Marion Piper shares her thoughts on the curatorial process when she was asked to be on the selection panel for the Cromer Open 2024.

Following my exhibition LUX at Cromer Artspace last year, I was invited to join the panel of selectors for this year’s Open Call with Helena Banks, Craig Barber, and Simon Carter, and a few months ago I was asked to take the lead on the installation of the selected works.

I have applied to many open calls over the last 13 years that I’ve been working as an artist and I realise that the selection process isn’t necessarily a critique of my work. It is a subjective response by the selector to my work, which of course is being viewed along with hundreds if not thousands of other submissions. If there are several selectors, it is a matter of collaboration and discussion too. It is a result of those people working together on that day, at that moment; a unique encounter.

The panel spent a long time individually viewing the anonymous images. As I was looking through them, I was aware that I was drawn to works that caused me to stop and wonder what I was looking at. It might have been wondering what the materials were, the subject matter or the content. I am intrigued by work that is very different to the work I make. I like work that poses questions, art that reveals itself slowly, that makes me look hard, and where the questions keep coming as I look at it.

I jotted down some of the words that kept coming up in our conversation during the selection process:

Poetic
Enigmatic

A work that doesn’t quite settle
Work that has an other worldly feel

Mysterious
Clarity

Simplicity
Un-earthed.

The art works were selected on their own merit and not because they would go nicely with something else or fit the space.

For the role of curating the show, my approach was to become very familiar with the images, I looked at the images frequently in an album on my phone until they coalesced to form a group. The works weren’t in relationship with each other in the way the work of a single artist’s work would be. By repeatedly looking they began to offer me, as a viewer, possible narratives and spaces to navigate and gradually they became a whole.

My personal taste is to not hang things that are similar together. I like the conjunction of difference to provide a point of entry for extended looking, the suggestions of space, connections, and the interaction between works. We look at the works and in some part, we find the work looks back at us, this interaction is part of the magic of art.

I purposefully began the hang with Stephen Hyatt-Cross’s paintings, Modulation 1&2, painted images on pages from a book. There is something very modest and private to me about these works. They look in some way as if they haven’t been made for public display with their uneven edges and non-traditional support, in themselves they were an interesting submission to an open call. These works invite you move in close to see what they are, to work out what the image is. We see it is a painted image over a photographic image. What might they depict, why are they there; we pause to think about that.

They are hung next to Philip Warmsley’s work, Waxing Gibbous Moon. We are familiar with looking at the moon. We know it’s a long way away, we have to adjust our heads up to look up to see it. Our viewing of the moon constantly changes. Here, Philip’s drawing keeps it very still. I like the enormous distance that putting these two works together suggests. They operate as a primer or a key; a way for us to move into the rest of the exhibition. To come in close and move back as we engage with the business of looking.

The exhibition continues daily 11-4pm until Friday 25th October.
Cromer Artspace on the Prom
West Promenade
Cromer
NR27 9FA