Place/Displace
Place/Displace 14 December 2013 – 8 March 2014. Touchstones, Rochdale.
Solo Exhibition.
Place/Displace drew together recent and new work focusing on place – work physically made in a specific place such as the wall-based sculpture ‘Found Drawing, Irwell Series’ and the video ‘Eye of the River,’ or in response to specific places as in the ‘Sheds of Rossendale’ series.
The exhibition explored the importance of context in how we think about place, and how when removed from its original context, it creates a disjuncture, and we are forced to examine our sense of a place anew. Commissioned new work in response to Rochdale and the North West allowed the chance to scrutinise familiar places and buildings in new way. It was also an exhibition about the relationship of people to place, re-examining land and landscape, people and industry, the ethic of work, and its affect on our lives. Randall’s work questions notions of material value, and reveals an interest in the unfinished and the incomplete, the broken and the damaged. ,
Randall is drawn to post-industrial landscapes and sites of industry, and has undertaken a number of residencies creating interventions in non-art situations such as at Parys Mountain Copper Mine in Anglesey, North Wales, and the Magnesium Elektron factory, Salford. She is interested in the harnessing of this post-industrial legacy to create artworks, and to use contemporary fine art as an alternative perspective on industrial heritage. Responding to the place and the people, a process the artist describes as “slow burn”, often resulting in collaborative new works with the workforce and industrial processes, is part of her practice. Work is often about reinventing and reinvesting the forgotten and neglected, revealing the underbelly of place and people.
Photography: Dave Bennett.