Dale Mackie and Steven Ingman, Cleethorpes Discovery Centre.

Place in Process

Landscapes of Present and Past Grimsby and Cleethorpes, Reshaped and Re-Imagined.

This exhibition has been organised under the umbrella of Arts Meridian/Arts Underlined.  Arts Underlined is a project creating commissions and professional development opportunities for local and regional artists.  The project is now in its second year and Place in Process is the culmination of a year creating new work by two artists, each with different relationships to Grimsby and Cleethorpes.  Nottingham-based Steven Ingman and Grimsby-based Dale Mackie have been commissioned by Arts Meridian to create bodies of work which respond to locations within North East Lincolnshire.

Steven Ingman is a landscape painter who has always been interested in contemporary spaces and buildings that are in a process of transition and our relationship to them as environments.  He considers the use of such spaces and explores the concept of change; how a space may fall out of or into use.  For this exhibition he has examined the seasonal use of Cleethorpes and its 'edgelands'.  

I particularly enjoyed his painting of the Mermaid fish and chip shop on Cleethorpes sea front; a bustling thriving place during the season, but closed during the winter.  It is an ideal place to eat and at the same time look out over the estuary.

Below is an image of it that I took when I was studying the People and Place module in 2010. 

His 'edgelands' painting of a chalet on the Humberston Fitties is a reminder of one of my favourite places.  Not my nearest edgeland, which is on my doorstep, but somewhere I spend a great deal of time photographing wildlife and coastal landscapes - I have used images taken here for some of my degree work in the past and am currently working on a new project down here.

For much of this exhibition Dale Mackie has concentrated on the historic aspects of Grimsby.  He has painstakingly painted artistic reproductions of maps of Grimsby town centre and, using old photographs he has produced works depicting what the old centre used to be like.  This work poignantly (for me anyway) reflects on what we lost in the name of progress in the 1960s and 70s.

There are also drawings of detail from Cleethorpes seafront.

 This is a fascinating exhibition and well worth seeing.  It has been a pleasure to see the work develop and unfold over the past year.