Belvedere (Mowbray Park) 2023. Detail. Digital print on vinyl banner. 400 x 500 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.

Weighting Time is a survey exhibition across two venues Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens (1 April – 3 June) and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (6 May – 3 September) exploring 30 years of work by British artist Fiona Crisp.

From the subterranean world of dark-matter laboratories to the midnight sun of the Norwegian mountains in summer, Crisp’s work explores how we might connect to spaces and ideas beyond our own lived experience. Her practice interrogates the ontology of the photographic image – a branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. Across the exhibitions elements of her large-scale photography and film installations will be reconfigured and recontextualised to reveal new insights into our changing relationships to space, place and time.

Crisp’s works are often generated over sustained periods of time in specific heritage or science locations including the Early Christian catacombs of Rome, a Second World War underground military hospital in the Channel Islands and the United Kingdom’s only underground Dark Matter Laboratory inside Boulby Mine on the Northeast coast. Weighting Time draws together photographic and film work from these series, among others, for the first time alongside new work and a large-scale public commission for Sunderland’s Mowbray Park.