The Surface Collection: Review

You have to wear a hard hat and scramble underground to visit The Surface Collective's temporary gallery. But you'll be glad you made the effort.

Scholars have argued about it for decades, but SevenStreets can finally reveal why Williamson built those tunnels. Bored of all those sterile, white-roomed galleries, he decided to create a subterranean space to display the work of the city’s exciting emerging artists. Maybe.

And it continues this week - as artist/lecturers from Liverpool Community College are given the chance to create site-specific works for this, the city’s most underground of art spaces. It’s part of the Independents Biennial strand - and we highly recommend you check it out.

It’s the perfect marriage of space and subject: and, evidently, the nine artists showing at this pop-up (or should that be pop down?) gallery were equally enthused too, responding to the dark, vaulted spaces, the half-excavated passageways, and subterranean pools with ingenuity and inventiveness.

Playing on the themes of ephemera, of fragments exhumed from the sand(stone) of time, and of buried hopes, this brief exhibition is all the more impressive because of its fragility - left in the damp conditions of the tunnels, much of the delicate work is slowly decaying over the course of the exhibition, as if being coaxed back under the bedrock again.

The Surface Collective’s Come Into View offers reason enough to appreciate that, sometimes, to find the best art in the city, you’ve just got to dig a little deeper.

Artists’ work pictured: top, Maria Stuart, bottom, Pamela Sullivan.

Come Into View, until 22 October
The Williamson Tunnels
The Old Stable Yard
Smithdown Lane, Liverpool

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