Turning Point – Review of Jo Lathwood: Making Up

Marjorie H Morgan

Writer Marjorie H Morgan reviews an exhibition by artist Jo Lathwood, who has been commissioned by The Lowry to spend six weeks as artist in residence, constructing and deconstructing a brand new site-responsive installation. Inspired by the history of Salford Quays, the large-scale sculptural work is made using recycled materials and, at the end of the exhibition period, will leave no trace, the materials repurposed and distributed elsewhere. Gallery visitors can watch Lathwood building her work daily in person in the galleries or via live-streamed CCTV footage from The Lowry Galleries basement workshops (11am-5pm Tues-Sun). Marjorie H Morgan details the following exploration of the themes, influences and ideologies behind Lathwood’s work, a must-read for anyone planning to experience ‘Jo Lathwood: Making Up’, viewable at The Lowry, Salford Quays until 3 March 2024.

On the immediate right of the entrance to the main ‘Jo Lathwood: Making Up’ exhibition space, housed alongside the permanent LS Lowry Collection in Gallery A of The Lowry, is a work in progress lit with a glowing green light in front of temporary safety barriers in what appears at first glance to be a construction site.

Traditionally, art is presented as an accessible completed work for the audience to observe. However, with this exhibition, Lathwood presents the audience with an invitation to step behind the scenes and observe the process of making large scale sculptural art. Lathwood plays on the blurry definition of what can be considered an artwork and, at the same time, removes some of the mystery between the process of art creation and its final presentation. Lathwood is interested in ideas of journeys, movement, turning around, and undoing – all of which align with her ongoing interest in the environmental cost of art, a theme that underpins ‘Making Up’.

Curated by Zoe Watson, Contemporary Curator of The Lowry, ‘Making Up’ is part of Lathwood’s six week artist residency at The Lowry, during which time she will reveal research carried out about the local area, and show how the process of making art can effectively utilise circular systems whilst working according to a manifesto of sustainability.

An open manifesto for making sustainable artwork, written by Lathwood in 2020, outlines ways for creators to consider where they are getting their art materials from, and encourages them to think about what is going to happen to the art work after the exhibition. Printed copies of the manifesto are available in the gallery space during the residency, and are also downloadable online. There is space on the printed form for visitors to contribute their own suggestions.

As an artist who builds large structures, Lathwood describes how during the pandemic lockdown in 2020 she reflected on and became concerned with the problematic issue of what happens to the construction materials post-installation. Lathwood states that she is uncomfortable using brand new materials when the outcome of them is not guaranteed. As a self-proclaimed natural resource scavenger, Lathwood makes regular use of recycled timber, and this new installation also reuses timber from her most recent exhibition.

Lathwood began with a virtually empty gallery space in Gallery A. One of the few items that arrived intact was a circular turning table, upon which the artist set up a projector. The OHP projected what turned out to be distorted lettering onto the gallery walls, which now reads as a painted slogan: ‘We are all in a cycle.’ This space has become an active workshop, with Lathwood and an assistant involved in building a large scale 30cm high wooden boardwalk which leads to the turning circle, upon which visitors will be invited to stand in the later stages of development. Nearby, affixed to the wall by masking tape, is a diagram of the proposed build of the boardwalk – further evidence of a work in progress.

Construction work is also taking place in The Lowry Galleries basement where there is a workshop and onsite technician to manage the physical aspects of the visual art exhibitions at The Lowry. Footage is live-streamed from here into the other ‘Making Up’ gallery space, Gallery B, directly onto a large expanse of wall. Visitors may be able to view Lathwood at work via this CCTV footage; or they may be lucky enough to catch her physically present and working in the upstairs gallery space A.

