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Kate McDonnell and Nicola Turner, We Are For The Dark at That House on Mare Street – Rather pleased to have somehow avoided all online imagery before walking up those stone steps at that house on Mare Street and find that first room in that fascinating house transformed in such a breath-taking full-bodies way, “wow!”. Exciting, engaging. 

We Are For The Dark is a site responsive intervention by contemporary artists Kate McDonnell and Nicola Turner. “Their assemblages, sculptures and installations retrace invisible memories left by generations of former inhabitants at one of Hackney’s oldest buildings”. We have  written about That House a number of times over the Summer, there’s been some excellent exhibitions and events in the born again space in recent months, not everything has been, in terms of the shows that have happened in here, not everything has been has been right, not every show has been worth covering but more than enough of it has been. The Summer has been positive at 195 Mare Street (and we still have most of September and the big wall painting before the space closes for that restoration work to start)

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Both artists are, so we are told and so we can very obviously immediately see, are exploring “the darker sides of the human condition through an uncanny palette of ephemeral materials and ambiguous forms. With Turner’s works speaking to the fragility of the body and McDonnell’s to the fragility of the mind, their collaboration contemplates the notion of death as a life-affirming force”. 

The work  has an immediate impact, strong, demanding, questioning, engaging, never obvious, at times rather beautiful. The two of them have used the old house wonderfully, the big open rooms where the ballroom once was, the smaller upstairs spaces where’s Elizabeth Fry’s women once slept, and that wonderfully dark basement where they really can explore the darkness. There’s some excellent live music resonating in just the right way dow nthere in the dark, respectfully working with rather than overpowering the visual art – “Tendrils creep into the building’s gloomy basement where Clare Whistler and Jim Blackburn add movement and sound to one of Nicola Turner’s immersive installations – just right. Kate McDonnell and Nicola Turner. are a strong combination, this is a very powerful show, a wonderful way to use the space, I know art show reviews should be critical, they should analyse, question, deconstruct. but sometimes you just have to go with the emotion of it all 9and anyway, I;m an artist, not a critic.       

“Monumental yet incomprehensible creations ooze down walls and staircases, bulging shapes engulf furniture and spill out of crevices – where children once may have played hide and seek in their Georgian family home, or where former prisoners were given shelter during the building’s time as a women’s refuge”.

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I still haven’t found the World War Two bomb damage, there are the marks from the various times the big house was squatted (and some might argue, saved by the squatters), there are so many stories to this space, these rooms and the lives lived within them, it would not be overstatement to say that Kate McDonnell and Nicola Turner. have added to the stories, We Are For The Dark has been an excellent show. Alas it was only for one weekend, it really was something special, a privilege to see it, to get lost in the basement with it. Brilliant art show, art excites. Wow! (sw)     

Previously on this pages –

ORGAN THING: Peeling wallpaper, brick dust, Emily Tracy’s room at the Elizabeth Fry Refuge, traces left by Sam Hodge, a rather fine first art exhibition as Hackney’s historical 195 Mare Street gets a new lease of life…

www.195marestreet.co.uk / Kate McDonnell / Nicola Turner

As always, do clcik on an image t oenlarge on see the whole thing or t orun the slide show and get a flavour or two…