Homing

Annie O'Donnell, Matthew Kaplan               13th March - 24th April 

Homing is a duo exhibition by artist Annie O’Donnell and photographer Matthew Kaplan that navigates ideas of belonging and identity through their interaction with the places where they live and work. Returning again and again to the ‘primal landscapes’ of their homes in the Teesside (UK) and Calumet (US) regions to create their own idiosyncratic visual worlds, the pair share creative conversations connecting the physical, psychological and political spaces that surround them and their communities.

A photographer with an international practice, Kaplan is also widely recognised for his long-term lyrical documentation of urban Indiana and Illinois, including the area around his hometown of Whiting. His photographs for Homing are working prints, that often focus on de/industrial sites and structures and the homes built for their workers and support systems. These images, trigger improvisatory responses by O’Donnell in sculpture, collage and painting that inhabit the gallery like characters in a play. They hang around and cling to the space, conjuring memories of the routes her family took to arrive in the landscapes of nearby Billingham and questioning how journeys like these shape our experiences and identities across time.

Together, the seemingly hyperlocal works explore and respond to sites that are thousands of miles apart, yet are strikingly similar – working rivers, bridges, industrial plants, big skies and large bodies of water. They also demonstrate the fluidity of identity across global settings and urge a re-evaluation of how regions such as the Calumet and Teesside are perceived in the hierarchy spaces and places. What might happen if the periphery became the centre?

Homing forms part of an ongoing project Company Town which grew from an ACE funded research visit by O’Donnell to Chicago 2022, where Kaplan guided her around his home region, and they shared stories around family, mobility and community in post/industrial landscapes.

Statement from Annie O'Donnell: 

As a child in Billingham, a Teesside town grown in the test tubes of the chemical giant ICI, my bedtime stories were not fairytales from a book but were instead family memories that had been passed down to my parents from previous generations. They were set in places across the UK and Ireland and involved characters, heroes and villains, most of whom I would never meet. Some involved my parents themselves, their siblings or the people they had worked with. Misadventure, recovery, grinding determination, laughter and above all hope, formed their narratives. Told and retold against a backdrop of the shapes, colours, noises and smells of the surrounding industry, these ideas of the stability and mobility of people, in and out of place, became a driver of my art practice and are, perhaps, not so different from fairytales after all.

My sculpture and collages, set in theatrical installations, are filled with thoughts and questions about what it means to build a creative life in such a place. Their materials are often reused from their former lives and the objects and images are often found by chance. I improvise around how this plays out in day-to-day life through local and global links. How might working in this way be influenced by future events, and, as part of a wider art community, potentially bring about imaginative change?

Statement from Matthew Kaplan: 

I was born and raised in the Calumet Region, on the shores of Lake Michigan, one of the most industrialized sectors of the United States. My father grew up there too, in the oil refining town of Whiting Indiana. His parents, born in Tsarist Russia, migrated to

Whiting in 1916. Our mom still lives in the home I grew up in. A short walk away, my father's childhood house still stands, where we would have Friday dinners with our grandparents - and uncles and aunts and cousins.

As a photographer for more than 50 years, I’ve traveled across the US and throughout much of the world. Often my assignments have been to capture beautiful scenery in faraway places. But the scenes I’ve always returned to, and in which I’ve now immersed myself, are the steel mills, factories and refineries of my family home.

The Calumet Region is a place that many people think of, if they think of it at all, as filled with dirty air, polluted water, and folks who are ‘not from here’.

Some of this is true. But what is also true of my home ground is the awesome power of industry on display, for good and for ill, and less visibly, the strong bonds of multigenerational families, held together through shared struggles, by close-knit communities.

As my photographic work continues into its sixth decade, my great good fortune is to have the Calumet Region as a subject, and a visual obsession. A geography which is sprawling, diverse and meaningful to me. Infused with life, and the energy of memories.