The Globe Gallery has certainly been a globe-trotting gallery.
Even if its ‘trotting’ has been confined to the North East, there’s a circularity about a journey that, after nearly 30 years, brings it back to the place where it all began — 97 Howard Street, North Shields.
It was here that Rashida Davison’s eye alighted on a former shoe shop, the Globe Boot Company, and she decided that with a bit of work — actually quite a lot of work — it would do for an art gallery.
Rashida went one better and opened the Globe Gallery in 1995, showing work from the Northern Print Studio and original artwork by the Viz team (she knew them from her time as a model in the comic’s popular photo strips).
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The Globe’s history since then has been largely peripatetic, shoestring funding being a prime factor in its string of addresses.
At some point a sister gallery, Globe City, was opened in Newcastle’s Carliol Square, above the World Headquarters nightclub. The North Shields gallery subsequently closed, temporarily severing the connection with North Tyneside.
The Globe Gallery moved from Carliol Square to Blandford Square and then to Commercial Union House on Pilgrim Street, occupying a street level site before ascending to the top of the now demolished building.
Every move has involved a Herculean effort of restoration on a tight budget with a band of loyal volunteers mucking in.
But Rashida gradually built up the gallery’s reputation, staying true to her pledge to work with high calibre artists and remaining steadfast, particularly in the early days, in the face of ersatz media outrage (local press coverage of an early exhibition by photographer Phyllis Christopher, preserved in the archive, has shades of Viz).
Now Globe Gallery is back in North Shields. For a couple of years it has marked time in the North Tyneside Business Centre which will continue to accommodate much of the office equipment, freeing up space in the new/old premises for exhibiting.
But this month there’s to be a grand reopening over the road at 97 Howard Street, the former shoe shop having been made ship-shape by North Tyneside Council and handed back to Rashida.
It just feels like home. It feels right to be here, appropriate, and phenomenally exciting as well.
Rashida Davison
The Globe Gallery is now to be a key component of the evolving North Shields Cultural Quarter, an initiative to grow the town’s creative economy backed by the North of Tyne Combined Authority.
Putting the municipal endorsement into words, Cllr Carl Johnson, deputy mayor for North Tyneside and responsible for regeneration, economic development and culture, said: “Globe has been part of the fabric of the town’s artistic community for decades.
“Having this exhibition space in the town centre brings opportunities for local, national and international artists to show their work in North Shields.”
Standing amid the freshly whitened walls, and still looking as if she can’t quite believe it, Rashida savours the atmosphere.
“It just feels like home. It feels right to be here, appropriate, and phenomenally exciting as well.
“Because the stuff we might need from time to time can be stored in the other place, it means we can adapt this space to accommodate whatever exhibition we put on, or even live shows that might generate income for the gallery.”
A successful application to the National Lottery Community Fund will see kitchen facilities installed in the back room designated for artist workshops and the sessions Globe will run with Northumbria University focusing on “hidden illness”.
Mindful of her own entry into this world, Rashida has always been aware of the potential of art to be part of the healing process. Not that this has ever dictated what work is shown.
“Globe has always been about health and wellbeing and the conversations we have around an exhibition are part of that,” she explains.
“This is somewhere completely different to an office or an NHS facility. It’s a place where people are free to come and be quiet or have a conversation, whatever makes them feel comfortable.
“Art can be a conduit to conversation around issues that might not be directly related to the work on show.”
The opening exhibition is something of a Globe Gallery coup, featuring new work, including six large paintings, by Mark Fairnington whose art is inspired by the natural world.
You might have seen his close-up studies of animal eyes and massive portrait of a bull displayed at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in 2009 as part of an exhibition called A Duck for Mr Darwin.
In 2018 he exhibited a series of small landscape paintings at National Trust property Cherryburn, birthplace of Thomas Bewick, showing what the area the famous engraver grew up in looks like now.
That series led to the big paintings to be shown at Globe, which he says “are much more like stories to do with looking at the natural world.
“They’re stranger in a way. The scale and detail are more emphasised. The landscapes in the back of the paintings are from Northumberland and the Lake District but the foreground images start as photos I’ve taken of woods around south London which I’ve then put into Photoshop to create fantastical landscapes.”
At least one of the paintings draws on a tradition established in the 17th Century of showing the seamier side of nature, the forest floor where reptiles, roots and insects battle to survive. It is known as Sottobosco (undergrowth) — hence the title of Globe’s reopening show.
Mark suggests his new paintings are best described as dioramas.
“You think you’re looking at something that exists in the real world but actually it’s a construction arising from the imagination of the person making it.
“I’m still making new ones and it’ll carry on. Each painting has a point of focus but they’re all slightly different and they develop as I move from one to another. The most recent one is a sort of floating tree over the landscape.”
He says a couple of people have sensed in that picture echoes of the ‘sycamore gap’ outrage on Hadrian’s Wall although that hadn’t been in his mind when he painted it.
“I suppose what I’m interested in is the idea of painting as a kind of storytelling and the big difference for me in these paintings compared with previous ones is that they seem to connect to folklore, things like the Green Man (pagan symbol of nature’s life cycle).
“It’s the idea that storytelling is a way of constructing an emotional connection to the natural world rather than an objective and scientific one.”
Mark exhibited some paintings in the series in Germany at the end of last year and a couple were bought by collectors. North Shields might seem an unlikely location for a first UK showing of the latest additions.
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But Mark was born in Gateshead in 1957 and lived there until he was about four when his father got a new job in London. The family would then return to Tyneside for holidays to see grandparents.
Then, when they retired, his parents moved to Wooler, to be followed by his brother who now lives in Kelso.
In a sense, he says, this exhibition connects to his personal history and the history of the work he’s done.
“Also I know Rashida and I know the gallery and I’m really impressed by what she’s done with it.
“It’s the first time someone’s given me the chance to show all six of these new pieces of work together in one place.”
Paintings both big and small will form part of Sottobosco: Tales of the Undergrowth which reopens the Globe Gallery on July 27 and will run until September 20.
