Manchester gallery trip
On the 17th of October 2016 we visited the Manchester City Gallery and the Whitworth Gallery, also located in Manchester. I found my two favourite pieces in the Whitworth Gallery; Les Dormeurs (2006) by Yto Barrada and a fashion piece by Karin Human. Les Dormeurs (also known as the The Sleepers) is a series of photographs of people asleep, mainly in fields. This piece of work is very different to other work by Barrada, who is a French, multimedia visual artist. She often works with bright, contrasting colours and often uses geometric shapes. However, this piece is monochromatic which gives it an extremely eerie feel. When I first looked at the photos, I thought the people in them were actually dead.The second piece that really stood out for me was Salford fashion student Karin Human’s The Pattern of Protection (2016). Human took her inspiration for this piece from a group of Suffragettes who trained in martial arts. They did this in order to protect their leader, Emmeline Pankhurst, during marches and protests. The dress reinvents the traditional colours of green and purple that were used by the Suffragette’s. Furthermore, the silhouette reflects both East Asian styles and the dress reform styles associated with the women’s movement in the late 19th Century. I was drawn to the piece originally because of it’s unique silhouette, but when I read about it and discovered it’s backstory, I was even more enthralled - I would consider myself to be a feminist and I have an interest in the women’s liberation movement, which made Human’s piece all the more fascinating to me.