RECORDING - Artist talk: Expanded Interiors Re-Staged

Join artists Catrin Huber and Rosie Morris, who will be discussing their installations for Expanded Interiors Re-Staged, currently on show at the Hatton until 10 August. In this talk, Huber and Morris will be discussing their practices, research and ideas surrounding their work and their thoughts on developing their current exhibition / commission.

Huber’s original exhibitions Expanded Interiors were exhibited in two Roman houses at Pompeii and Herculaneum: in the House of the Beautiful Courtyard at Herculaneum and the House of the Cryptoporticus in Pompeii.

Huber, a visual artist and Professor in Fine Art at Newcastle University, has re-staged her large-scale installations. She has also developed new work in physical and digital formats, setting the installations in a new conversation with the architecture of the Hatton Gallery and incorporating a 3D real-time environment that enables visitors to virtually ‘walk around’ ancient rooms in Herculaneum and Pompeii.

The large-scale installations incorporate replica 3D-printed Roman artefacts that are integrated and re-assembled within the contemporary setting of the Hatton. Artefacts recreated include statues of Roman women, face cups and oil lamps. As with Roman wall paintings, the exhibition conjures up a balance between real and imagined space, inside and outside space, and the past and present, creating a dramatic succession of rooms that contrast and link with each other.

Expanded Interiors Re-Staged also includes a brand-new commission by fellow Newcastle-based artist Rosie Morris. Morris’ atmospheric new commission for Expanded Interiors Re-staged brings a theatricality to the experience of crossing spatial thresholds. She has playfully reimagined a small, dimly lit space with domestic-scale illusions of incisions and openings. Borrowing from the principles of Roman Wall painting, Morris’ installation negotiates an exchange between the viewer, the artist, and real and imagined space, as well as multiple visual languages including colour, painting, drawing, photography, light, filmic projection and dioramas.

Expanded Interiors Re-Staged reconnects Newcastle and ancient Rome via a time just before Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79AD. You are invited to explore the exhibition virtually with the artists and join them for an evening of discussion and reflection.