 An exhibition of paintings that engage with the emotional and physical history of Irish emigration to Liverpool. Crossing Place graphically evokes Liverpool as a crossing place for Irish migrant workers and families; however the work operates on many dimensions.
It confronts the vulnerability of individual lives, their connection to place, the experience of displacement, the value and expedience of place to economic cycles and the contemporary concern with the destruction of place and the natural environment by human life’s crossing. Crossing Place addresses the question of our connection over time as well as place, to past, and therefore future, generations. Wendy Dison skilfully and carefully combines analytic/printmaking and empathic/painter’s techniques to create a body of work which contains great truth, great presence and great sadness. Her figures merge with and emerge from past locations which are both precise and atmospheric. The places and people portrayed are gone, yet, in these paintings they present to the spectator an inquiry from the past. The figures and images draw the viewer to them, and to the time portrayed, and then it is as if one’s ancestors have suddenly arrived in the present, consumer driven, globalised world to ask ‘What are you doing?’, inquiring, impugning, ‘What happened after we left? Was our effort worth it?’ | 
