Lost in lace

A November day in Brum

This weekend has been proper November weather here in the UK: foggy, damp and cold, with grey skies hanging heavily overhead like a sodden mantle. Breath condensing in the air in front of me and fingertips like icicles, what better place to seek shelter than Birmingham's sumptuous museum and art gallery.

Built by the city's founding fathers in the late 1800s, the museum and gallery is a magnificent example of Victorian splendour and testament to our ancestors' belief in the importance of art in education. I'll be writing in a later post about its most treasured collection (in my opinion) of pre-Raphaelite paintings, but for now I'm focusing on a thoroughly modern exhibition exploring an ancient technique: Lost in Lace.

The Lost in Lace exhibition (which is free by the way) features UK-based and international artists playing with lace - and the curiosity of it as a deeply structured material, but one which is founded on holes and space (I'm clearly missing my vocation here as a museum curator).

One of the works I found especially interesting was a mammoth inverted cathedral, based on Gaudi's unfinished church in Barcelona, which was essentially thousands upon thousands of beads/crystals, strung and hung from the ceiling.

Completely fascinating was a video of a fragment of 19th Century black Chantilly lace under a microscope. To me it felt like I was crawling through alien vegetation, helped I think by the soundtrack of a munching silkworm.

Equally curious was 'Lace the final frontier' - a striking red installation, which on closer inspection turned out to made of wood and composed entirely of military motifs such as by-planes, soldiers and missiles.

There were also some pretty spooky figures trapped behind a tangled web of black mesh.

Finally, there was an interesting comparison between white and black lace - twisting their connotations of virginity and seduction. The white formed a wall, impossible to pass through but permitting a flood of light; the black was fashioned into a medieval style gateway, entirely passable but forbidding.

But before I come over all Freudian, might I suggest that if you're in the Birmingham area, you take in Lost in Lace, along with the rest of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and if you come before Christmas, you can combine it with the fabulous German market too!