Leeds Beckett University MA Fine Art
We sit around in the MA seminar space trying to come up with a title for this group exhibition. The students have some words like ETHEREAL and MATTER and we ask AI but it comes up with frankly ridiculous suggestions. ETHEREAL MATTER it is then, but with the first E faded out to suggest it’s THE REAL MATTER. What does it mean?
On Wednesday 1st October we visit Bruce in BasementArts to see Jay Gadhia’s exhibition and meet Keith Ackerman to hear about his Jacob’s Ladder public artwork. This meeting with Keith to look at the sketchbooks and tools that underpin the sculpture is becoming a special annual event for our Postgraduate students. It’s important to hear artists speak about, and question, their own work in all kinds of contexts and this visit begins the process of putting together the ETHEREAL MATTER exhibition than opens on a cold and dark Tuesday 9thDecember 2025.
The poster is an image from a White Column show. It shows one of Abbie’s cyanotypes seen through a glass ball that Shannon has exhibited. There is apparently much chat on the WhatsApp group about digitally removing the hand or leaving it so that the ball appears almost ready to crash to the floor, shattering the illusion (and seeing into the future?) I love the poster, the image, the richness of that cyanotype blue and the glow of light on the palm of the hand. It reminds me of an interview I did back in 2012 with the artists Bigert & Bergström about their project The Last Calendar in which they list about 150 ‘mancys’ – ways in which humans have tried to predict the future and the list includes crystallomancy (divination by crystal ball) and chiromancy (lines of the hand). More of that later.
The White Column is our experimental project space within Fine Art, a place to test out the presentation of work. It’s a handy space just downstairs from the studio and next to our 3D workshop and has plenty of bright white walls and electrical sockets and staff on hand to help and advise. It is limited however in terms of really only being ‘open to the public’ when viewed through the windows, which makes using sound or very detailed work problematic but overall it’s a clean environment in which to place works alongside those of others.
In this context, working with the BasementArtsProject space is diametrically opposite and thus a very worthwhile challenge. There are access issues with the narrow stairs, having to cart equipment and artworks from university, the low light levels and the tightness of the space when eight people are trying to install at once! After an initial adjustment period, the nine exhibiting MA Fine Art students react well to these parameters and this adaptation is really evident in the increased use of light in artworks (Idia, Liz, Shannon, Rory, Ben and, to an extent, Abbie) and use of low level sound (Matteus, Liz, Rory, Lorna and Ben).
Down in the Basement, colours become more sombre, even more so given the months of the exhibition, and Aparna’s work with leaves and gold leaf reflects these very muted environments. Elsewhere, we see and hear spidery soot tag patterns from petrol/synthetic fires, the frequency of the earth itself, a Jeff Buckley poster, discarded, creased and walked-on A4 paper, shadows of flickering cave-painting-like galloping horses, a composed cacophony of noise, low breathing, aliens in burning landscapes, rotating kebabs with music box ballerina music and a golden bead mask on a décollaged wall.
Going back to that mancy list, I note we also have arachnomancy (spiders), hippomancy (behaviour of horses), sciomancy (shadows), geomancy (dots on paper) and phyllomancy (patterns and colours of leaves). See the full list here: https://alandunn67.co.uk/Theendisnigh.pdf
As I sit at the opening and gaze into a glass of red wine (oenomancy - divination by gazing into a glass of wine) I wonder if it is coincidental or are the students in ETHEREAL MATTER in some way trying to predict and shape their own futures by using materials that can be random but at the same time signifiers of something to come? Time will tell, but what I do think is certain is that from the bus and taxi journeys down to Basement from Leeds city centre to passing the characters on the street and the family members in the house, ETHEREAL MATTER is both about the ‘otherwordly’ but also very much about the reality of this world, beyond the occasionally safe or sanitised walls of academia. That’s what it means.
Dr Alan Dunn
December 2025