Harewood House

I went to Harewood House over the weekend to have a look at the exhibitions that they had on at the moment. It was a really interesting venue, in rooms of the massive stately home. I found it a bit bizarre that the galleries were at the end of the tour of the house, so one minute you're in an old house with Victorian furnishings and the next you're in another room converted into a modern gallery space. The exhibition took place in two rooms which led to a third room which was a cafe. This all seemed a bit disjointed, like the exhibition was an afterthought and had been put in the only available rooms. Something we have had to consider while planning our final exhibits is the space in which we are displaying it. The fact that it is in a shopping center, in a shop that has closed down, has to correlate to our work in some way. I didn't realise until going to Harewood House that an exhibition in a place that is not a traditional white cube gallery is actually quite difficult to pull off.

The way the pieces of work were hung was interesting too. Quite a few of the pieces had been attached to the wall using small bulldog clips or pins. As the pieces were quite small themselves this worked really well. The pieces seemed to hang in the air and the colour was not lost against the black walls.

A common way that pieces were hung was by wire or chains from the ceiling. The transparent wire was really effective as although you could see it, it worked with the piece and as they were all parallel they didn't detract from the work at all.

The pieces that were hung by the chains were more grand pieces, in large frames, mostly in the period style rooms within the house itself. This meant that the paintings had more of an impact on the room, drawing the viewer to it with ostentatious gold frames and chains. This technique of hanging didn't work that well on some of the pieces, especially the smaller, subtle paintings as they were drowned out by the grandeur of the display. I found that I preferred the pieces where you couldn't actually see the hanging mechanism - where the frames had been mounted onto the wall at the back and lay flat against it. This method meant that you weren't distracted at all from the art itself and is something I want to achieve in the way I display my work.