The Exchange and Newlyn Art Gallery: Walking a Cappella, Abigail Reynolds

This exhibition closes on 2nd May 2026 and is a cross site exhibition at both Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange.

Abigail Reynolds is a versatile artist using a range of mediums to explore her connection to Cornwall.  she is not interested in reproducing touristic images of Cornwall, suitable for postcards.  With interests in history, geology and ecology, her work often draws from the mining heritage of Cornwall.  To Abigail, the idea of walking a cappella is move step by step, freely, without rules.  It is to find your own path.  Abigail finds her own path through Cornwall's landscapes and encourages others to do so.

I think the most impactful part of the exhibition was A Book of Holes (2025).  This film was shown across three screens with mirrored columns, in a space that was otherwise very dark.  It was visually striking in the space.  Just outside Camborne, near Troon, is Holman's, a site consisting of mine and quarry used as a test site by Holman's, then by Camborne School of Mines more recently, but now a venue for airsoft.  In the quarry, the rock face was used to test drilling equipment and there are lots of holes in the rock.  It has been found that each hole has it's own sound.  The sounds were recorded and made available to a number of producers of Electronic Dance Music.  20 tracks were produced and four were used in the film.  I very much enjoyed the music and so did the the young person who came in while I was watching.  

The film went from exploring these holes as being veins in the rock to looking at the tunnels themselves and how copper has leached and turned some of them blue.  These copper veins were connected to Horseshoe Crabs which have unique blue blood full of copper.  This blood is extracted and used to test vaccines.  Horseshoe Crabs are the oldest living relative of Trilobites which were the first animals to have eyes.  Their eyes were unique in that each one contained a tiny piece of calcite.  All eyes these days are protein based rather than mineral.  Abigail linked the music again by stating the rise of EDM coincided with the decline of mining.  Footage of trilobite fossils, horseshoe crabs in the wild and in labs, mines stained blue with copper, miners drilling, copper cables, people (and a dog) dancing and footage of the holes at Holman quarry being played were all combined.  I found the film interesting as I learnt things that were new to me and made new connections.

The remaining exhibition space at the Exchange was given to a ring of 25 plinths, each with a small glass sculpture Abigail calls masks and a wall given to five large screenprints of cooling towers on oil marbled paper.  I liked the masks but I am not sure this was how I would most like to have seen them.  One of the things Abigail talked about in a film on display at Newlyn Art Gallery was how these pieces are made from glass from specific beaches, often coloured with seaweed from the same beaches, connecting them to a place.  That you could look through the different pieces of glass to change how you see and connect with the landscape.  In the film, a Book of Holes, there was a young woman with copper stained hands in the woods at Holman's using one of these masks to look at the camera, looking at us through the different pieces of glass.  I would not have wanted to attempt to have entered the circle of plinths in order to look through the masks and even if I had, there was nothing to look at.  I think there was a missed opportunity to allow the viewer to connect to these pieces in the intended way.  I understand it wouldn't be possible to allow people to touch them but there must be some way to arrange them with something to look at so viewers could explore shifting vision, without these fragile pieces being damaged.

This opportunity was not missed at Newlyn Art Gallery.  The Studio has a beautiful wind looking out to sea and the three pieces of Gyre were placed on this window.  Each was beautiful in it's own right but I enjoyed getting up close to them and looking across to the Mount and at the Fisherman's monument through the different panels.  My favourite however, was Porthmeor Window which was a geometric piece placed on the large glass window of the link.  This window looks out on to a tree and I liked the interaction between Porthmeor Window and the tree.

I have talked about things in reverse of how I experienced them, so I actually saw the main exhibition room first.  This beautiful bright room included three large sculptural glass pieces.  I found these more brutal and imposing than the other pieces.  I loved Winter Tree and Wilding, two smaller pieces of glass art on the walls.  I would loved to have taken these home.

I also loved Abigails's practice of doubling.  This is a collage technique that also gives a 3 dimensional sculptural element.  Abigail takes old pictures of Cornwall and then takes another picture of exactly the same place, at the same size and angle, so the two images could be superimposed.  Instead of doing this simply, she cuts top image and folds back the pieces and places the other image in the window.  The cuts are geometric and the producing pieces of paper or card make interesting shapes.  I like the idea of opening and closing the flaps, exposing different parts of the image underneath, like a children's interactive book.  I liked the history and the juxtaposition.  Some of the images were black and white and contrasted with colour images.  Others were from magazines and included text as the images had different borders.

My favourites were an image of Gwennap Pit, showing all the concentric circles, the cuts were five triangles with gently curving bases and the triangle bases were also aligned to make a gentle curve.  The underlying image was larger than the magazine image and protruded out in to a piece of marbled paper.  The magazine page also included a photo of a wayside chapel which was unaltered.  Anotherhas a black and white image with windows showing a colour image, now with bright red hot poker flowers in red and yellow.  Still others showed quoits with one contrasting black and white with a colour picture with a a sky painted by the setting or rising sun.

I enjoyed this aspect of the exhibition very much, being encouraged to look at things differently, connecting to places, layering.  It was an interesting exhibition