NNF 2021 - Tony Cragg at Houghton Hall, PrimeYarc at Yarmouth and Mona Arshi at Cley

The N&N festival is always going to have music and Norwich at its heart, but even in this covid restricted year, there are treats to be had around and about the county. Foremost among them is the annual Houghton Hall art exhibition, but there is other stuff out there should you care to go looking. To paraphrase Elwood Blues, it’s sixty nine miles from Great Yarmouth to Houghton Hall, via Cley Next the Sea. I had a full tank of gas, and in the wettest May on record, I didn’t need sunglasses.

The Yarmouth Springs Eternal Exhibition is tucked away in the inauspicious Market Gates Shopping Centre – finding it is a challenge in itself. Startling in its incongruity, this huge white space, curated by PrimeYarc, was presumably a retail outlet of some sort in a previous life, but aside from a boxed off escalator I spied through an open door, there’s little evidence of that. What there was instead was an art bazar, with everything from printed t-shirts to charity shop object-trove up for grabs. Garlanded with Jacques Nimki’s pressed flowers, and surrounded by various photo collections (I was particularly engaged by those of the Venetian Waterways gardens) this was a perplexing mash up of installation and craft fair. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and what emerged was a community based project that was a positive and charming shout out to the town.

Mona Arshi’s Shifting Sands is best described as a small pleasure - a tad oversold as a multimedia blend of voice, natural sounds, video, photography and sensor data. Invited to sit in a room with a few large photos dotted about, attention was focused on a central telly, where I was invited to watch fifteen minutes of a rolling film. What was presumably Arshi’s own voice whispered a selection of poems while the text appeared on the screen, accompanied by ambient sounds from the marshes. I’m told you can visit an IMAX cinema at the Grand Canyon, showing films of the Grand Canyon, and this came to mind while I fidgeted during the installation. The Cley Marshes are so beautiful and atmospheric it seemed wilfully perverse to sit inside the wildlife centre, when the real thing was a stone’s throw over the road. The people were lovely, though, the cake was excellent, and the invitation to listen to Arshi’s poems while walking around the Marshes worked better. Looking out over lush wetlands while her thoughts on the Lapwing or the Yellow Horned Poppy played out through my phone was an intriguing collision of word and vision.

Houghton Hall is an extraordinary place – one could happily spend all day in the immaculately tended walled garden on its own. There’s a grandeur and scale that is either impressive or queasy, depending on your historical perspective. In previous years, it has played host to a number of art grandees, most recently Henry Moore, Anish Kapoor and Damien Hirst. There is a considerable permanent collection dotted around the grounds too, with the likes of Jeppe Hein’s whimsical Waterflame and Rachel Whiteread’s witty Houghton Hutrubbing shoulders with the scale of James Turrell ’s SkyspaceSeldom Seen or Anya Gallaccio’s Sybil Hedge. Suffice to say that this year’s contributor had some stiff competition when it came to holding the viewer’s attention.

Most immediately striking are Tony Cragg’s monumental pieces set out on the lawn in front of the house. Each suggest that they are of something (or perhaps someone) yet the precise explanation for these gigantic, amorphous shapes – sometimes glutinous, sometimes liquescent, frequently disconcerting – remains elusive. Is Ferryman a creature beckoning us on a journey, or a strange, unknowable sentinel, standing at the crossroads of the lush greenery of hedgerow paths? Is Runner suggestive of an athlete or is this twistedtower of irregularly stacked shapes merely suggestive of movement. There is an odd dissonance when wandering around these huge edifices. They dwarf the viewer and yet are dwarfed by their setting. I can’t imagine they’ve ever previous been seen in this context, which is, of course, what makes the exhibition such an engaging experience.

Curated by the artist himself, it’s a marvel of endeavour over logistics in these trying times. I was frequently distracted by the sheer audaciousness of bringing these works all the way from Germany to Norfolk. If I have a misgiving it is that, collectively, they are all a little similar, at least to those of us less familiar with his work. There is variety, but it comes largely through material rather than form. Cast iron, fiberglass, aluminium, stainless steel, wood, glass, onyx, stone are all put to work. Tellingly, it’s actually the smaller works indoors that are most affecting. Nonetheless, set against the magnificent backdrop of the Hall and Gardens the time spent feltlike a proper, old fashioned day out and well worth making the effort.

Perhaps that’s what links these seemingly disconnected events, contrasting as they do in scale and ambition. Each gives the viewer an excuse to stride out across the county, revisiting places we too easily take for granted. I can’t think of a better reason to put them on.