Where's Your Coat

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Where's Your Coat is an online exhibition released alongside a zine by Shy Bairns, focusing on giving a platform to artists who call the North of England home, challenging the focus on London based artists. 

 

Where’s Your Coat, a predecessor for the full IRL show of Where’s Your Coat You’re Going To Be Cold, aims to show a body of digital work, giving a nod to how important online community and connections are for artists living in the North, specifically in rural areas. The work links to this theme of how we relate to digital and social media in vastly different ways. Tulani Hlalo’s 'Motherland' and 'Fatherland' does this by using digital video to capture the two contrasting ‘homes’ she can’t be in at once in one viewing space, while Joseph Cotgrave’s gif from his 'Elite Controller' body of work plays with themes of HIV, including how this can be circulated in the digital age through dating apps. Some works within the show relate heavily to the North of England, such as Georgia Gibson’s 'Luk’s Like a Gud Set' Facebook collaboration with her ex miner grandfather, and works by Beth Mellet, with 'Text 2 Speech' and 'SCOUSE ASMR | A-Z of Liverpool' both attempting to challenge perceptions of local dialects. Contrasting this, works such as Jack Rientoul’s 'Untitled 5 (trees)' and Chris Priestman’s 'Hunger (Connectivity)' play more on the aesthetics of digital communications. Overall the exhibition is brought together with a background of risograph (matching the constant theme of the publication), scattered with screen-printed cabbages from Eleanor Haswell’s 'Big Veg Community' zine. The show features 14 artists: Sheyda Porter, Scarlett Hirst, Jack Rientoul, Jessica Andrews, Beth Mellett, Meghan Graydon Darby, Tulani Hlalo, Liam Fallon, Saffa Khan, Chris Priestman, Joseph Cotgrave, Georgia Gibson, Eleanor Haswell and Jennifer Walton. Where’s Your Coat You're Going To Be Cold opens in Salford at Caustic Coastal on the 27th of April 2017.

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Curated by Shy Bairns