Leigh Niland
Press Brief - I Saw Three Ships Wilson Williams Gallery
30 Queensdown Road London E5
November 21 – December 21 2008
Leigh Niland
Lighting the approach to the preview evening at the Wilson Williams Gallery, Hackney-based American artist Leigh Niland has set up a walkway of glowing lighted paper bags, recreating a street packed up on Christmas eve from the artist’s New England town and unpacked on Queensdown Road in Hackney. I Saw Three Ships is a group show inspired by Ghost Ships, a Christmas story by Angela Carter of the austere traditions of New England in the time of the Puritans, from which the artist derives, and Niland’s contribution draws on this personal experience. Visitors to the show are taken on a simulation voyage of the artist driving around on snowy Christmas eve in search of lumenaria, arriving, switching off the headlights, and slowing it to a creep along lantern-lit streets. The journey rounds off at Park Hill Meeting House in the artist’s village of Westmoreland, depicted in Old Colonial. Returning again and again to draw the building on visits ‘home’, this idyllic white church by day is here transformed into a red gash of fingernails in the night.
… The snow lay deep and crisp and even….let these familiar words conjure up the traditional anticipatory magic of Christmas Eve, and then - forget it.
