CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Black and white and Redcar
MIKE QUILLE salutes an extensive body of photographic work that documents, with subtlety and compassion, working-class lives in north-east England
Redcar Blast Furnace, 2.00am Midsummer night, 1986; Picnic on Bran Sand, South Gare, Teesmouth 1982
[Courtesy of the artist]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Ian Macdonald – Fixing Time
Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland
FIXING TIME is the title of a comprehensive exhibition of 50 years’ work by Ian Macdonald, the north-east England photographer and artist. It takes place across two venues, the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art and Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens.
Macdonald’s extensive body of work is dedicated to documenting working-class life, and the rise and fall of heavy industry in the north-east in the last decades of the 20th century. This has been, of course, a period marked by huge political shifts and social upheaval. There are a wide range of themes, including People, Towns and Portraits; Greatham Creek, Teeside; Smith’s Dock Shipyard; Redcar Blast Furnace; and School Portraits.
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SIMON PARSONS applauds an artist who rescues and rehumanises stories of women, the victims of violence, from a feminist perspective
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
KEVIN DONNELLY accepts the invitation to think speculatively in contemplation of representations of people of African descent in our cultural heritage
MIKE QUILLE applauds an excellent example of cultural democracy: making artworks which are a relevant, integral part of working-class lives