Slow Looking Exercise

It can be daunting visiting a museum or gallery with lots to see, trying to look at each item. We invite you to have a go at slow looking as part of our current exhibition ‘Exploring the Collection: Colour’.  You can do this in person in the Reflective Space in the gallery, or you can have a go online below.

Slow looking is about you spending time with an individual piece of artwork and making personal connections. It can be used as a mindfulness technique, allowing you to pause, refresh, restore, and can reduce stress.

Listen here for a guided process. Emily from the WIVA community group takes you on a journey around ‘Flow’ by Margaret Cahill.

Simple Steps:

You can spend 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or even half an hour looking at something and taking in every little detail. You don’t need any art history knowledge, or to know anything about the artwork, it’s about what you observe. Let your eyes do the work and questions will emerge. As you keep looking you will notice more features and details.

∙ Get comfortable.

∙ Decide how long you want to spend looking and maybe set a timer on your phone.

∙ Focus your attention on the painting. Let your mind wander.

∙ Try concentrating on certain aspects like colour, texture, shapes, or story.

∙ Your mind will make connections between elements of the work. These might be intentional by the artist, or unique to you. Both are valid.

∙ Pay attention to how your mind and body respond.

∙ Share your feelings. If you are in our gallery space please fill out one of the paperchains and hang with the others. If you are at home please email how you felt before and after the exercise to exhibitions@scll.co.uk 

Emily’s Transcript

Before we start, if you need to leave or pause for a moment at any time, for any reason, please feel free to do so. There is no need for you to do anything or to be anywhere in particular. This is time for you, to experience being in the present moment.

Let your eyes do the work, and your thoughts and questions on what you are seeing will slowly emerge. If you find yourself getting stuck or zoning out, close your eyes or look away for a few seconds, then look back at the painting. As you keep looking at the painting, you will notice more and more about it, going beyond your first impressions to find something deeper.

Let’s begin. Are you feeling comfortable? Feel the chair or the floor beneath you. If you need to, change your position so that you can feel a little more comfortable, whatever that position may be. Let’s take some nice, deep breaths, just noticing and observing your breath, sensing the rise and the fall of your chest.
Deep breath in…deep breath out.
Deep breath in…deep breath out.
Deep breath in…deep breath out.
Deep breath in…deep breath out.
Listen to the gentle sound of your breathing.

Let’s take a moment now to check in. How are you feeling? Is there a word you can use to describe how you are feeling? Let’s put the word into a little box and place it at the back of your mind. Don’t worry if it won’t stay there – just let it pass by you while you look at the painting in front of you.

You are looking at a painting called Flow by local artist Margaret Cahill. It was commissioned by Salford Museum and Art Gallery in the late 1990s, as part of a collaborative exhibition called Past Impressions/ New Perspectives.  It is a large, unframed canvas. The artist has created the picture with mixed media – she has painted the canvas but many of the details are photographic images on paper, which she has glued onto the canvas and then worked into with paint. The picture explores interior space and human presence, and the relationship between natural and urban landscapes.

We appear to be in a room, painted in muted colours, mostly shades of blue, grey and beige. We are standing on one side of the room, looking towards the wall on the opposite side. The bottom three quarters of the painting contains the floor of the room. The room is almost completely bare. It has no carpet, very little furniture, no pictures on the walls, no fixtures and fittings. It is not even clear if the walls are plastered and painted or simply bare concrete.  As there are no lights switched on, we are standing in a darkened room, but the sunlight of the day outside is coming in through three tall windows at the top right-hand corner of the painting, which nearly reach from the floor to the ceiling.

Yet what at first glance appears to be a painting of a solid structure – a room with four walls, a floor and a ceiling – on closer inspection becomes much more fluid and freeform. The more you look, the more it resembles a scene from nature as much as a scene from a building. The top half of the painting is bathed in bright light and filled with objects, in contrast to the bottom half, which is dark and empty. The very bottom of the painting has dense, dark blue tones, giving a sense of a solid surface. Move your gaze slowly upwards towards the top of the painting, and you will notice that the tones of blue gradually get lighter and lighter, reminding you of a windswept sea. Ask yourself, is this really the floor of a room, or is it a body of water? Or perhaps both things at the same time?

The walls above also contain different shades of blue – are they reflecting the blues of the floor, or the blues of the ocean? Is the back wall even a wall at all, or the sky of a seascape? It somehow appears to be both at once, yet there is a line connecting the wall and the ceiling that tells you this must be impossible. Such a sense of confusion should feel unsettling, yet you feel calmed by the soothing, melancholic tones of the whole painting.

On the right of the painting there is an armchair – its bright red hues and crisp photographic details mean your eye is immediately drawn to it. When you look at it together with the other domestic items in the room, such as the coat hooks, you might think that you are in a doctor’s waiting room, or perhaps even in a psychoanalyst’s office, waiting to sit down and for the therapist to arrive. Perhaps this isn’t a room at all, but a reflection of your inner psyche. The chair is illuminated by light streaming in from the windows beside it, which reflects from the floor, although – take a closer look – are those the crests of waves? Is the armchair stood in the corner of a room, or at the edge of a beach? Or somehow both at the same time?

To the far left of the painting, there is a wooden door painted bright blue. Is it a door out of the room – or a door into a beach hut?  To the bottom left of the door, there are some spherical objects. Have these been carved by a stonemason, or are they a rockpool? Or both?

To the right is a doorway that leads to the outside, a place that is usually associated with freedom and spaciousness. Yet going from the darkness outside into the light, you are immediately confronted by a brick wall – a man-made object is blocking your path, while the inside of the room is free-flowing and takes us towards the natural world. Things have turned on their head – it appears that nature is free to flow into the room, yet you are clearly enclosed within its four walls. Or is it that by leaving the natural world outside and stepping into this man-made room, it is you who has trapped yourself in here in the first place?

The composition of the painting and the contrast of soft, fluid brushstrokes with the crisp, hyperreal images of many of the objects in the room give the whole picture a curious, dream-like quality. And like when you are dreaming, at first everything appears to make sense until you consider it more carefully, when you realize that everything is perfectly connected while making no sense at all.

Would you like to stay in this room? Why, or why not?
Would you like to sit in the armchair? Why, or why not?
How does this painting make you feel?

Now, take your attention away from the painting and into the room around you. Check in with yourself once more. If you like, you can close your eyes.

Feel the chair or the floor beneath you. How are you feeling now? Is there a word that describes your mood? Or perhaps your mood is a colour? Whatever you are thinking of, hold that thought. Let your mind see it.

When you are ready, open your eyes if you haven’t already done so, bring your attention to the rest of your surroundings, and feel free to explore the rest of the museum and gallery.

Thank you for taking part in this slow looking exercise. Please take a moment to feedback your feelings on one of our paperchains on the gallery wall.