The Plant that Stowed Away at TATE Liverpool

Tate Liverpool presents The Plant that Stowed Away, a new exhibition that explores the connection between port cities like Liverpool and the movement of people and… plants. The display takes place in Tate’s temporary home in RIBA North.

The Plant that Stowed Away is inspired by Chris Shaw’s photographs series titled Weeds of Wallasey. Shaw was born in 1961 and is a documentary photographer who established his interests and style as an artist in somewhat unusual circumstances. Finding himself homeless, Shaw began to work as a night porter in a hotel that provided staff accommodation. During his shifts, he describes taking photographs to keep himself awake, capturing anything from more mundane subjects like fire escapes to drunk, naked hotel guests who had to be escorted to their rooms and enjoyed the idea of posing for a photo in the process, resulting in images that verge on the surreal and otherworldly. This became Shaw’s first ever monograph Life as a Night Porter. 

The atmosphere of that series was recreated in Shaw’s project Weeds of Wallasey, which began when the artist moved back home to the Wirral to live with his ailing father. He found that taking pictures of his dad was too emotionally difficult and turned to the local landscape instead – mostly industrial dockside scenery taken over by expansive weeds. The battleground between industry and nature became the leading motif in this body of work, made more expressive by Shaw’s manipulation of the prints. He describes how the “connection with the film, and the dirty tactile nature of what photography used to be” is a significant aspect in his practice and this experimentation and reworking of material in the darkroom is what led to his recognisable style: high contrast and an almost dreamlike atmosphere of the scenes that could’ve been captured at any time of day or night. His work is slightly reminiscent of David Lynch’s industrial photographs, only in Shaw’s work, the clean lines of industrial scenery are interrupted by organic forms.

The Plant that Stowed Away uses Shaw’s images as a starting point to highlight the change in urban and natural environments by extraction, colonisation and migration. The exhibition also includes Atkinson Grimshaw’s Liverpool Quay by Moonlight, prints of Liverpool’s docks from William Daniell’s book, A Voyage Round Great Britain, Henri Matisse’s collage, as well as work from contemporary artists Cristina de Middel, the recently Turner Prize-nominated artist Delaine Le Bas and Kader Attia.

Trade, movement and colonial histories are a recurring theme in Liverpool’s art displays and Tate’s new exhibition is a fascinating offering in both this category, and a great show for anybody interested in film photography.