The entry to the installation space serves as the eventual exit, both for the visitor and the art. The installation space also encompasses Lathwood’s thought processes, her inspiration; and, intriguingly, an example of the final end product of the exhibition: a prototype wooden crate. It is in this object that the circumnavigation of the ideas and the process has a result visibly displayed within the gallery. Towards the end of the exhibition, visitors will be able to take away one of these moderately sized utilitarian crates, which are useful, attractive products, although not fine art crates, and of which there will be hundreds. Related to the use of found objects, the text on the walls of the room has been created using a random paint palette foraged from The Lowry’s previous exhibitions, including paint remnants from the ‘Julia and Axel - Thirty Years of Favourite Stories’ characters, Highway Rat and The Gruffalo.

The main sculpture in the installation is inspired by the history and heritage of Salford Quays, the way the visitor can also observe all the behind the scenes aspects of the work being a direct echo from the past where ‘maker ups’ were working on the same principle of packaging items for distribution in the Salford Quays. The installation will be developed over a two week period, after which it will be available for the audience to interact with - either by physically walking on or by closer observation when the temporary barriers are removed. Then it will gradually be dismantled as Lathwood recycles the wood into crates.

The repurposing of the materials of the sculptural installation disrupts the usual narrative of art permanence, whereby women artists have often historically been excluded and erased from the canon of art history and gallery collections. In some ways controversially, Lathwood is not looking for permanence in her installation. The ‘in construction’ art work will be reformed when the sculpture is eventually dismantled and distributed as wooden crates.

There is also two dimensional work. Close to the entrance, the exhibition includes a series of small framed pencil and gouache drawings of miniature rendered ladders on heavyweight paper that were developed during lockdown times when the whole world existed in smaller than usual indoor spaces for extended periods. Just round the corner in Gallery B are a further selection of small collage pieces also depicting ladders, made using coloured paper.

Additionally, Lathwood exhibits larger, collaged images of ladders, some in non-traditional shapes, including bent and broken ladders and rungs, some of which include the use of light fast, permanent oak gall ink to depict what can be broken through age and repeated use, and also shares the dead ends of circular ladders. These images have been created on large sheets of recycled paper: Lathwood notes that the mark making of the oak gall ink is stronger than the paper itself, which further raises questions about the longevity and impact of materials used to construct art works.

Lathwood’s personal use of ladders as symbolic to her work began with a 2011 residency in I-Park, Connecticut, USA where she found timber on the site, and used it to create a ladder to a perch in a precarious tree. Site visitors were invited to access the work via the ladder, and many of them were brave enough to engage at a great height.

Lathwood stated in a recent Bricks Artist Talk (bricksbristol.org/events) that she has been influenced by the use of ladders in the works of a number of artists. She cites the examples of Martin Puryear’s Ladder for Booker T Washington (1996): a wooden ash ladder sculpture that narrows as it rises, suggesting an infinite climb for African Americans in the Jim Crow era and beyond; Louise Bourgeois: The Ladders (2006), an small engraving with aquatint of 5 ladders of various heights and dimension with a small human figure holding on to the outside of a ladder that towers over them; Michael Simpson: Leper Squint (2014), a large oil canvas print (3.81 m x 0.32m) depicting a series of four ladders against a wall, atop each is a small square through which lepers could look into the Christian church from which they were physically excluded; Cai Guo-Quiong: Sky Ladder (2015), made out of fireworks and a weather balloon, and existing for only 2m 30s; and Adeline de Monseignot: Echelle Charnelle (2018), a twisted marble and steel structure that reflects extensive use.

As an artist Lathwood started drawing ladders in 2020; now these ladders are an essential meditative theme in her practice. Additionally, sharing the process of making up and breaking up has become important to Lathwood’s artistic practice because she believes that the kind of interaction and engagement with other people that it engenders means there is a lot to mutually learn from one another.

For Lathwood, ladders are universal and not tied to any single culture, she says they are a tool for connecting people together with their practical uses, they also represent small journeys, and they are a tool to traverse - get over something, and they also give you different viewpoints because they are created for a specific purpose as denoted in images of ladders in Gallery B: Four step ladder (2023), Tripod ladder (2020), Iceland stile ladder #2 (2021), Scotland stile ladder (2023), Painted ladder (2020), and Travel ladder (2022).

