Joanne Masding: The Moveable Scene of the Page at Bluecoat
At Bluecoat in Liverpool, I saw an exhibition that asked me to reconsider something I do instinctively: read.
The Moveable Scene of the Page by Joanne Masding is full of things to read — pages from a novel, torn handouts, billboards, ceramic letters — but also quietly asks what happens when we don’t read, or at least, when we don’t read first.
The gallery walls were lined with copper and steel piping, like scaffolding for something just beginning. Hung along them were pages from Mermaid’s Taxonomy, a story Masding was still writing during the run of the show. The story —involving a mermaid encountering a sock— was fascinating, both as a vehicle for exploring how our bodies relate to everyday objects and in the tale itself. Would the mermaid ever know what a sock was designed for? Would she find another use for the sock?
This blend of live writing and sculpture made the exhibition feel open-ended, like the work wasn’t finished and wasn’t meant to be. The space was full of translations — an image becomes a sculpture becomes a bit of text, which then appears again as embroidery or ceramic. Grapes and leaves taken from Victorian engravings cropped up repeatedly, reworked like visual echoes.
Some of Masding’s ideas felt deeply playful. A font based on Monster Munch crisps connects the act of eating with the act of speaking. Letters as something to be pushed out, to be chewed. This made me think about language as a physical thing, something our bodies do, not just our brains.
I kept returning to one of the exhibition’s key questions: do we value some forms of knowledge more than others? Do I, for instance, look straight to the wall text to “understand” what I’m seeing, instead of letting the object or image speak for itself? I often do. I’m aware of that. But Masding’s show made me more conscious of how that habit shapes my experience of art.
There’s a restlessness to the objects in The Moveable Scene of the Page, everything in flux, translating from one form to another. But rather than feeling slippery or confusing, it became an invitation to slow down, look closely and sit with uncertainty.