A weekend of two halves...

Last weekend I went up to County Durham to visit my parents; on the Sunday we went to Newcastle, to look at the Sage and the Baltic, neither of which I'd visited...


The Sage is amazing - you can only really get a decent picture of the whole thing from the Newcastle side of the river, but I love the way the curve at one end echoes the Tyne Bridge, and at the other end the Millennium Bridge. Inside it's very clean and minimalist, but in a way that makes the Quayside buildings over the river one of the focal points...

One of the halls was open for viewing while some lighting testing was going on...

The Baltic, a former flour mill, was also really interesting - but they had 'no photography' labels all over the place... Highlights of the current exhibitions for me were the portraits by Vik Muniz, (made in all sorts of materials - magazines clipped with a hole-punch, chocolate, ink, tiny plastic toys, spaghetti - and then photographed. The wide-open spaces of the Baltic meant you could get a good distance from them, which was important to see some of them properly!) and a moving display of tiffin tins from Subodh Gupta (scroll down a couple of pictures) - these were on one of the slow-moving tracks you'd see in a sushi restaurant so the alignment of the towers changed all the time - it was really mesmeric, and the tins themselves were gorgeous...

On the Monday we went to Alnwick (photos to follow), and in the evening my cousin and his wife came over and we went out to see the marvellous Bob Fox playing at the extremely friendly and welcoming Brecon Folk Club. After seeing the splendours of the new Quayside, it seemed a fitting contrast to hear songs about the industrial glories of the old one...