Review of Paper After All at PAPER Gallery

Jo Manby

The group show ‘Paper After All’ is the final exhibition to be staged in the small but perfect PAPER Gallery on Mirabel Street, Manchester. Hidden away behind the railway arches at the back of Victoria Station, the gallery attracted a loyal and loving crowd at the preview on Friday 11 November.

A collaborative project presented first at the Royal Cambrian Academy in Conwy followed by Saul Hay Gallery and PAPER in Manchester, ‘Paper After All’ was devised by asking each of the participating artists to respond to the idea of assemblage – gathering new or found or salvaged elements to create new work especially for the exhibition. It runs at PAPER until 17 December 2022.

‘Paper After All’: a phrase that presages a qualifying statement. Paper, after all. Paper was what it was all about. Among the many wonderful pieces of work in this exhibition is In the car talking to tiktok (2022) by Caspar White. It is lit up against the PAPER Gallery blue wall by a single white candle attached to the painting on a bespoke metal bracket. In this simple, unadorned manner, the element of fire brings to life an artwork directly inspired by the image of a TikTok streamer. The candle flame imparts a spiritual aura while at the same time achieving equivalence with the artifice of screen light that would have illuminated the original video.

The paper that White’s painting is made on is held at a short arm’s length from the element that could destroy it, a reflection perhaps on the volatile, sometimes critically damaging potential of viral social media that young people like the subject of In the car talking to tiktok hold in their hands. Paper as a material becomes as susceptible and vulnerable as our own physical and psychological well-being. But at the same time as strong, as expressive, as resilient and as meaningful.

For the final show at PAPER Gallery, artists were invited to create work responding to the concept of assemblage. The exhibition programme at PAPER Gallery and Paper2, along with the Fourdrinier, initially known as PAPER Magazine before being rebranded in 2019, has constantly sought to explore what paper can actually do as a medium or support in terms of contemporary and modern art production, whether locally and regionally around Greater Manchester and the northwest, or further afield across the globe.

As PAPER Director David Hancock explains in detail in the interview that accompanies this review on the December issue of the Fourdrinier, the gallery set out with the aim to place a work of art in every home. Its remit was affordable, small-scale art in a welcoming, inclusive street-level space. Collaboration, as in ‘Paper After All’ and many other PAPER projects, whether part of its ambitious Manchester-based exhibition programme (Paper After All is the 77th to be held in the gallery) or off-site projects, art fairs and tours, has also been an essential element. ‘Paper After All’ began at the Royal Cambrian Academy in Conwy before appearing in Manchester at Saul Hay Gallery and now PAPER.

Walking into the PAPER iteration, a number of works occupy the indigo walls of the larger space, while found ceramic interventions by Hannah Wooll, such as the sumptuous Pinnacle (2022) are placed around the window that looks out onto the entrance yard. Further works are housed in the smaller Paper2. Leading on from Caspar White’s arresting miniature candle-lit installation, every other work brings a new perspective, insight or revelation. Tim Ellis’s A Peaceful World (2022) masks the subject of a Victorian photograph card with copper, enamel and ink, using wire to reimagine a miniature system-matrix that might reference the Industrial Revolution or the genteel imprisonments of bygone societies.

Iain Andrews’s haunting, quietly dramatic The Disasters of Peacetime (Sanos y Enfermos) (2022) refers to Goya’s Sanos y Enfermos (Healthy and Sick), Plate 57 from his series of prints, The Disasters of War (Francisco de Goya, Los Desastres de La Guerra, 1810-1820). Andrews’ drawing, made using iron gall ink, evokes mock-threatening heaps of rags as remnants of humanity, becalmed on a raft-like dais at the end of the world.

John Hedley goads several types of paper in his 2022 work to mimic the Beccarated and Weathered Limestone of its title – Japanese paper, rice paper and tissue have been manipulated with gouache paint to create a convincingly mineral-looking three-dimensional work delicately coloured in pastel shades of orange, grey and blue.

Here at PAPER, and over at Saul Hay Gallery, David Hancock reinterprets scenes from ancient myth in Perseus & Andromeda (2022) and Laocoon & His Sons (2022). The characters act out their age-old histrionics in contemporary dress against watercolour-painted, collaged landscapes: slate blue fells and lakes, and snake-infested magazine pages, respectively. The young people Hancock paints are re-envisioned with a perspective that raises them to the level of gods and simultaneously reveals the ordinary humans behind the legends.

Ruby Tingle presents a tactile, layered collage depicting a minute turtle and a gelatinous green puddle of algae on torn leather in Deep Swamp II, continuing her experimental uses of found imagery and specialist papers. The work is idiosyncratic and takes its place among the interleaved audio-visual productions that characterize Tingle’s fabrication of a swamp princess persona.

In Paper2, Richard Gant, like Caspar White with his candle, harnesses the elements in his work Condensation (2022), mysteriously conjuring the faintest of water droplets spelling out the word ‘PAPER’ using a sheet of paper, a flat Perspex box projecting from the wall at hip height, and a water mesh. Nearby, Lisa Denyer’s Big Twin (2019) uses acrylic, filler, collage and clay to create a rich, tactile painting as delicious-looking as tropical fruit, its fine narrow-outline yellow square on thick orange brushstrokes maintaining the work’s geometrical congruence.

As mentioned in the case of David Hancock’s watercolours, artists showing at PAPER have other pieces displayed at Saul Hay Gallery, including Darren Nixon, Lisa Denyer, Lara Davies, Ruby Tingle, Martyn Lucas, Andrew Smith and Heather Eastes. At PAPER, David Leapman’s Winged Pit Former Child (2022) employs unearthly pigments loaded with crystals, the winged pit a flying chasm of unknown depth and scale, pitching into the subconscious world as infinitely complex as the concept of deep space. Meanwhile at Saul Hay, Leapman’s Doctor Cunning’s Sufficient Time (2022), where a painted cut-out box of magic floats above a furrowed watercolour mountain and terrain of marks that meander like a delta of streams, similarly speaks of absorption into the universe.

As Leapman’s titles remind us, we are all ‘former children’, and many of the works in this transformative exhibition, one of a long line of inspiring and thought-provoking shows at PAPER over the last decade, remind us of the idea that we are all assimilated from the glitter of the stars. PAPER has showcased incredible work by countless artists from the area for ten years, as well as reflecting national and international practice, and will without doubt leave a lasting legacy in the cultural and artistic scene of Manchester, Salford and beyond.