Giles Sutherland

Sylvia Wishart RSA Edinburgh

2012-01-20T16:09:00.000-08:00

Sylvia Wishart

RSA

Edinburgh

Until 29 February

The artist Sylvia Wishart, who died in 2008, arguably came to wider public attention through her collaboration with fellow Orcadian George Mackay Brown on the writer’s poetic history, An Orkney Tapestry, which was published in 1969. Wishart’s fine, sparse but evocative drawings acted as the perfect counterpart to Mackay Brown’s deft and measured prose, helping to capture the islands’ underlying sense and spirit of place.

A version of show opened in 2011 under the title The Lamp in the Seaward Window at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness (an organisation which Wishart was instrumental in helping to establish). Here, assembled en masse for the first time, were Wishart’s prints, sketches, drawings and paintings from the 60s until shortly before her death.

They reveal an artist of great technical skill with an assured sense of composition and a confident handling of paint. In her latter works, especially, there is a greater sense of experimentation as well as metaphysical enrichment.

Wishart trained at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen (where she later taught) and her work reflects the school’s principles of solid observation and technical mastery.

Although Wishart’s subject matter seldom, if ever, included the urban, the industrial or the clutter of contemporary life neither did she shy away from depicting the reality of things, as she saw them. An island landscape might well include abandoned vehicles or electricity poles. These vertical structures were necessary elements in compositions that were dominated by the horizontals of fields, walls and buildings.

A whole series of works is devoted to the wreck of Norwegian trawler Northolmen that was wrecked on the rocks near Stromness kirkyard in 1966. Not typically picturesque, these works offer perspectives and pictorial combinations unachievable in reality. They afford an insight into Wishart’s evolving sensibility, which was increasingly able to look below the surface of things to imagined spaces and presences.

Wishart’s home, Heatherybraes on the outskirts of Stromness, overlooks the sound of Hoy, the cliffs of St John’s Head and, in the distance, the mountains of Sutherland.

This ever-changing vista with its infinite combination of light and weather as seen through her large seaward window provided Wishart with a never-ending source of subject matter. Much of her painting from the 80’s onwards included the reality of this moody seascape combined with reflections and other elements, real or imagined, such as a ship in a bottle perched on her windowsill, birds and various sailing craft.

Some paintings contain a ‘painting within a painting’ by depicting the reflection of the work in progress, as seen by the artist in her window. She is thus, in a very real sense, depicting not only what she sees through the glass but also what is on it.

In her lifetime, Wishart achieved that rare thing: genuinely popular success and critical recognition.

Bill Bollinger

2011-12-27T10:25:00.000-08:00

Bill Bollinger

The Fruitmarket Gallery

Edinburgh

Until January 8

The American artist, Bill Bollinger, who died in 1988 at the age of 49, originally trained as an aeronautical engineer before turning to art in his early twenties. The way in which Bollinger uses materials is indicative of his former experience and he is often quoted as saying “I only do what it is necessary to do. There is no reason to use colour, to polish, to bend, to weld, if it is not necessary to do so.”

Bollinger could be described as a ‘minimalist’ or even a ‘minimal-interventionist’ but such labels do not serve to adequately describe his approach. As Bollinger’s own words suggest he is not interested in materials for their own sake but for what they can be used for in the service of his ideas.

In one work a connected series of thick plastic tubes has been filled with water and set against the gallery wall. It seems like a bald statement, like much of Bollinger’s work – a challenge set out for the viewer to pick apart, interpret and engage with. The rawness of the material seems like a statement in itself. But what is the work telling us? Or what does Bollinger wish to convey? The fact that water finds its own level is certainly one important element here. Bollinger clearly designed the work to demonstrate such a property and this emphasis is inherent in the construction of the work, which involves the inter-connection of the piping.

