Over the past four years dancer, choreographer and artist Jo Shapland regularly visited the Mostyn Gallery in Llandudno as part of her [in]scape residency project where she experienced at first hand the gallery’s extensive rejuvenation and expansion project.
From the reconstruction of the original Victorian gallery building and the addition of the empty, disused spaces of the adjoining Post Office building, Shapland followed the process from demolition and construction through to completion.
Spaces were shuffled, developed, re-built. Shadows gave momentary expression of place. Physical marks and less tangible traces remained. Informed by her own approach to drawing and choreography Shapland explored the qualities of architectural spaces through body and movement, developing film and photographic imagery, sculptural and found objects as well as a site-specific performance to celebrate the reopening of the gallery in May.
For the exhibition, which opens on Saturday 7th August, Shapland revives the old ‘blueprint’ methods of reproducing architectural drawings.
Casts of the former post office sorting office have been used to create cyanotypes on plaster of Paris and other techniques use strong tea, blue ink, salt solution, rust and various methods of imprinting.
By transposing dimensions of the old sorting office and overlaying ghostly traces of the recent and distant past the work transforms the gallery into a resonant space of archaeological memory. Designed as an homage to traditional methods of architectural drawing and photographic reproduction, and to a fading pre-digital past [in]scape is a palimpsest of the visible, the remembered and the imagined, but infused at the centre with live presence and its promise of futurity.
