Active Silence
Bev Broadhead / Natalie Odile Lang / Tricia Hall / Cromer 29/30th June 2024
Sculptural forms and found objects beam in sunlight at Active Silence, a two-day intervention hosted in domestic space. Like a playful incarnation of Jim Ede’s house, but in Cromer – every piece is considered with a hidden language of space and crackles with the active silence of energy.
Behind it all, three talented women whose shared processes as artists creating the show together were more co-creative, than curatorial. ‘It arose out of desire to show work on our own terms, which most artists have little opportunity to do these days.’Bev Broadhead tells me, whose front room has been transformed.
‘“Can we?” We thought. Of course we can.’
This positive can-do spirit amplifies the individual nature of the pieces, but with a strong sense of their being experienced as a whole – radiating all with congruence, solidarity and the sanctity of art. ‘There’s no writing, anywhere’, Tricia Hall comments on this deliberate choice at Active Silence to show work without any accompanying text. This clever decision is part of the power of the show.
Humanising our experience of art, by relying not on curated curatorial copy that you might find in a uniform white cube gallery space – but our own senses. And, it might sound old fashioned, encouraging us to rely on actual conversation with each other to add to our own responses to the works. Oral language, becomes newly vital.
‘We’re normally just all so saturated with everything,’ Bev explains. ‘We wanted to counter that.’ Through this active silencing of the written form, of QR codes, of screens and traditional art conventions and labels that too often reinforce unequal power structures – conversation, feels part of Active Silence itself; almost adding a live art element, embodied in these participatory exchanges. Authorship, transmuted into a blank cypher; hierarchy, replaced with collective strength. In a saturated world, this nourishing of our own responses feels not just harmonising, but vitalising.
And perhaps this is a real beauty to a show that’s already permeated with a sense of balance – between shape, form, light and dark. The energy of silence. An ease and fluidity resonating throughout, between the works. Look around you and we find innovative textiles work inspired by audio sound of birdsong recorded by Bev Broadhead. Look over into the kitchen and there’s a sculptural experiment in colour, by Tricia Hall, made while on a residency at Antony Gormley’s estate.
Look near a window and you find a triptych of mixed media stills taken from a documentary on the plight of passengers travelling by train to Auschwitz by Natalie Odile Lang. ‘I was struck by the balance of light and dark – the beauty of the landscape, contrasted with what was hidden in the hills, the words in the subtitles,’ says Natalie. ‘We find so much hope in nature, don’t we? It’s the trees that will save us,’ she adds.
‘Is that an angel?’ I’m asking about a piece perching near the back door. ‘That? No, it’s Tricia’s found object from a p****d up dirty old alley,’ Natalie is laughing [there’s a lot of laughter here]. Angel or not, it’s now a sculptural form that’s been transformed by the processes innate to this show, imbuing visitors with a regenerative quality. Not dissimilar in theme to her painting WOUNDED HEALER that you can see in the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy this year.
Outside, we all talk about the art of sustaining bees. Of growing. The natural forms and designs that sustain life in nature. The neuroscience of strengthening our senses and restoring vision.
Through the door to Bev Broadhead’s studio, we see an Artists Union England banner.
These exchanges between artists and visitors, weave into Active Silence; a positive undercurrent. Asking us if perhaps it’s through reclaiming our human voices, solidarity and human connection, after all, that we learn the languages we need to flourish.
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