More than one way out: Leo Fitzmaurice at The Lowry

Susie Stubbs speaks to Leo Fitzmaurice as he installs a new contemporary art exhibition down at Salford Quays

Pop art, graphic design, colour field painting, commercial art, theatre and even Media City, that fast-rising media enclave on the banks of Manchester Ship Canal – they all get the nod from Leo Fitzmaurice in his latest exhibition. The show in question is Panoramia, the work a site-specific commission by The Lowry designed to fill its Promenade Gallery, a vast space that isn’t, it has to be said, the easiest to work with. Double height walls, the fierce glance of the sun streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows, and the competing architectural noise of both The Lowry and Media City could easily drown out the most compelling of artworks. Yet rather than retreat from such a daunting space, Leo Fitzmaurice has responded to the challenge with something akin to cheerful glee, his installation a colourful presence that stretches comfortably across the gallery’s first-floor deck.

In the past, much of Fitzmaurice’s work has featured commercial packaging (wrappers, boxes), which, when stripped of text and branding by the artist, ‘end up looking quite architectural’. The installation at The Lowry is a natural extension of that practice. Beginning with empty 35mm photographic film cartons, Fitzmaurice first created an architectural model consisting of blocky, spectrum-painted boxes and walls, and then worked with a team of 15 to transform model into reality.

The final installation sees gallery walls covered in the kinds of primary colours that anywhere else might feel brash – but here feel joyful. Smaller cubes and Bauhaus blocks are stacked in front. Painted in the same zinging hues, they invite clambering over. The range of sizes, from smallish seats to neck-craning walls, is deliberate: it gives the eye something to latch onto, a means of enabling the visitor to comprehend the relationship between themselves and the space.

‘The idea is that people can experience scale by being bigger than it, smaller than it and the same size as it,’ says Fitzmaurice. ‘Human scale is important here but it keeps scaling up, from human height up to the gallery, then to the building, then Salford Quays and on and on. One of the ideas that interested me with this work was that inability to grasp things that are so big; how limited human scale really is.’

The fact that both walls and cubes have been painted by hand gives viewers another way to connect with the work. Rather than the perfect, impenetrable finish of vast vinyl stickers (which Fitzmaurice briefly considered), the installation is clearly handmade – up close, brush marks and tiny imperfections make the work less clinical, more inviting. ‘This is a human and humanised production process,’ says Fitzmaurice. ‘Painting makes it accessible because you can see someone has done it, rather than a machine, and this too offsets the scale.’

As he describes his work, it’s clear that the artist hopes visitors will find multiple ways to read, interpret or enjoy Panoramia, from the simple joy of the Pop art-inspired colours to the fact that Fitzmaurice has created a dictionary of made-up language to accompany the installation, populated by words such as ‘sculpitecture’ that fuse one creative discipline with another. The title of the show is another such trick, a word that hints at the panoramic view from the gallery windows, the abstract landscape painted on the walls and, again, the notion of panning into and out of a scaled-up vista.

Panoramia is the third in a series of site-specific commissions from The Lowry; a series Fitzmaurice suggests is designed to ‘get artists to produce work they don’t normally do’. It’s an interesting venture for an organisation perhaps better known, at least until recently, for its collection of work by LS Lowry and its theatre and music gigs. The balance appears to have shifted, however. On top of a raft of recent, credible art and photographic shows, The Lowry has commissioned Spencer Tunick to produce what it hopes will be a blockbuster summer show – surely designed to signal its place on the contemporary arts roadmap. This new emphasis is nothing if not timely. Fitzmaurice’s installation directly overlooks Media City, while a pedestrian bridge to connect the BBC’s new northern home to the Imperial War Museum is well underway; both hint at the creative communities destined to flock to the Quays from early next year and who will, no doubt, appreciate what The Lowry has to offer.

Like The Lowry itself, Fitzmaurice’s installation references visual and commercial art, theatre, architecture, history and what it means to be a person, just one individual, caught in the midst of an era that will surely be remembered for its dizzying uncertainties and economic scramblings. And yet, in amongst it all, Fitzmaurice’s playful work reveals that there is still time and space for joy; that if there’s more than one way in, there’s almost certainly more than one way out.

Transformations 3: Panoramia by Leo Fitzmaurice, The Lowry, until 5 September. Free entry. Susie Stubbs is the Editor of Creative Tourist. Images: The Lowry’s technicians complete the installation of the new artwork. All by Susie Stubbs.

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