New exhibition at Sunderland's National Glass Centre features 28 artists

The exhibition, The Skin We Live In, features portraits through photography, painting, sculpture, film and printmaking. It opens in the National Glass Centre on Saturday, November 23.

Work from 28 artists and photographers features. It’s the first time the NGCA’s own collection has been used for an exhibition.

Swiss artist Simon Senn’s series Fawcett Street from 2015, named after the street where NGCA used to operate, invited people walking down the street to enact "being sensational". The photographs were then sent to a psychologist who produced reports based on them.

Natasha Caruana’s photographic series Married Man documents 80 “dates” the artist arranged with married men through online dating sites.

The photographs were taken secretly with a hidden camera. The images conceal the men’s identities.

Works by Johannah Churchill and Michael Daglish touch on personal stories connected to isolation, depression and loss through “presence and absence of the body and delineations of time”.

Elsewhere, working class communities are celebrated through the photography of Daniel Meadows, Ian Macdonald and Chris Harrison.

Ian Macdonald and Chris Harrison photographed residents who were and still are, the fabric of their industrial hometowns of Teesside and Jarrow.

The portraits witness the monumental changes brought about by deindustrialisation and the housing crisis in the UK during the 1980s.

Jon Weston, curator of NGCA, said: “The artworks on display in The Skin We Live In move away from a focus on the individual to reveal a collective experience.

“We are delighted to bring together a broad range of artists and photographers from the NGCA collection for the first time within a group exhibition.

“Each artist and photographer approaches the subject from a different perspective, however, collectively they challenge the conventions of portraiture to reveal, question and celebrate what it means to be human.

“The Skin We Live In asks how we can learn and take comfort and solace in our shared experiences, with often marginalised human experiences given voice through the gallery walls.”

The Skin We Live In runs until until March 2, 2025. For more information visit www.northerngalleryforcontemporaryart.org.uk.