Mx.D.P

Seen: Unseen – What Lies Between’ showing in the Main Barn Gallery of the Mid-Wales Arts Centre until Sunday 11th of May. https://midwalesarts.org

My visit was described in on my blog https://mxdp.blog/2025/04/16/visit-the-power-of-ma/

The mid-wales art center is a modern barn set in the grounds of an old farm house. Its was a joint exhibition between two artists staged with tradition wall hung paintings, it had a central space with chairs in the round for an artist talk.

It was inspired by the Japanese concept of ‘Ma’. I struggled with this exhibition as I had a busy mind and I wondered if others did too. I couldn’t find my own ‘Ma’ so I wondered if a queered curatorial experience would have changed that….

Queering the Exhibition:

Queering, in curatorial practice, to questioning, destabilise, and reject the normative..

I want to make room for ambiguity, contradiction, in-betweenness, and multiplicity qualities that the artists talked about to echo the Japanese concept of Ma, within its staging…

This was a traditional exhibition where visitors entered through a single door and walked around the sides of the gallery… start here, end there, follow the labels. To queer this, I want to fragment the spatial logic and feeling of a gallery exhibition…

Challenge the Linear Flow use the Margins and the In-Between

Ma is about the space between, the peripheral, it is intrinsically queer..

I invite visitors to enter and exit at multiple points, so there’s no single ‘correct’ path, disrupt the flow, move the paintings to give physical space.

Place, as well as hang, at unexpected heights or angles, outside the normative ‘hang’ space…use corners, ceilings, windows… Place in transitional spaces, hallways, thresholds, entrances—so visitors must move through in-between spaces as part of the experience.

Let empty gallery walls provide mental space.

Labelling

Dispense with traditional gallery labelling instead place plain labels at different sizes, heights and angles with the following hand written and printed:

Present / Absent

Still / Restless

Visible / Hidden

Certain / Doubtful

Open / Closed

Silent / Loud

Beginning / Ending

Solid / Fragile

Known / Unknown

Intimate / Distant

Whole / Fragmented

Empty / Full

Arrival / Departure

Bound / Free

Surface / Depth

Truth / Fiction

Here / Elsewhere

Fixed / Shifting

Inside / Outside

Order / Chaos

Memory / Forgetting

Rooted / Floating

Contained / Unleashed

Connected / Alone

Light / Shadow

Pause / Rush

Hold / Release

Safe / Unsettled

Soft / Sharp

Echo / Silence

Matter / Void

Lighting and Sound

Open the doors to hear the sounds of the countryside, overlapped with recorded soundscapes of water, birds, wind, rain.

Program light changes unpredictably, making the space itself ambiguous and shifting.

Disrupt the Artist/Audience Hierarchy

Use mirrors so the audience is always visible to itself… but is multifractored… with infinity ….to find space the audience are drawn to the work.

Make Room for Uncertainty

Ma is about possibility; queering is about not forcing closure. Leave some works partially covered, unfinished, or shrouded in fabric. Allow the arrangement of works to change during the run of the show either by the curator, the artists, or the public.

Offer no single exhibition narrative… just a series of possibilities…

Curatorial Statement: What lingers between seen and unseen; Queering the Power of Ma

It lingers between seen and unseen, form and formlessness…Inspired by the Japanese concept of Ma… the meaningful emptiness between things… we invite you to inhabit the gaps, silences, and overlaps that make life possible…

This barn is not a container for paintings… but a living participant…

The fields, the weather, the echoes, we, are all part of this…

Expect the Unexpected… what’s missing may matter as much as what is present…

There’s no single story, only intersections…

Move as you wish… Stay as long as you like… This is the space of not-knowing… Here, ambiguity is yours…

Exhibition Floor Plan (Description):

