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Throughout our time in the Usher Gallery, our focus has continuously returned to one of the gallery rooms upstairs and in particular, the painting, ‘The Brayford Pool and Lincoln Cathedral 1858’.
As citizens of Lincoln we were immediately drawn to how the painting illustrated the vast changes between the city we know and the city that once was. We found it interesting to compare the people of the ‘then’ and ‘now’ and how this could be used in our performace. We sat in the gallery for an hour and a half and documented the views and reactions of other visitors, interested as to whether our views were shared with others. There was a commonality between students and the older generation who would both study the painting intently, possibly trying to identify what has changed or familiarising themselves with what used to be.
An important architecutural point that we noticed is the purposful way in which the room was designed so that the influences from the contemporary art gallery parallel are clearly visable from the room in which the traditional paintings are hung. This is a clear passageway from the old to new. This stimulated further ideas on the subject of the progression of art, with the possiblity of hanging a matching image of the Brayford Pool in the twenty first century. What impact would this have on the vistors of the art gallery and would they appreciate the comparison between both images? The clashing of the two different styles of art is something we are becoming interested in exploring rather than blending them together. In context of a site specific performance, a way in which we could achieve this could even be as simple as the use of speech in the Usher Gallery which would break the traditional silence. This is a subtle beginning of our exploration into how we can challenge the boundaries between traditional and contemporary art.