Out of Place

In 2018 MCAHE commissioned five new site-specific contemporary artworks for heritage sites in North East England. The exhibition ‘Out of Place’, re-presented these artworks within the new context of the Hatton Gallery, prompting a questioning of how the meaning and experience of art changes when it is relocated from its original site. The exhibition featured sound works, installation, painting and sculpture by MCAHE artists Susan Philipsz, Matt Stokes, Fiona Curran, Andrew Burton, Marcus Coates and Mark Fairnington. Presented in the Hatton, the MCAHE works are exhibited in relation to Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbarn, a key example of a site-specific artwork that is relocated from its original context. Responding to the Hatton Gallery, Fiona Curran chose to make a new body of work that built on the research undertaken for the original National Trust Gibside project. This research focused on the inspirational network of female botanists in the 18th century whose ‘amateur’ practices opened a space for women to discuss and share their findings. Preferring not to resituate the original work from its site-specific location next to Mary Eleanor’s Orangery to the interior space of the gallery, this new body of work instead focused on decorative depictions of the natural world, women’s broader cultural association with flowers and plants and the thresholds between interior and exterior spaces