Another important aspect of Bollinger’s approach is his seeming insistence that beauty or at least visual interest can be found in the most commonplace, industrial, mass- produced objects such as a length of chain fencing which with a simple twist is rendered a complex three-dimensional geometrical form. A room full of graphite powder becomes a record of it own making with the footprints of the gallery technician preserved on the parquet flooring and splatterings of the material on the walls.

Elsewhere a 44-gallon oil barrel – familiarly used on building sites as makeshift braziers – has been filled with water that is slowly evaporating, leaving a record of its own existence and disappearance on the sides of the drum. The patterns of oxidisation become something to be regarded, not ignored. Perhaps this is what Bollinger is saying – that the apparently ‘ordinary’ physical processes around us are actually things to be noted and wondered at.

Other aspects of Bollinger’s method seem more complex and mathematical. These are concerned with variation and endless combination as in his Volkswagen Rope Pieces that dismantled the famous VW emblem into its component parts and proposes these as sketches on paper and physical sculpture.

Bollinger’s eye and mind seem omnivorous, finding visual interest, complexity and beauty in the built and constructed 20^th century that he so briefly inhabited, rendering it fresh and unusual – changing it forever.

Scottish National Portrait Gallery Edinburgh

2011-12-16T19:35:00.000-08:00

Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Edinburgh

Photograph by Rose Strang

The £17.6 m revamp of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery – which re-opened its doors to the public at

the beginning of the month – is, by and large, a great success but has resulted in some missed opportunities.

The renovation by PAGE \PARK architects has transformed the dark and sombre Gothicism of Sir Robert Rowand Anderson’s 1869 Arts & Crafts inspired original into a lighter, more accessible modern space.

A large glass lift elegantly connects three floors and affords uncluttered sight lines along the length of the building. The addition of a Contemporary Gallery and the reorganisation of the collection into thematic displays result in a more integrated historical interpretation of the collection. Overall, hanging space has been increased by 60% and the café and shop have doubled in size. The elevation of the ceilings and the exposure of the original riveted I-beams create an airy and comfortable atmosphere. The increased space has been achieved through housing staff in a mezzanine area and the removal of the collection of the National Museum of Antiquities to the National Museum of Scotland.

The most significant aspect of this reinvigorated and expanded collection – which extends the notion of portraiture well beyond its normally understood boundaries – is the display of photographic material. In the absence of a dedicated national museum of photography, the SNPG offers an arresting substitute that helps to re-emphasise the importance of the photographic art in the way the nation has interpreted and portrayed itself.

At the core of the collection of 38,000 photographs are David Octavius Hill’s and Robert Adamson’s pioneering calotypes, made in the 1840s that include the staged portraits of Newhaven fisherwomen Jeanie Wilson and Annie Liston, replete with distinctive striped dress costume and four fish laid out on a board. Elsewhere, Thomas Annan’s series of images of the slums around Glasgow’s High Street, prior to their demolition in 1868, represents a unique social document, which is nevertheless striking because of Annan’s apparent disinterest in the plight of his human subjects.

The curators have created 17 new chronological displays that fit within five key areas of Scottish historical development – the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Empire, Modernity and the Contemporary. Such a historical-thematic arrangement of existing and new material presents a re-invigorated approach, allowing fresh insights and new connections.

The captioning provides some marvellous anecdotal material concerning the images themselves such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief that his 1766 portrait by Allan Ramsay presented a much less favourable impression of the French philosopher than his Scottish counterpart, David Hume, in a companion portrait by the same painter, created in the same year. Apparently, Rousseau was so incensed by his perceived iniquitous treatment that he considered the painting made him look like a Cyclops – and fell out with Hume partly as a result.

If there is a disappointment here it is the way that the Contemporary Gallery has been used to present Graham Fagan’s specifically commissioned film, Missing, which purports to present an empathetic impression of a missing person and the effect this has on family. The result is artless and banal. The double-screened projection seems bleak and forlorn in a large gallery that might have been given over to any one of many potential projects. It is only trumped by the ill-conceived ceramic portrait of Baroness Helena Kennedy, which is to be found in the Library, apparently waving to passers-by.

