David Rushton at Herbert Gallery

I'd never come across David Rushton's work before, and I hadn't even seen the exhibition advertised, so it was a coincidence I visited his exhibition at the Herbert Gallery in Coventry. One of the main gallery rooms had been emptied of all furniture and replaced by strange black boxes on stilts with an accompanying stool. It took me five minutes to get up the courage to sit on the stool and have a look into the box (I was alone in the room with just a gallery staff member). Inside the small slit in the box I could see a tiny reconstruction of a room, like a dolls house, but very lifelike. By which I mean all the furniture and embellishments were to scale. What I didn't get was why Rushton had done it. So I moved on to the next box, which was slightly bigger. As I sat down and peered in, sounds started playing; a siren and footsteps. The room reconstruction had the air of abandonment and looked quite creepy, with a chair strewn on the floor.

The other models were similar, all gave out a feeling of abandonment and loss, with empty rooms, stark old-fashioned furnishings and the creepy sounds of wind rattling windows, sirens and radio broadcasts. I loved how it felt like I was a voyeur into a tiny world, but I couldn't work out why he'd made the piece, I felt like I was missing something. It was only when I found a small sign announcing that the boxes were made in memory of the Chenobyl disaster that I had some indication of what it was about. Even then I wasn't fully aware of what happened in Chenobyl (it happened several years before I was born and for some reason never heard much about it) so I decided to research it after the exhibition. On 26th April 1986, one of the nuclear reactors at the Chenobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine exploded, releasing an enormous amount of radiation into the surrounding area, including the nearby town of Pripyat. It took three days after the event for the emergency evacuation of the town, when the Ukrainian government couldn't conceal the accident, nor the dangerous levels of radiation. Because of this the residents left the majority of their belongings, which can still be seen today. 

Once I had discovered what happened at Pripyat, a shudder ran up my spine as I realised that I'd been right in my feelings about the models, but that sense of voyeurism was replaced with shock about what had happened. Rushton's piece was well made and accurate of the ghost town, but because of that, I felt uncomfortable yet still attracted to looking at into the piece, almost as though it was a taboo subject.