Exhibiting: Defenceless

Planning the exhibition

So the venue had been booked, but what to exhibit?

Our original plan (which was later thwarted for completely non-photographic reasons) was to use the exhibition to compare and contrast two very different attitudes towards preservation of 'sinking' localities: Venice and Happisburgh. We wanted to explore the contrast between what is happening on the north Norfolk coast, where the coastline of a once thriving seaside location is being allowed, at government level, to follow an inevitable path of erosion, and the very different situation in Venice, which is still a viable tourist venue, where an inestimable amount of money is being directed at strategies to prevent the city from sinking into the sea. Our photographs were to show what would in both cases be lost, making no value judgements but trying to demonstrate what had, in one case at least, become 'Already a Memory'.

But it wasn't to be.

We scaled down the project and concentrated just on Happisburgh, for which we had plenty of source material already and could easily obtain more.

The exhibition was planned, quite literally, on the back of an old envelope: it was all we had to hand as we sat in the venue's restaurant eating lunch and fizzing with ideas.

From the outset we knew we had to design the exhibition specifically for that space: the gallery was superb, and set up in the usual white-wall fashion, but the wall space rented out to external exhibitors was actually made of brick and flint. A beautiful old wall, but challenging to hang on:

click to enlarge

We knew that we wanted to avoid conventionally framed pictures - we had seen other people's on that wall and they had not hung well due to the irregularities of the surface. We also wanted something more organic than rigidly defined images constrained by artificial barriers, yet at the same time we needed to find a way of lifting our images off the wall to lessen the confusion caused by the colours and textures of the flint and brick.

Mounting the images

We decided to mount on self-adhesive foamboard, which would give the images stability, and then provide a backdrop of black or white card, separated from the image by a small amount to provide a three-dimensional effect.

This proved very effective, and we were pleased with the raised effect which produced shadows behind the images, on the card backing.

We intended to use invisible thread to hang the pictures from the battening at the top of the wall, but this proved fiddly in the extreme and far too time-consuming. Instead, we settled for the Perlon and hook hanging system provided by the gallery which, whilst more noticeable, did prove to be the better option in the long run.

We had a few problems with two or three pictures coming adrift from their fastenings- due entirely to the use of 'layered' sticky pads (used to attach D-rings to the back of the pictures) which pulled apart on the heavier images. The problematic images were all mounted on black Daler board, and someone did suggest to us that the surface of the board might have had a slightly more 'waxy' finish than the white board we had used elsewhere. We solved this in various ad-hoc ways involving glue-guns, sellotape and gaffer tape, none of which looked anywhere near as neat and tidy as the original system but at least they stayed on the wall!