Sunderland Airshow 2011

This weekend is the annual Sunderland International Airshow. This has been running for about 20 years now and gets more popular each year, with hundreds of thousands of people attending over the weekend, making it the largest free event in Europe.

We went yesterday, and found a spot about half way along, on the cliff top at Roker.  Here's the view north up the coast, to Seaburn and Whitburn:

I don't know if you can make them out, but there were huge crowds all along the sea front.

There was plenty to see, as usual, and the weather was absolutely beautiful, as you can tell.

There were no serving military aircraft this year; presumably they're all otherwise engaged. My lack of knowledge about planes is total, so you'll have to forgive the vagueness, but here are a few highlights as best as I can remember.

This Cold War classic is the Vampire, though to me it looks for all the world like Thunderbird 2:

There were a few display teams, including this pair:

And these biplanes with wing-walkers:

I'm not sure of you can tell, but the people on top of the planes were upside down at this point!

This is think was a Hawker Hunter, but what mostly struck me was its jazzy paint job, which reminded me of the 'rocket' ice-lollies we used to get as kids:

This guy made me nervous - he kept going straight up, and then straight down again, in a rather jerky fashion:

This art deco beauty is a Catalina flying boat:

Isn't that just a gorgeous sight?

No UK airshow is complete without a Spitfire:

And finally, the star of the show, the Vulcan bomber:

You can really see its Concorde-like shape from the side:

A great day out, and I can thoroughly recommend you come along next year if you have the chance.

A cultural morning

Taking a morning off from sewing, I went to see a new exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery at the gallery at Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens.  This is entitled 'Writers of influence', and ranges from Chaucer to J K Rowling, via Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolfe and Dizzee Rascal (plus many others).  They're all fascinating to see, but the real star of the show, and what looks like making the exhibition a real blockbuster, is the Chandos portrait of Shakespeare.

This is the only portrait of him that has 'any claim to have been painted from life', as the caption put it, which is as good as we're going to get, and good enough for me.

This is quite a coup for the gallery as this is the first time ever that it's been displayed outside of London, and as something of a Shakespeare fan, I was determined to see it today, the exhibition's opening.  There were a lot of people there, most hearteningly of all a bunch of teenage boys.  They weren't on a school trip (it's Saturday), and they weren't there with their parents, they'd come along because they wanted to.  Maybe our culture's in safer hands than we give it credit for.

Photos weren't allowed in the gallery, of course, but outside in Mowbray Park, I did take one of a rather different literary figure: the Walrus.

Lewis Carroll (also in the exhibition) had family and friends in Sunderland, and stayed here often.  On one visit, he went to see the skin of a walrus, being displayed to the public by a sea captain (you had to make your own entertainment in those days).  Sunderland had a massive shipbuilding industry, and he would have seen many men heading to work in the shipyards.  They were wooden ships, and the men were woodworkers, or, of course, carpenters.  So, The Walrus and the Carpenter, surreal as it is, was directly inspired by Sunderland people and things.  Carroll's work was an influence on John Lennon, who wrote I am the Walrus.  He's in the exhibition too.

The walrus skin was stuffed and was on display in the museum for a century or so before finally falling apart; when I was a kid the head, mounted on a plaque, was still proudly displayed over the door.  That's had it too now, so a life-size bronze statue was commissioned in its stead.

Walking back through the park, I passed the statue of Jack Crawford, the 'Hero of Camperdown', and the boy who quite literally nailed the flag, or the colours, to the mast during a sea battle, giving us an enduring expression.

The inscription on the sculpture in the foreground reads:

'On open seas

or dry land

nail your colours

to the mast'

There'll be an exhibiton on in your local museum or art gallery or library, and it'll be every bit as interesting as this one and will tell you just as much about where you live.  Go and see it.

AV Festival 10: Energy

The International Festival of Electronic Arts, Music and Moving Image - the AV Festival - is currently running at venues across North East England, and last night I went to the AV Late & Live event. This was a chance to see all the exhibitions running in Sunderland as part of the Festival in one packed evening, and it was really fun. Some things I thought were better than others, inevitably, I suppose. The one I’d particularly wanted to see was really good, as expected, but a different one was unexpectedly terrific, and the hit of the night as far as I was concerned.

It was very well attended, and what must have been almost a hundred of us were loaded onto buses and taken to the first venue, the Reg Vardy Gallery, to see The Jump Films by Mark Neville. According to the artist statement, these short films 'explore the relationship between performance art and documentation that survives it', but I'm afraid I didn't get it: to me, it was a man throwing himself in a pond.

I got on better with the next exhibition, at the National Glass Centre. This also features videos, in this case one of workers in a glass factory in the 1970s, a retired glass worker talking about his life recorded in the 1980s (I ran out of time and didn’t watch that one), and my favourite, a new piece entitled Glass Struggle, a silent black and white film in which the artist, Mat Fleming, made a glass hammer and sickle.

The resulting items were also on display, and whatever your political leanings, they did look beautiful.

We then headed back to the city centre, and a sound and video sculpture based on wind turbines, Wind Phase, by the American artist Bill Fontana at The Place. I attended a talk he gave last summer where he discussed his work and gave hints about this new piece, so it was good to find out how it ended.

Next to the highlight of the evening, in the semi-derelict Athenaeum Building, above the Pilgrim pub. This was entitled Incandescent, by an artist collective called SDNA, and consisted of a ring of light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

This was equipped with sensors, so how many of the bulbs lit up depended on how close people got; the closer we went, the more lit up. If we got too close, a bulb fell down a chute in the centre and smashed, while a brief video of bulbs suddenly played in the background. This may not sound much, but it was great! It was really effective in the space, and I l0ved it, as I think did everyone else. There was a cheer every time a bulb smashed!

We then went to the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, and the Semiconductor video installation, which is what I’d mainly gone for. I do like their work, and I wasn’t disappointed; they were showing Magnetic Movie, my favourite of their short films, and which I’ve only seen in a low-res online version before, so it was good to see it in a decent setting.

Finally, to the Winter Gardens, for Buddha Machines, by Simon Fisher Turner. This is a series of small music players concealed amongst the plants in the Gardens, playing musical and ambient sound loops.

I think this could have been very effective, but unfortunately there was a lot of talking over the top of it, which spoiled the effect somewhat, which was a shame.

It was a terrific evening, which I thoroughly enjoyed. If you're in the area and would like to see any of these events or any of the others in the Festival you need to be quick: it's on until this Sunday, 14 March.