Concrete Nature Exhibition: River & Concrete/Brutal

Photography @marcin_sz_photographer -
website: Martin Sz.

Concrete Nature was a group exhibition held at the Showcase Gallery at the Jubilee Centre on 4 December 2023.

The work includes woven collages which echo landscape as a real and imagined experiences. There are two overlapping series of collages: River & Concrete and Brutal. River & Concrete follows the physical and imagined relationship between the River Tame and the concrete megalith of the M6 motorway which shadows the river along much of its route. Brutal surveys the trajectory of the concrete idealism of Birmingham’s Brutalist architecture, and uses collaged natural forms to reflect Brutalism’s “ethic” as well as the “aesthetic” (terms taken from Reyner Banham’s 1966 book on Brutalism). Both series explore the ideological concrete visions of the 1960s and their later decline – in the material itself (the decaying or demolished concrete), and in shifting perceptions of these visions. They explore human connection with place, in an imaginative, emotional, visceral and historical sense.

The exhibition also included photography produced as part of the making process.

Photography @marcin_sz_photographer -
website: Martin Sz.

Press Material

Concrete Nature explores four individual relationships with urban concrete, through walking, commuting and recording experiences, memory and re-imagining. Their documents are translated through collage, painting and photography. Each artist presents alternative and overlapping perspectives; interpreting modernist infrastructure and its juxtaposition with nature, the romantic notion of the ruin as explored in art histories and the translation of urban concrete with materials including cardboard and paint.

Carloyn Blake’s paintings from rail commutes reflect a sense of nature and the manmade in constant battle. Nature inevitably survives, because it continues to grow and renew, whereas the manmade is built for a specific purpose at a certain time.

Jen Dixon’s woven collages follow the physical and imagined relationship between the River Tame and the concrete megalith of the M6 motorway which shadows the river along much of its route. A parallel series surveys the trajectory of the concrete idealism of Birmingham’s Brutalist architecture.

Paul Newman’s painting and digital collaging returns to his memory of a walk along a canal path under the M5 in Smethwick. This is imbedded with his interest in Romantic landscape and Surrealism painting references, blurring the experience of real landscapes and paintings of ones.

James Fowkes’ subjects include Salford Circus flyover and Hobs Moat Shopping centre carpark. His fascination with brutalist infrastructure has set him on a journey with translating urban concrete as a material with cardboard models and then transcribing these with his paintings, questioning the nature of material itself.