It seems in keeping with the Catholic iconography that Michaela Yearwood-Dan has cited as one of the organising principles of The Practice of Liberation, an exhibition of newly-commissioned works, that I should start by making my own confession: I can’t quite see it myself.

Such a qualification, though implicit in the review process, is particularly worth explicating when it comes to an artist who is otherwise esteemed so highly and so widely. For context, my other cultural blind spots include the popular recording group Radiohead and the situation comedy Fleabag. Maybe it’s just me.

According to Yearwood-Dan, the 14 paintings which process across the sombre brown of The Whitworth’s gallery walls approximate to the Stations of the Cross. In the Roman Catholic faith, which Yearwood-Dan was raised in, these narrative images function as a kind of pictorial rosary, specifically recounting the Gospel account of Jesus’s death as a subject for prayer and devotion. 

Certainly, the works are staged in a space that feels suitably sanctified. The atmosphere evoked by Yearwood-Dan in conjunction with Alex Gruz’s score, which corals the choral into worshipful tones, is one of incense and stained glass. Even more so than in The Whitworth’s other galleries, one’s instinct on entering the exhibition is to lower one’s voice and cross oneself with holy water.

For me, the whole of a holiness summoned by the paintings’ settings felt substantially more than the sum of its parts. While it’s certainly the case that a number of the pieces, particularly those worked on a smaller scale in oil and acrylic, are hardly lacking in compelling vibrancy, it’s correspondingly difficult to discern how they correspond to the high drama of Christ’s road to self-sacrifice. Their bruised lushness evokes a despoiled Eden more than a nocturnal Gethsemane. Moreover, their abstractions, though overwritten with text, are too opaque for invocation, their very disparity resisting a unified narrative.

Equally, although there are commonalities between the pieces, the wealth of details in many of them, scored like school desktops with graffitied verses, or scattered with glitter and beads, feels less like opulence and more like the tangle of tentativeness. Sometimes, less is more.

Of course, this sense of excess may well be in line with Yearwood-Dan’s intentions. The discordant note that the extraneous flourishes introduce can be read, perhaps, as articulating the messiness of life as it is lived outside the oppressive orderliness of the heteronormative. It’s a fine line to walk, and a difficult distinction to draw, as the resulting pieces can seem at once underdone and overorked.

What did work well for me, more so than the accompanying ceramics, were the tiled benches, named Jane and Lily, set along the gallery’s centre line. Their understated invitation to contemplation sat well with a feeling of secular grace, allowing one to take in the views they afforded of the ebb and flow of Yearwood-Dan’s natural abstractions. From that vantage point, perhaps, others will see somewhat deeper beneath their photogenic surfaces.

See for yourself.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image courtesy of The Whitworth

 

The Practice of Liberation is at The Whitworth, Manchester until October 18, 2026. For more information, click here.