Wednesday, 12 October 2016

Exhibition Visit. Fitties: Image, Text, Memory in Place

Fitties: Image, Text, Memory in Place
Photographs by Annabel McCourt, Texts by Harriet Tarlo, Paintings by Judith Tucker.

The Humberston Fitties is a century old colony of about 300 chalets, huts and cabins on former salt marsh (fitties) on the Lincolnshire coast south of Cleethorpes.  This exhibition is inspired by this particular and unique location, as well as by memories of those who have stayed on the Fitties over the years.  The exhibition emerges from Project Fitties, a collaboration between these three artists to realise a cross-disciplinary project.  The artists invited people to contribute postcards of their memories and also conducted interviews in order to deepen their picture of the Fitties past and present.
Some of the images and texts show the Fitties in the context of the esturial marsh and beach land surrounding the site, while other, more intimate pohotographs, paintings and poems evoke the past and present, exteriors and half-hidden interiors of the holiday chalets and the relationship between people and place.  In the ground floor exhibition space (part of the Discovery Centre cafe) are large-scale striking paintings, open form poems and a series of black and white photographs entitled The Closed Season.  Upstairs, the artists get closer to the people of the Fitties.  There is a large memory map occupying the whole of one wall with personal memories written on postcards, intimate paintings of individual dwellings, portraits photographs and found texts created  from the names of chalets and from spoken and written words by individual.

This is a part of my local area to which I am continually attracted for walking, bird watching and photography.  I found this exhibition particularly evocative and was inspired by the juxtaposition of text and image.





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