The spaces between

The curatorial and editorial project for systems, non-objective and reductive artists working in the UK

Francesca Simon The Spaces Between (an Exhibition in Two Parts)

Platform A Middlesbrough, 8 May-19 June 2025

Ryedale Folk Museum Hutton-le-Hole, 10 May-29 June 2025

A review by Annie O’Donnell

Where to begin with an exhibition in two parts running concurrently? Parts, in the sense that the work is installed in two galleries thirty miles apart, in places with distinct yet connected physical features and histories. And parts in that the exhibition includes two interlinked bodies of work, ‘CHECK/check’ and ‘goaf’ by Francesca Simon which span the period 2022-2025 and which draw together and interrupt reductive abstraction and landscape in art practice. But perhaps the question of starting points is complicated, as when we say ‘landscape’ in the context of Simon’s own practice, we often specifically mean land-shapes or anthropogenic spaces, sometimes visible at ground level and sometimes hidden underground. These carry illusory memories of their human makers, even if they have now physically left the scene.

Simon has a long-term relationship with both galleries and their teams, both in Middlesbrough and Ryedale, but to ground ourselves, let us begin in Middlesbrough, where most of the work is from Simon’s more recent ‘goaf’ series. ‘Goaf’ is one of many words historically used by miners to describe a void left by previous extraction. Simon’s work often creates a sense of movement where it is possible to imagine that the right-angled triangles and long rectangles appear to be shifting into still more complex positions, almost as if they are still making themselves. Simon’s repeated use of monochrome at Platform A emphasises that effect, and the paintings and collages flitter and flicker around the space.

The recheck variations xi to xvii, 2024-25 (watercolour and pencil on paper) in the gallery’s foyer are seven collages hung equidistantly but grouped by colour and by geometric families of two, three and again two. The ground and framing of the collages and the walls are white, allowing the painted and cut shapes of blue, burgundy, green and ochre to hang like an idiosyncratic dance notation in their pencil-drawn grids. These works feel fresh, and signal a new departure in curatorial approach, suggesting that while the geometries may be familiar, there is a flexibility and ambiguity in how we might understand them.

Like the collages, they may perhaps be preparatory works for larger paintings such as the dramatic goaf diptych, 2025 (acrylic and pencil on gesso on wood) and Crosscut, 2025 (acrylic on gesso on linen on wood) but these pieces have a scale and energy that exceeds their size. Similarly, goaf transition 2 (2025) (acrylic and pencil on linen on wood) is not a physically large work, but Simon’s use of rich colour – greens, red, ochre and black with slim horizontal blocks of white – suggests an intriguing, glowing way forward for this series of works, perhaps just as mining goafs often held potential for reworking at a later date.

A direct comparison can be made between the seven collaged recheck variations found here at Ryedale and those back at Platform A. While the colours of the triangles and drawn circles mirror the works viewed earlier, here they are cocooned in dark green walls, which emphasises their relationship to the surrounding landscape. Again, they are grouped in twos and threes, but in Ryedale they are placed as if sheltering between the larger works. Among these is Coded, 2023 (acrylic and pencil on linen and wood), a diptych of unequal parts, where the gap between the panels interrupts their para-symmetry in such a way that, once discovered, it becomes a moment of pure pleasure. We can imagine the point in the studio where this was improvised or determined. The Coded diptych also offers a metaphor for this ambitious two-site exhibition where Simon shares with us a glimpse of her multi-layered thinking and making process to provide a new way of interpreting the geometries of tangible and intangible worlds.

CHECK C, 2022

Coded, 2023 (diptych)

Platform A images courtesy of Rachel Deakin; Ryedale images courtesy of Annie O’ Donnell

Across the main gallery by the windows, the mainly monochrome 4 untitled plans for paintings, 2025 (card, collaged on paper) can be discovered. Looking down on these collages, laid horizontally on trestles, they too seem less like formal ‘plans’ and more like games where shapes can be playfully slid back and forth to create new configurations. In one pair, with bars of orange forming a type of crucifix on the black and white, the unfolding and folding of space is suggested. The right-hand collage in particular seems particularly compressed and congested into vertical columns. In the other pair, the orange is replaced by yellow, and the works seem to extend visually through the gallery windows to the bollards and painted markings of the station car park beyond.

On this same side of the gallery hang the wonderful small paintings goaf works I and 2, both 2024 (acrylic and pencil on gesso on wood). Their ground is merely dragged with white gesso, giving them a metallic quality, and the black triangles themselves are gathered in multiple groupings which express a powerful sense of occupied space.

goaf transition 2 (2025)

Meanwhile, in Hutton-le-Hole, works including Simon’s slightly earlier CHECK/check series can be experienced. The gallery’s relationship to Ryedale Folk Museum and its gift shop echoes that of Platform A to Middlesbrough Railway Station. These are not spaces where we can totally leave behind the surrounding context; it seeps into them.

The emphasis throughout the space is on a quiet, intimate polychromy. Simon’s deep knowledge of the seasonal variations in colour found in the land, water and weather of North Yorkshire comes into play here. The paintings characteristically use their unpainted linen ground as an essential and unifying part of their colour palette. The largest of these, and the earliest, is CHECK C, 2022 (acrylic and pencil on linen on wood), found on the far wall. This is the work that draws the visitor into the gallery and which needs us to advance and retreat many times as we respond to it. The central sections are filled with blue and lilac shapes that spin like parabolas, kites and windmills. At the edges, green triangles point ever downwards to the earth beneath the gallery floor. Throughout, long horizontal bands of peach appear to shore up vertical stacks of colour.

recheck variations xi to xvii. (2024-25) (watercolour and pencil on paper)

4 untitled plans for paintings (2025), card, collaged on paper.