Exhibition by leading British artist open in two Sunderland venues

Fiona Crisp’s Weighting Time exhibition explores 30 years of her work. It is on display at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in the National Glass Centre.

The exhibition features parts of Fiona’s large-scale installations. Her photographs and films explore how people “connect to spaces and ideas beyond their own lived experience”.

Included are works made in the Early Christian catacombs of Rome, a Second World War underground military hospital in the Channel Islands and a dark matter laboratory beneath the North Sea.

Weighting Time at Sunderland Museum explores Fiona’s “long-term engagement with the construction and framing of a view”.

Through large-scale photographic works, visitors can see Fiona’s preoccupation with thresholds. For instance, in her Still Films series from the 1990s, life-sized figures are suspended in action, caught on the thresholds of buildings.

These works are brought together with a new large-scale commission, Belvedere, made by Fiona for the exterior of the museum overlooking Mowbray Park.

Fiona explained: “At Sunderland Museum there are two works from the series Belvedere that I made throughout the 1990s by taking model spaces to high points around London and photographing ‘through’ the space to the view beyond.”

The NGCA Weighting Time brings together several bodies of work created by Fiona “within enclosed, hermetic or subterranean spaces”.

The still and moving images, made in mines, theatres, laboratories and catacombs, come together to form “otherworlds” or “underworlds”. This includes a film installation through which visitors can experience the intense sights and sounds of a truck travelling through tunnels underneath the bed of the North Sea.

Edited together with an animated simulation taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, the film also allows viewers to reverse time-travel through the formation of galaxies towards the moment of the Big Bang.

Fiona added: “All of the works are a part of much larger installations (often the size of the entire gallery) so I had to find a way of reconfiguring these elements so they could ‘live’ alongside each other.”

Weighting Time at the museum runs until June 3, while the exhibition at NGCA is on until Sunday, September 3. Both exhibitions are free. For more information visit the Sunderland Culture website.