Nothing Gold Can Stay at texture

After closing its Ardwick site last year and re-opening this June in Cheetham Hill, texture 2.0 hosts its second show, Nothing Gold Can Stay, fittingly themed around transience and impermanence.

It takes its title from Robert Frost’s 1923 poem – eight lines musing on nature’s… nature, which is, essentially, to change. The newest growth, according to Frost, carries the richest colour, but that colour is gone almost as soon as it appears, in a kind of fall from grace. Is it a tragedy, or is it just what time does to anything living?

Through thinking about light, nature and the inevitable cycles of time, the exhibition places the poem in dialogue with contemporary issues such as the climate, post-colonialism, identity and post-humanism. Four issues for four artists.

Nastassja Simensky works through fieldwork, tracing the effects of extraction and energy industries on landscape and heritage. Zoë Wilkinson paints on sugarcane fabric and charcoal made from driftwood, materials that carry the legacy of indentured labour, building an imagined homeland between Guyana and Britain.

Ruth Murray’s realist paintings work against the traditional depiction of women in nature, loading familiar domestic and outdoor scenes with psychological tension. And Damaris Athene works across painting, sculpture, glass and digital collage, exploring the posthuman and the blurred border between human and non-human.

As is their wont, texture have given little else away in terms of what to expect in the room. So why not read Frost’s poem, and let your imagination fill in the blanks:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay