Monday 28th July 2025, 07:23
The final gallery holds Skye Baker's installation, mixed media, or whatever it's called. The photographs will not do it justice, it is art that has to be experienced. It's rare for me to take performance art seriously, it rarely seems other than pompous, self absorbed, and made for those in the know.
But this made me breathless, by the time I returned to the entrance to ask how I could donate something I was almost in tears. I don't really know why.
The first item on display was a video of Skye under water repeatedly coming to the surface for air and allowing bubbles out of her mouth, at one point she lets out a cloud of black food dye. Described flatly like this it sounds silly. But it comes with a sound track that you listen to on headphones, just the bubbling noises. I don't know how they were captured or how the sounds were post processed but they had a very curious quality. I'm pretty sure that if I tried to replicate the video in my own bathroom that the sounds would end up much more ordinary somehow.
There are several such videos, each on its own screen with headphones and concealed behind a black roller blind that you have to roll up to see the video.
It was a slightly disturbing beginning. I have no pictures, without copying the video and soundtrack somehow I don't think there would be much point.
I didn't watch all the videos, I felt sufficiently off-balance after the first to skip most of them.
The lighting in the gallery is not very bright, part of the design I am sure, so what photographs I do have are not all very good.
Next is a calendar, a sort of diary, it's not entirely clear to me whether this is entirely imagined or autobiographical, or a mixture
This might have been where on is 'supposed' to start:
Then a series of four photographs entitled Vocal Weight
Then another screen at the opposite end of the gallery from the one with the explanatory placard
And here is some of how it was planned
And the last thing I see before leaving the gallery, but not the last I see of the gallery, really hit home
I left the gallery and went down the stairs to the art gallery below where I realized that the Skye Baker installation is in a literal gallery above the older and more conventional artworks
I have a brief conversation with the member of staff sitting at the entrance in which I say how impressive the whole museum is and especially Skye Baker's work. He points out that Skye is only eighteen and says that he is glad I enjoyed it, to which I replied that I'm not sure enjoyed is exactly the right word.
And then I leave, feeling rather disoriented and almost tearful but very glad I decided to visit Warrington Museum and Art Gallery
