The unheralded Vernon Park in Stockport is a stunning Victorian green space that has a bandstand, a maze, pond and playground, with statues and even a cannon dotted along its immaculate tree-lined paths which overlook old mills.
At the top of one of its rolling hills is an old mansion, complete with a wedding venue, packed cafe staffed by people with learning difficulties and, in the basement, an amazing catacomb like space converted into an art gallery, open for use to local artists.
Vernon Park, its House and Art Gallery are owned and run by Stockport Council and, while Salford Council ums and aaaas, and holds yet another consultation on the future of Buile Hill Park and Mansion*, here is a perfect example of how to do it - complete with a Heritage Lottery grant - without trying to flog the place off for a private hotel or houses.
The whole mansion itself puts Salford Council to shame, having left Buile Hill Mansion derelict and in danger for almost twenty years. But the latest art exhibition being held at Vernon House rubs the irony in to the max...capturing the squalor of Buile Hill and somersaulting it to new creative heights...
(Dis)regard is an exhibition of drawings, videos, images, prints and installations exploring 'the unseen, unremarkable and overlooked', with works titled Neglected Spaces, Collected Debris, Corralled Detritus, Found Abandoned and The Cleansing, amongst others.
The three Greater Manchester artists - Sandra Bouguerch, Paula Fenwick Lucas and Louise Garman – have responded to various sites, including Buile Hill Mansion and 'secret garden', and the old Cussons factory in Lower Kersal, collecting items and photos from the abandoned sites and reimagining them on another ethereal level.
Two amazing dreamlike works by Paula Fenwick Lucas titled The Secret Garden, Salford I and II, use the back steps and neglected courtyard of Buile Hill Mansion as inspiration to an enchanted world, using drawing, hand coloured photos, textiles and print, inviting the viewer into its gated, fabulous possibilities, framed by lace curtains and sweeping trees...
...Meanwhile, Louise Garman, has an angry reaction to the state of the place, using hard hitting black and white images featuring the front door of the Mansion with its Keep Out, Dangerous Building sign, a slapped gate bolt from its gardens and the burnt out roof of its depot building within multi-layered abstract photos suffused with graffiti and found objects from around the Park and Cussons site.
Cussons, about to be reinvented as a housing estate, also features prominently within the exhibition, as Paula Fenwick Lucas encases a hand, sculpted from soap, standing on a rock from the site, and Sandra Bouguerch prints images from the abandoned car park and the Mansion onto aluminium that transforms piles of rubbish into shimmering objects of unearthly beauty.
Paula Fenwick Lucas also mounts debris from the site into a glass trophy case, like something you would find butterflies captured and pinned within the halls of some old creepy museum.
While these converted images from Salford alone would re-balance the senses, there's absolutely loads of other works from beyond Irwell-land with the same theme and other worldly presentation...
Louise Garman says that her art takes the 'un-neat' and makes it 'neat'...and has mounted found objects from solitary walks, catalogue style - including a 'hippy crack' canister - with drawings and printed plaster onto a clean icy white background.
Other silkscreened and filtered images see a dystopian future of cars (Sunset Over Saddleworth), hellish clouds (Fake News) and an eerie nuclear power station (Places Obscured: Dungeness) in a series of disturbing works, some clipped on rusty grills, that bring home extinction rebellion in a major wow! context...She contrasts this apocalypse with a tranquil natural triptych video of trees, clouds and sea. All isn't quite lost. Yet.
Sandra Bouguerch also disturbs the psyche with a video installation projected onto the floor showing golden shapes with the shadow of a figure slowly encroaching its aesthetics. Plus, there's a series of Morocco-inspired abandonment printed onto tiny oblongs of corrugated cardboard. It's warm, frightening and cold at the same time.
For the truly disturbing see the Corralled Detritus installation by Paula Fenwick Lucas, a static, staggering mobile of lids, dolls' arms, gloves, feathers, bones and more hanging, frozen in time and place on an epic scale within a glass case...
Like the (Dis)regard explanation states, 'the unseen, unremarkable and overlooked' gets explored and extrapolated into an incredible art show that makes the viewer see the world from another angle...
The show in itself is vital viewing – but the irony of exhibiting Salford's shame in such stunning surroundings should not be lost...
(Dis)regard
Until 22nd September open daily 10am-4pm free
Vernon Park Art Gallery
Vernon Park House
Turncroft Lane
Offerton, Stockport SK1 4AR
* See previous Salford Star article - Salford Council Consultation on the Future of Buile Hill Park and Mansion - click here
Louise Garman is a Salford Star contributor
Review by Stephen Kingston
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