The gallery is concerned less with portaiture in the conventional sense and more with the portrayal of the nation, in all its facets, to itself and the larger world. It is clearly already a popular – and critical – success.

Kate Downie: The Concrete Hour

2011-12-16T19:24:00.000-08:00

Kate Downie: The Concrete Hour

Where Where Art Space

Beijing

Until December 18

Following a study tour to research traditional Chinese calligraphy and ink drawing the Scottish artist Kate Downie has returned to Beijing to complete a residency that builds on her previous findings. Downie’s work has been widely shown in Scotland and internationally and her election, in 2008, to the Royal Scottish Academy helped to confirm her status as an accomplished artist.

Over the years Downie has honed her own style and developed a specific way of looking at – and representing – the built and structural environment. Fascinated by urban spaces such as junctions and intersections, she has developed what might be termed a ‘democracy of looking’ in that all spaces, objects and other elements are accorded equal status. There is no prettification and the viewer is never spared that apparent ugliness or discordance that urban architectures often create.

Here, in Downie’s first show in China, there is ample evidence of the artist’s working methods. She favours working in situ in almost any context and the results of this way of drawing, with all its immediacy and vitality, feed into larger works. The powerful charcoal and ink drawings ‘Shique Hutong’ and ‘Gaumao’ both occupy large portions of the gallery walls while also, literally, extending from them. In ‘Gaumao’ – which depicts a busy intersection with fly-overs, traffic and high-rise buildings – the drawing has been made directly onto the gallery wall and extends around the corner of the room. A bold, angled line, which defines the edge of the drawing, extends from floor to ceiling.

‘Shique Hutong’ takes these ideas a step further. Hutongs are the narrow streets and alleyways associated with vernacular Beijing architecture. They are commonly found cheek-by-jowl with the recent Western architecture of skyscrapers and concrete. Here Downie has focussed on a typical street scene that includes a junction, so that the eye travels in two directions simultaneously. As is often the case in Downie’s work, the human figure is given less status than the built environment. If there is a criticism to be made of her work it is that the human energy and dynamism that created such labyrinthine structures and streetscapes is, if not absent, then somewhat sparse. But then, perhaps that is to miss the point because Downie is far less a figurative artist than one whose primary focus is the totality of the scene before her. In ‘Shique Hutong’ all elements are given an equal place – street signs, a spaghetti of overhead wires and cables compete with road markings, bicycle tracks and foot prints.

As if to emphasise the immediacy of the scene, footprints on the gallery floor merge with those in the drawing. This was the result of an earlier performance work orchestrated by Downie in which the audience was encouraged to trample fragments of charcoal into the gallery floor.

While it is clear that Downie has responded creatively to the dynamism of the Beijing scene, there is no doubt that her innovative approach will give her audience in China, many of whom will be familiar only with state-approved traditionalism, an insight into new ways of working – and looking.

Alison Watt & Don Paterson: Hiding in Full View

2011-12-01T13:36:00.000-08:00

Alison Watt & Don Paterson

Hiding in Full View

Ingleby Gallery

Edinburgh

Until 28 January, 2012

Over the years the painter Alison Watt, who was born in Greenock in1965, has received a number of significant plaudits. In 2000 she was the youngest artist to be given a show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. From 2006 she spent two years as Associate Artist at the National Gallery in London – an OBE followed in the 2008.

Watt may thus be seen as a relatively young artist of prodigious talent who has benefitted from some of the best available opportunities. Here she has collaborated with the poet Don Paterson (himself an OBE and winner of the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 2010) to produce a new body of work which develops some earlier themes.

Clearly Watt is a painter who deserves serious consideration. Since 1997, when her exhibition ‘Fold’ opened at the Fruitmarket Gallery, her work has concentrated on fabric and materials. That show revealed Watt’s particular interest in the French 19^th century painter, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres whose work ‘Madame Moitessier’ (1859) Watt had seen as a teenager.

