing piece about the ocean, squinted through our binoculars, The Erosion around us also providing a long view through its close-ups.
Stephanie Wynne’s The Erosion was part of LOOK Photo Biennial 2024: Beyond Sight, 28 June-1 September 2024, at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool.
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