Our full exhibition programme, including our public artworks, is now closed. Visitors can still enjoy art in person at FACT and Bluecoat until August & September.
One of the three suggested entry points to The Stomach and the Port is ‘porosity’. To be porous means to not be sealed against its environment. For example, our skin is porous, hair can be porous and even rocks can be porous. To accept porosity is to accept a form of exchange and the possibility of transformation. When we recognise our bodies as porous, we also reject the idea of humans as exceptional and separate from nature. Exceptionalism has deep historical connections to an economy based on extraction, where nature and people are thought of as ‘objects’ in order to justify their exploitation.
The artists exhibiting at Bluecoat acknowledge new networks of relationships – kinship attachments and co-dependencies between people, things and environment. They propose a more equal world through challenging borders between nature and culture, alive or not alive and other binaries, offering multifaceted ways in which we belong to and are intertwined with the world beyond our concrete physical boundaries. To consider ourselves as part of nature is an argument against separateness, it means to recognise that nature is not around us but rather, we are nature.
This exhibition will run until 5 September.
Bookings
Booking is strongly recommended. Tickets available here.
Accessibility
At this current time Bluecoat can only be entered from the front courtyard off School Lane. An access ramp leads up to the entrance of the building.
The entrance from College Lane is currently closed.
