Exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery retraces the steps of generations of people who have lived in the city

An exhibition by artist Jill McKnight inspired by collections of artworks and sound archives has opened at Leeds Art Gallery. Yvette Huddleston reports.

Leeds is a city of many, diverse stories thanks to the generations of people who have shaped its history – and some of those stories are highlighted in a fascinating exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery.

Desire Lines is the result of a project launched last summer, part of an ongoing collaboration between the gallery and the British Library, which saw Leeds-based artist Jill McKnight being invited to delve into the extensive collections of both institutions and make new work in response.

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“It was a pretty open brief, but my angle was that as an artist living and working in Leeds, I was interested in exploring identity and representation and how the people of the city and the wider West Yorkshire area had been represented in both collections.”

Then it was a case of narrowing down the scope of her research. After consulting with curators, McKnight chose 50 works from Leeds Art Gallery to study in more detail, from a longlist of 160.

“I focussed on works on paper, which is the largest part of their collection with over 10,000 works including sketches, prints, drawings and watercolours. And from the British Library I was directed towards a section of their sound archive which was recordings made by the University of Leeds from the 1960s onwards capturing local dialect.”

She listened to around 100 sound recordings, many of which were with older people who had worked in Leeds woollen mills, as well as folk songs performed by local people. “Because it was a six-month project I had to be quite decisive, but I was guided by intuition and areas that I was drawn to. There was quite a lot of back and forth researching and making drawings initially and small sketches and lots of note taking. Then it was a case of developing particular images that stood out.”

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McKnight is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across sculpture, writing, installation and drawing, and her new body of work showcased in the exhibition includes a mixture of sculpture, print, sound and video works. These are displayed alongside selected items from the British Library sound archive and artworks from the Leeds Art Gallery collection.

“There is work in the show by some artists I have admired for a long time but also two who were new to me – Edna Lumb and Effie Hummerston who were both mid-20th century artists. It has been wonderful to discover them and to find that they had similar interests to my own.”

Cultural identity and the representation of working class people in the North of England is a key feature of McKnight’s practice. Recurring themes in her work include domestic and industrial labour and community, with the aim of highlighting voices that might otherwise be lost or overlooked. The whole project chimed perfectly with McKnight’s creative aims and ambitions.

“For me as an artist it has been a really amazing and inspiring experience to encounter the artworks and the artists and to hear the voices of all those local people. It’s only a snapshot really of two huge collections that include so many stories but it’s been a real privilege to retrace the steps of people living in this area of West Yorkshire.”

Desire Lines is at Leeds Art Gallery until October 16. Free entry. Jill McKnight appears in an online ‘in conversation’ event on July 14. Details https://t.co/OnssN0bn5q