Laura Gascoigne highlights the must-see art exhibitions of 2022

The arts have long led the way on “levelling up’’, but despite the proliferation of new regional galleries, art exhibitions tend to be imports from elsewhere. Not so with the Laing Art Gallery’s autumn exhibition. The return to the North East of one of the British Library’s greatest treasures, the Lindisfarne Gospels, on display at the Newcastle gallery from 17 September, is a matter of immense regional pride. It has inspired a programme of celebratory events, including light projections illuminating the facade of Durham Cathedral and a Festival of Flame recreating the complex patterns of the manuscript’s “carpet” pages in installations of thousands of tealights.

The delayed exhibition was originally intended to mark the 1,300th anniversary of the death in 721 of Eadfrith of Lindisfarne, the cleric credited with having scribed and illuminated the Gospels’ 518 pages in the scriptorium of the monastery founded by St Aidan on Holy Island. At the time, Northumberland was the most powerful kingdom in England and, judging by the manuscript’s combination of Celtic, Germanic and Mediterranean decorations, the most cosmopolitan. The manuscript “is many things to many people but, first and foremost, it is a book created in the North and of the North”, says Simon Henig of the North East Culture Partnership with justified pride. The scriptoria of the South produced nothing to match it.