retiredmartin

September 2024. Barnsley.

Back home from Driffield, I had the sudden urge to actually finish a GBG chapter.

South Yorkshire would do, you ought to knock off your home county first. Unless it’s Rutland, when it’s already done.

That burst of Rotherham ticking last week had left just a couple in Beautiful Barnsley,

which had just opened it’s free art gallery when I arrived.

So I got personal attention as I got lost on the complex stair arrangements,

but the exhibits are diverse and “given time to breathe”.

Actually, the explanations were as good as the art, like this one.

“The exhibition examines how we experience art as part of a lineage, rather than singular artistic ideas coming from one artist or ego. It explores a collectivist, non- hierarchical approach to art making, where many methods, materials and styles exist together.”

Barnsley has some less pretentious art in the streets between the town hall l

and the post-modernist transport exchange,

and football plays a big part in the art in a town that punches above its weight in the League.

Actually, the last time I was here for culture was the night Isabelle Oakeshot was on the Question Time panel.

I’m sure she visited the Cons Club, but Barnsley’s nightlife is rather more gritty,

though Matt and Emma tell me the bars are good (read : cheap).

About time we went to one, then…