Audiences will recognise the visual object of a ladder, in all its forms, and thereby easily examine their relationship to each version of the object. This insight allows the audience entry to an earlier part of the artistic creation process, and also encourages them to join the conversation regarding sustainability in art from a different viewpoint after accessing the thought ladder of the artist’s mind.

Lathwood’s pragmatic making process is a language in itself, and through sharing this language the audience receive an extra gift of art as the live performance of thoughts made visible through material and action unfolding in real time.

This transparency of the process of this work has also encouraged The Lowry curatorial team to rethink how they can more sustainably put together exhibitions in the future, this includes, how each installation is set out, how images are mounted, and how items are shipped. The underlying themes of the exhibition come from the manifesto for making sustainable artwork, and are an invitation to join in a conversation about how we interact with the world, and to question and examine the generally accepted capitalist understanding of progress.

This residency may be viewed as part performance art as Lathwood’s creation process is constantly visible. In addition, the raised pathway of the boardwalk will lead to a large turning circle, the middle of which will rotate at the same speed as a rotating door. At the midpoint of the exhibition, the audience members will be able to become participants in the artwork and stand on the boardwalk and be slowly spun around in a circle. In a sense the gallery visitor becomes a performer of and within the art work.

The installation gives the audience the chance to become repeat visitors who take opportunities to reflect, turn around, and consider different perspectives, to see a different viewpoint while bearing in mind that we are all in our separate life cycles of living and dying. The artwork provides the opportunity to pause - on a gentle turning circle - and re-evaluate what we do, and how we do it, with the time in between those dates.

The story behind the ‘Making Up’ exhibition is one of trying to link everyone together. The statement, “We are all in a cycle” is a gesture to get people to consider the global connection of us all, what we are doing with our lives, and how we are treating the world. The combination of these linked elements in the exhibition are themselves communication tools to explain why Lathwood has selected to dismantle and repurpose the large boardwalk sculpture at the end of the residency.

The Lowry is located in Salford Quays, the modern home of a hive of social and commercial activity, including MediaCityUK, museums, galleries, hotels and shopping malls that have replaced the historical commerce of the area in previous centuries and times of mass manual industrialisation. Salford Quays is no longer a working dock due to the efficiency of the workers who became so adept at packaging that everything became centred on container ships and containerisation. The process that Lathwood is undertaking is in a way mimicking what used to happen in the Salford Quays where raw products were being brought from the outside in, made up, and then shipped off again in a different form. The external development of the Salford Quays reflects this growing modernisation as it is also a popular destination, but portions of it remain undeveloped, and unconnected to the surrounding landscape - a series of dead ends.

A central aspect of the ‘Making Up’ exhibition, linked to the manifesto, is the concept of dead ends which the artist considers may provide more scope to think about reflective, or circular ways for progress as opposed to the traditional linear mode of progressive thinking and action. Dead ends usually have negative connotations attached to them; however, this installation suggests that there is a possibility to turn around and go in a different direction.

Lathwood comments that the images of the ladders in the exhibition always start and end at a definitive point, but circular modes of existing can mean perpetual progress, not an abrupt end. The dead ends in the installation also reflect the physical Lowry building which has multiple obstructed and unobstructed sight lines in its design. These, in effect, act as visual dead ends, or routes through which one has to look or pass through to get to a particular destination, then turn around and retrace one’s steps to the entrance. It was also planned into the architectural design of The Lowry at an early stage that a visitor could circumnavigate the entire building by following a footway that encompasses its external perimeter.

The installation is a different type of journey to a ladder, it is encouraging the audience to take a different perspective, to turn around, and come back to the same point again. The exhibition reveals Lathwood as both historian and contemporary artist, working in a space that is constantly in construction, never fixed, always changing, and needs preserving - like the natural world.

Lathwood’s work in ‘Making Up’ speaks to this moment in history through the medium of recycled and sustainable material, about the progress that can be made by artists and galleries in the process of making new art creation a sustainable part of our cultural present and future. Her installation is like stepping into a fluid time capsule where one can take material from the past, utilise it in the present, and send it on to times yet to unfold.

This review is supported by The Lowry