New works inspired by the British Library and Leeds Art Gallery collections
Inspired by the collections of the British Library and Leeds Art Gallery, Furnace Fruit, by Leeds-based artist Karanjit Panesar, is a mixed media exhibition centred around new moving image work.
Karanjit Panesar is the recipient of the 2024 Collections in Dialogue co-commission from the British Library and Leeds Art Gallery. The resulting artwork, Furnace Fruit, is based on his research into the Leeds Sculpture Collections at Leeds Art Gallery and the Henry Moore Institute, together with the oral history collections at the British Library and Bradford Industrial Museum – made available thanks to the British Library’s Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project.
Drawing on Panesar’s research into these collections, Furnace Fruit takes as its starting point the story of Punjabi immigrants – including members of the artist’s own family – who found themselves working in British foundries in the 1950s and 1960s.
Central to the exhibition is a film that weaves together writing, tableau shots of a performer in and around the artist’s car, and footage captured in an industrial foundry. Told through a semi-autobiographical narrative, the film uses metaphors of change and transubstantiation to delve into an internal experience of diaspora and personal memory.
As workshops or factories for casting metal, foundries are used to make both bronze sculpture and cast-iron car parts. Panesar is interested in this overlap of process; intrigued by the foundry as a place with different purposes, histories and economies.
In Furnace Fruit, the industrial foundry becomes a site of mythmaking and alchemy, exploring its metaphorical potential beyond being a place of manual labour. Objects and history are reworked; matter is melted down and made raw again, to be poured into new shapes.
Alongside the film are works featuring images of a pomegranate tree sent by the artist’s family in Punjab, as well as those based on archival material from the sculpture foundries of J.W. Singer & Sons and John Galizia & Son Ltd., held in the Archive of Sculptors’ Papers at the Henry Moore Institute. These original artworks are shown in dialogue with sculptures by the Boyle Family and Bernard Meadows.
About Karanjit Panesar
Karanjit Panesar is an artist living and working in Leeds. Recent solo presentations include: Clarence Pier (2022), Aspex Portsmouth; Parts of Wholes (2022), Workplace Foundation, Newcastle; Actor, Container (2021), Two Queens, Leicester; Strange Loop (2019), Turf Projects, Croydon; THE WAY THINGS ARE (2018), arebyte Gallery, London.
About Collections in Dialogue
Launched in 2021 Collections in Dialogue is an artist co-commission project between Leeds Art Gallery and the British Library. It is centred around the commissioning of an artist based in the North of England to work with collections at both institutions as a catalyst to produce new work that creates a dialogue between the British Library and Leeds Art Gallery collections.. The inaugural commission was awarded to Jill McKnight in 2021. Her work was exhibited at Leeds Art Gallery from March – October 2022.
With thanks to Bradford District Museums and Galleries.
