Sheffield seems to be in a constant state of redevelopment. Last time I went, the Millennium Galleries had just opened; now they’re already history, overtaken by newer developments that have turned the walk from the station into a rat maze of roadworks. But the maze is worth negotiating for the reward of Art at the Rockface, the Millennium Galleries’ latest exhibition.
A joint venture with Norwich Castle Museum, Art at the Rockface is a literal blockbuster — an exhibition exploring art’s fascination with stone. Its scope is extraordinarily ambitious: its 200 ‘rock samples’ range in scale from the Crown Jewels in a Beaton photograph of The Queen to Mount Fuji in a print by Hokusai, and in time from a Montastruc caveman’s 12,500-year-old sketch of horses to a Richard Long Cornish slate spiral dated 1981 (the slate itself is 350 million years old). If the show succeeds, it must be because John Ruskin — whose lifelong passions for art and geology it unites — is smiling down on it. The Museum of St George he founded for Sheffield workers now shares the same building, and has contributed several items to the display. In fact, the whole idea of the show is based on Ruskin’s belief that a stone is ‘a mountain in miniature’, a belief that, in his case, was practical as well as philosophical — one way of teaching urban workers to draw mountains was to bring the mountains to them, in miniature.
To knock this random rock pile into some sort of shape, the display has been arranged under six themes — Travel and Exploration, Metamorphosis, Prayer and Meditation, etc. — that cut across historical timelines. The effect could be disorientating but it works, partly because the constant shift of focus from near to far resembles the visual experience of a mountain walk.
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