• Main Barn Gallery:
  • Entrance and Exits: Multiple doors are opened, allowing visitors to enter or leave from any side.
  • Artworks: Paintings are hung at varying heights—some high, some low, some around corners or in alcoves. Several are partially covered or turned to show their backs. Materials from the artists’ process (sketches, failed experiments, scraps) are displayed alongside finished works.
  • Central “Void” Space: The middle of the gallery is open with a single bench illuminated, process scraps are left on the floor… it is lit from above with programmed intermitent lighting to mimic the change of light plein air…
  • This space can be inhabited for pause, reflection, or spontaneous performance.
  • Space Stations: where visitors, artists and curators can leave thoughts, questions, or drawings. Selected responses are displayed, updated daily.
  • Lighting/Sound: Lighting is intentionally uneven—some spots are bright, others shadowy. A subtle, shifting soundscape of field recordings from outside, quiet conversations, and silences plays in the background.
• Transitional/Threshold Spaces: Corridors, doorways, and windowsills hold small works or objects from painting, encouraging visitors to notice the in-between.
• Mirror placement …blurring the sense of where… life resumes…
• Field Path: A wheelchair assessable route leads from the barn into a nearby field, where a scheduled performance may occur. The performance is not announced with exact times but signalled by a subtle sound of a bell, wind chimes, or music drifting…
• Performance: The outdoor piece involves a dancer or group moving slowly through the landscape, pausing, disappearing, returning—embodying Ma and queering the boundary between art and environment.
• Space Stations: Along the path and in the barn are ‘spaces stations’ …
• Visitors can re-enter the gallery from a different door after or during the outdoor performance, reinforcing the idea that there is no single route through life…

 

Secret messages at Space Stations

 …on the threshold…

…still… sounds ….your breath….

…do you feel…

…moving through water…

…Disappear/Return… 

…re-emerge…

…you have changed.

…Echoes…

…a gesture…

…Silent Conversation…

…Trace the Invisible… 

…a patch of sky…

…invisible the visible…

…open your arms…

…the wind blows…

…mirror in movement…

…Leave nothing unsaid…

…Walk away without looking back…

…Threshold…

…step fully into space…

…it fade and blows away…

…someone else to finish…

…for no one at all…

Show + Get it online

Put the whole lot online in a virtual exhibition to make it linger, as a record, for assessability, and to entice.

Japanese and Welsh fusion food in the cafe.

An evening music event, A Twmpath! local Welsh musicians and Japanese dance and music, the ‘Space Stations’ become chill out areas.

Gallery shops are often the last place you expect to see queering, so it’s the perfect opportunity to disrupt the normative.

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Gallery Shop Ideas

• Blank Notebooks with Contradictory Covers
  Seen and the other Unseen, Begin vs. End. (The first and last pages could be printed with only a single word or mark; the rest are blank).
• Absence Badges or Pins
  Enamel pins that are just empty outlines or strange negative shapes, badges you wear that signify space.
• In-Between Postcards
  Postcards sets with pairs of contradictory words (one on each card) meant to be kept separate or sent together.
• Queered Scent Vials
  Empty scent bottles labeled Memory and Forgetting, a sensory nod to Ma and impermanence.
• Instruction Cards/Prompt Decks
  Small decks of cards with the performance prompts from the space stations
• ‘Unfinished’ Ceramics or Objects
  Cups with no handles, plates painted only halfway. Useful, but not quite as expected.
• Misprinted or Double-Printed T-Shirts
  Shirts with two contradictory words overlaid text that’s half readable, half obscured; each one slightly different.
• Field Kits for Pausing
  Small cloth bags containing a stone, a slip of paper, a piece of string—items meant for making your own ritual of pause or reflection in nature.
• Mirrored Keychains/Compacts
  Pocket mirrors engraved with the space station prompts
• ‘Invisible’ Artworks
  Certificates of authenticity for an artwork that described an idea or absence, something you buy but can never see.
• Unbound Books
  Collections of loose pages, none in order, some blank, some printed with fragments of text from the show or visitor responses.
• Weather Water Bottles
  Reusuable water bottles labeled ‘Today’ weather: Possibility’

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