PRESENT TENSE 17April - 2 May
Troubling the Metaphors by Dr. Carol Sommer (downstairs)
We are pleased to host Carol Sommer’s Troubling the Metaphors exhibition. Carol’s video work Monoliths won the 2025 Redcar Summer Exhibition Prize, selected by Professor Susan Collins. Carol is an artist and art educator based in Darlington. Her practice engages with the natural landscape, particularly monoliths, as spaces to critically explore art history and philosophical ideas around Eros. Equivalents brings together responses to selected works by minimalist and modernist artists.
Stepping Out What Held Me, I Held You Beautifully Once by Miria Miria (upstairs room1)
Miria Miria’s work Remain was chosen for the 2025 Redcar Summer Exhibition People’s Award. Stepping Out What Held Me, I Held You Beautifully Once marks the first piece in a new series. She continues transforming unwanted materials into objects of care and attention. Here, the Japanese Obi belt, once prized, now unwanted becomes a metaphor for social expectations and the ties that bind. Performers remove the obi, freeing themselves, yet honouring its presence, revealing beauty in what was once discarded.
Power of the Powerless by Female artists based in Tees Valley and surrounding area (upstairs room 2)
This exhibition was inspired by Václav Havel’s essay Power of the Powerless, which suggests that small actions grounded in truth can collectively become a powerful form of dissent. Each artwork is modest in scale, resonating with individual voices. Together, through our collective presence and multiplicity, the works ask whether such voices, can act as a catalyst for change. image: Roseberry Square (part) by E. Bennett