The Baltic. My Second Time

The first time was well over a year ago. On a school visit. In a storm. The rain hammered down on the glass roof. And I loved it. I saw work by Sarah Sze and Harland Miller which shaped and tweaked a lot of my thoughts for the whole of last year. In my mind Sarah Sze's work is just phenonomal. Beyond anything I had seen before (and you had to see it. Images are just not enough). It opened old wounds for me about satiating my own creativity. Harland Miller's work was very different. Humerous sometimes. But I was drawn more towards his 'Jack the Ripper' posters. Miller was a child when the manhunt was on for Jack the Ripper. He recalls the posters, the news bulletins, the cars with loudspeakers pleaing for information, the fear, the excitement. His work is about what remains when it becomes old news. Left over posters, partly pasted over with new news, and how this changes the initial content. Massively interesting. That was last year.

This year. I took the opportunity on the way back down from the Northumberland jaunt. Bright sunshine this time. Not as dramatic. But I was still undoubtably impressed with what I experienced. Cornelia Parker. Have long loved her work. Use it in school a bit sometimes. Flattened brass instruments. Suspended in a circle, lit from the centre. Shadows. Moving as the instruments swayed. Beautiful. Aware of each breath. Stillness. Like being in a church a bit. I felt the need to tiptoe. To try and pretend I wasn't actually there, disturbing the silence. I did actually try to get inside the circle, but the gallery assistant got a bit huffy and said 'no'. There were other bits by her too. Small objects in frames and cases. I was a bit dismissive of these at first, they seemed indulgent, but then I read the titles and realised they were brilliant and that I had been a pompous idiot. Ear plugs made from the dust of the Whispering Gallery in St Pauls Cathedral. Embryos of objects still in thier deflated feotal forms, before they become something. Often destructive objects. A gun. A balloon for a political campaign...

Two floors down Tomas Saraceno's utterly breathtaking web. An installation in a white room. A black web. So difficult to comprehend quite how beautiful this was. Almost frightened of losing the image from my mind. Ghostly. Pure. Fragile. He had studied the intricacies of how spiders build their webs. In great detail. I left the gallery for a second time needing to talk about and use this experience in some way... not quite sure how yet...