Sarah Wood reflects on Leaving Were The Ones Who Could Not Stay, a new exhibition at Broadway Gallery in Letchworth featuring the work of Beverley Carruthers, Bettina Furnée, Olga Jürgenson and Idit Elia Nathan and presented as part of Platforma 2025, co-commissioned by Counterpoints Arts.
1. Home safety video
Late one night I’m watching a film on television. Two lovers wander the ruins of a bombed-out church. A violent history, for now, is over. The lovers stop at a promontory. Across the bay Mount Etna is visible in the distance. A reminder, if the lovers even notice, of the perennial threat of devastation.
A haunting beautiful image. Then – irony – out of nowhere, in real life the ground beneath me shifts violently. I don’t understand it but I end up a couple of feet across the room. Oddly I wonder if a poltergeist has shoved me there.
The next morning a neighbour tells me he fell out of bed in the night. It’s only later, on the radio, that we hear there’s been an earthquake. It’s easy to forget that the Earth is always moving beneath our feet.
2. The ancestors
The first time I saw Mount Etna was on a postcard my grandparents sent when I was a child. My grandfather had written WE ARE HERE on the sky above the volcano and an arrow pointing into the crater. Funny ha ha. I treasured the joke card for years.
My grandfather was stationed in Sri Lanka during WW2 waiting on the island for an invasion that never arrived. Later, he spoke about the psychological impact of that waiting, the terror of anticipation.
At the end of the war, he was re-deployed to help with the liberation of Europe. In that aftermath a different impact – he bore witness to the nothing that war makes of the world.
3. Peacetime war movie
Never again. The promise of a peacetime childhood. My grandparents were the first people in the family to travel again across Europe– to participate, as they saw it, in the continent’s repair. Neighbours, they said, should visit each other, trade with each other. Free movement, they said, prevents conflict.
Now they’re gone and WE ARE HERE in a bellicose new century. Borders, once the site of that hopeful cultural exchange, are increasingly a form of social control. Free movement the football of cynical party-political game-playing.
Right now while some people are subject to the daily cruelties of conflict the rest witness the enormity of that horror traduced to the size of a postcard on the screens in their hands as daily newsfeed.
Never again? What can art do in times like these?
4. The gallery tour
Here we are standing in an exhibition designed for Letchworth – a town conceived just over a century ago with the utopian ambition to make the place where people live, better. Here we are in an exhibition that ponders the meanings of home (ideal or not) and the journeys we instinctually make to seek a better safer world.
But that’s just the start. Because here we are wandering the rooms of a group exhibition. Already we can feel, however subconsciously, companionability as the works, made discretely, now resonate, even talk to one other via the visitor’s journey. Ideas migrate between works. We are the conduit.
This is a project that positions movement as something central, essential to survival, to life. We are invited to bend, in companionable choreography, with the Shetland ‘herring girls’ who now populate Beverley Carruthers’ Hailstones, Bars and Meshes – the women who once migrated each year, following the fish as they swam their way down the coast of Britain. Now the portraits of some of these women are enlarged to life-size scale so they watch over us as we, in a gesture that mirrors the barrel-dipping action central to their work, bend our heads down towards the deep sound held in fishing barrels that theatrically and vitally broker the border between the present and the historical past.
We can wander freely into the ‘house’ that holds Olga Jürgenson’s Permission to Return Granted and feel our assumptions about free movement questioned as meanings arise from the past. Opposites are held in the installation architecture, weighty as it appears – the containment the space offers is challenged by its permeability and safety is undermined by its contingency – while the hard-won family photographs displayed and the absences Jürgenson alludes to in her collages also make visible the way human life is rendered almost throwaway by the often cruel march of history.
Correspondence is key here. Beyond the walls of her installation, beyond the histories it speaks of forced collectivisation, poverty, the impact of Stalin, WW2, the slightest movement of air stirs Idit Elia Nathan’s Trigger Warning. History, she reminds us, is never fixed narrative. In the handiwork that Nathan used to embroider a series of handkerchiefs is an emphasis on making; in the images, a reminder – history is what we are making right now. The modesty of a handkerchief. The enormity of geo-political cruelty. Her artwork, her act of attention, invites a timeless solidarity with all victims of war and acts as reminder that movement is not only literal, it’s what happens within us when we feel sympathy.
Across the gallery in Phone Home a mobile made of phonecards hovers like a gesture of thought above a telephone as we’re reminded of the very human desire to share stories, make contact, to literally be in touch. Across Carruthers’ herring girls images are the patterns the women each knitted into fishermen’s sweaters so they could be identified if lost at sea. Here in the prints – a commemoration of handiwork as
communication, as essential, as care.
The tangible calls to us too from Bettina Furnée’s Staying and Leaving – a pair of appliquéd banners reminiscent of the banners held aloft on protest marches, or by trade unions or marching bands – unifying objects. In the gallery the banners act as an encouragement to recognise how we are all part of the dynamic between movement and stillness, neither one nor the other – staying or leaving, two parts of a twin process, a unifying whole.
Even the question of origin, that problematic concept when it comes to the way the political right frames questions of human migration, are subtly opened and reframed. In fact it’s here that the moving image itself is rescued from its impoverished function as an agent of information and redeployed as an articulator for the complex notions that underpin the show.
Amongst the still photographs of Jürgenson’s ancestors a tiny video of a stream plays, an endless, hopefully beautiful moving image profoundly about source.
In Nathan’s Eva Learns Hebrew we see the way translation works against the odds to enable generational survival.
And as we make our own way through the gallery Bettina Furnée subverts the thin veneer of the informational image across several screen works (One Way Chorus, Domestic Celestial Events) until we arrive in the end in front of the formality of a three-screen video – a triptych. This is a framing we recognise from the history of art but one that Out of Our Earth quickly subverts as the film explores the fantasies, from religion via colonialism to simple human hubris, that underpin the desire to look heavenwards and imagine new worlds in outer space. Against the grandiosity of this ambition she posits something much simpler and more profound – the tiny everyday human trauma of leaving home: a reminder that migration is not only a primary function but fundamental to every human’s experience.
Here in the gallery history is never static. This is a show that’s all about the present and often about the future. It’s a reminder as the world lurches both literally and ideologically beneath our feet to think again – about inherited wisdom, about the legacies of history and about what kind of ancestors we want to be for our future descendants.
Copyright, text and image: Sarah Wood
Leaving Were The Ones Who Could Not Stay is at Broadway Gallery in Letchworth until 18 October 2025.
