Ian Macdonald: Fixing Time at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art
Maja Lorkowska, Exhibitions Editor
Photography fans, mark the dates in your diary! A very special, two-venue exhibition has arrived in the North East: Ian Macdonald: Fixing Time at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art. The retrospective spans the last five decades of the artist’s work across photography and drawing, celebrating his unique eye and the warmth with which he treats his subjects, from family beach picnics to industrial landscapes.
Macdonald is quick to emphasise that he is not a documentary photographer, as some would describe him. He explains that his intention is to go deeper than simply documenting a moment and capture something more about his subjects and their relationship with their environment. This is something that occupies Macdonald metaphorically as well as physically, with great attention being paid to spatial relationships which is the foundation of his careful compositions.
Despite avoiding labels, the body of work documents the political upheaval and financial shifts in the North-East of England through the 1970s and 80s. Working class communities feature heavily in Macdonald’s work, and their transformation through the heyday and decline of industry in the area can be traced across the photographs. Always respectful to his subjects, the artist describes how one of the best parts of his job is that it allows him to talk to many different people and the sincerity of his character translates into his images of people.
The exhibition features many previously unseen yet key elements of Macdonald’s practice such as videos, previously unseen portraits of school children and sketchbooks full of drawings which often act as preparatory sketches for photographic compositions. The exhibition is split across the venues which allowed the artist to really guide the viewer across the different series, and separate the visual experiences in a unique way. Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens features series such as Heavy Industry, Smith’s Dock Shipyard, Redcar Blast Furnace, and School Portraits while the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art showcases The River Tees Estuary, Greatham Creek, and People, Towns and Portraits.
Macdonald works exclusively with analogue, black and white film giving his work both a nostalgic yet timeless feel.
While visiting Fixing Time you can also catch Jeremy Deller’s best known work Battle of Orgreave, a re-enactment of 1984 Miners’ Strike filmed by Mike Figgis, which is on display to mark the event’s 40th anniversary.
