Shelter can mean a home, where we feel safe and belong. But it can also signify a space where unsettling secrets linger, while the term can provoke commentary around homelessness and displacement. These are among the themes explored by 81 artists in ‘Shelter: The Outside In National Exhibition’, a moving new exhibition at The New Art Gallery Walsall, developed in partnership with award-winning charity Outside In.
At the heart of the show stands a small bed, with the shape of a child huddled beneath its colourful hand-printed covers. Lurking beneath the mattress is a black monster, whose claws curl around the wooden slats. It’s equally playful and uncanny, hinting at a home’s hidden dangers. Eviction notices and bills are pasted to one of the bed’s pillars, threatening the sense of security, while weeds and vermin climb up others.
Selected for a 21-week residency ahead of the exhibition, Chantal Pitts created a collection of site-specific sculptures entitled ‘Aspects’. Behind the bed, wooden doors, as well as roofs, are stuck to the gallery’s white walls. Adding to the surreal atmosphere, winding cardboard staircases lead nowhere, while collaged figures swing from the ceiling of a doll’s house.
Pitts tells stories through found objects, including discarded furniture. Here, she takes viewers on a psychological journey through her own lived experiences: “I unravelled a lot in this installation: I was evicted, then broken into, I’m facing rent increases, and now my daughter is leaving for university. Having your own home can be heavy.”
However, the doll’s house also supports clay hands, which create a welcoming presence and point to human connection behind closed doors. As Pitts points out, “Home is more than just a physical space. My children are my home”.
Shelter as a community of people is a theme which continues in a large-scale black and white drawing by Natasha Taheem. ‘Queer Mehndi Night’ depicts a real event the artist hosts for the LGBTQ* South Asian community in Birmingham. As she says, “It’s a space where people don’t have to shed parts of their culture or identity to feel accepted.”
Cocooned inside a sanctuary of their chosen family, her sitters talk and listen, hold hands, and have henna applied to their skin, which Taheem has deliberately framed for its symbolic associations:
“The intimate and communal act of applying henna, a craft traditionally used for celebrations and important occasions, is used for rest and an indulgent form of self-preservation. It’s a direct reflection of the desire to create moments of peace and connection.”
A deep sense of acceptance weaves its way through her exquisite drawing, with her medium also carrying a message:
“Drawing is a tool for meditation and grounding, and a powerful way to manifest a better future. By drawing this queer utopia, I was able to create it in the world, and the artwork became a shelter in its own right.”
Another emotionally-charged drawing on display in ‘Shelter’, a partner exhibition of works on the same theme from The New Art Gallery’s own Collections, is ‘Sebastian’s Nest’ by Michele Harris. Layered graphite marks picture a bird’s nest being punctured by arrows, which metamorphose into syringes, symbolic of life during Covid 19. Named in the title, Sebastian was one of the saints invoked against The Plague from the Late Middle Ages. Here, his arrows both penetrate and fortify a nest, providing protection and isolation from the outside world, a duality which emerges in numerous artworks across both exhibitions.
Having collected birds’ nests for years, Harris explains, “it was only during Lockdown that they became so resonant. Shelter means family: they are my nest, woven with love, support, and protection.”
Nest imagery continues in the National Open with ‘A Quiet Place’, a delicate circular sculpture constructed from thin wire, feathers and collage by Jo Hudson. While it reflects an escape from the noise of the world, her choice of fragile materials invites meditations on shelters as impermanent spaces.
The idea of temporary shelters has been visualised in more graphic terms by Helen Grundy, an artist who has spent the past 12 years working for Birmingham’s homeless services. In the vibrant, punk-styled digital collage ‘Helter-Shelter’, she has subverted expectations of a fun day out at a fairground, which becomes instead a site of frustration. As she explains:
“I wanted my final piece to represent various aspects of being homeless, from the feeling of being lost, to the preoccupation of finding a permanent home, to the system of how people in hostels bid on council properties each week to get into first second and third place to secure a viewing but how just missing one week can send you plummeting back to the bottom of the list.
This reminded me of a fairground ride, and I selected a helter-skelter because of how people queue and climb to the top only to end up hurtling down to the bottom and being almost spat out onto the ground.”
In a world where security is increasingly in jeopardy for many, art itself emerges as a refuge for both artists and viewers, as does the site of a gallery, in this pair of welcoming, poignant exhibitions.
