Sue Webster’s Birth of an Icon at Firstsite has the type of bombastic exhibition title that you would expect from a confident artist. Tell It Like It Is, etc. Thankfully she just about gets away with it.
Birth of an Icon is no doubt a little playful, a tongue in cheek description to herald her first major solo exhibition. It comes right out of the punk playbook that the exhibition celebrates.
Basically it’s an exhibition spread over four gallery spaces, documenting how the first four Banshee albums shaped the artist. There’s some incredible detail with the various artefacts on show.
The main gallery walls resembles the contents of your loft being carefully curated and put on full public show. It’s a timeline of late 70’s, early 80’s post-punk culture, all presented in not quite a lineal style.
What works really well is the orange string that joins up the dots. It can be confusing at first, but it makes all the connections, showing how different artists, scenes and experiences are all related.
I worked my way along the timeline, surprised to see that Bowie was nowhere to be seen. Ah, don’t worry; there he is in some of the few, final spaces, showing how he helps to hang it all together.
The second gallery space has a stunning collection of DIY punk leather jackets, all bastardised showing love for the Banshees. A third room has some self-portraits of the artist whilst pregnant in her 50’s. The final space was a little too happy clappy for me with scented candles.
Oh - and I bloody loved the Crazyhead reference.