Gradually Watt eschewed figurative concerns altogether in her significantly-named SNGMA show, ‘Shift’ which concentrated solely on fabric as her work edged ever closer to abstraction. ‘Shift’ was as much about the absence of the human figure as about the presence of shape, form, texture and tone.

Thus Watt’s current work concerns the poetics of absence and the implied presence of non-visible elements such as sensuality, eroticism and the body.

Both Paterson and Watt have also considered the work of the US photographer Francesca Woodman, who died in 1981 at the tragically young age of 22. Three of Woodman’s photographs are to be found here. They are small delicate works and, like Watt’s paintings, they are a form of self-portraiture: deeply revelatory and strangely elegiac. One shows a woman whose face is obscured by her hair; in another, a figure, swathed in plastic wrapping, seems to lurk in the corner of an abandoned room. The paradox that deliberate obscuration is more revelatory than full exposure can be applied equally to both artists. It is an aspect of the work which Paterson clearly understands:

All rooms will hide you, if you stand just so. Ghosts know this. That’s really all they know.

Paterson’s words literally punctuate Watt’s images, as the poet’s work has been painted directly onto the gallery walls. Thus, the words have been freed from the bound page forcing themselves, however gently, upon our consciousness and forging links between particular images and particular phrases:

At the spiral’s heart, there is a hollow sun by which we are constructed and undone

The ‘hollow sun’ invokes both a camera’s aperture mechanism as well as Watt’s dark, deeply suggestive folds and creases.

For all their darkness and understated passion, there is a deep humanity in these words, paintings and photographs which makes experiencing them compelling and rewarding.

Mellis / Stokes – Colour and Form

2011-11-04T20:17:00.000-07:00

Mellis/Stokes – Colour and Form

Collins Gallery

Glasgow

Until 12 November

This unusual exhibition brings together the work of four artists from the same extended family: Margaret Mellis, Telfer Stokes, Ann Stokes and Charlotte Mellis. Margaret Mellis (1914-2009) mother of Telfer Stokes (b.1940) , sister of Ann Stokes (nee Mellis) (b. 1922) and aunt of Charlotte Mellis (b. 1952) was married to the prominent critic, painter and poet Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) between the years 1938 and 1947.

The score or so of works by Margaret Mellis span the last four decades of the artist’s working life. The exemplary selection includes ‘Landscape (Violet and Blue)’ (1962); ‘Interlocked Forms (1964) and ‘Over the Moon’ (1975). All of these explore Mellis’s continuing fascination with abstraction which is, nevertheless, anchored in the observed world. The last is a foray into what was then new territory. This involved using an unprimed, unstretched canvas painted with quasi-geometrical forms in a muted palette of greys, browns and whites.

However, it is for her driftwood constructions that Mellis will be best remembered. Composed mainly of fragments from discarded boats and other structures found in or near the sea, these are often characterised by the bright colours used in a hostile marine environment.

‘Ribbed’ (2001) reveals a complex arrangement of colour, tone, material, texture and surface ; it is astonishing to realise that this work, one of Mellis’s last, was made when the artist was eighty-seven years of age.

It is only in recent years that Telfer Stokes has acknowledged the significant debt he owes to his parents in his own artistic development. artistic careers. These metal sculptures – large, heavy, bold, muscular and masculine – are cerebrally titled : ‘Chufter’, ‘Meme’, ‘Accidence’ and ‘Darkling’ are at once literary, discomfiting and enigmatic. Solid, grimy and weighty these slabs of cut steel are assembled in rhythmic juxtapositions of colour and mass.

Charlotte Mellis’s ‘Shantytown’ (2010), which consists of fifty-eight individual ceramic pieces, represents both a political and aesthetic statement which owes something to the socially engaged aestheticism of the US photographer Walker Evans. Charlotte Mellis expresses an early and enduring fascination with corrugated iron structures, citing their repetitive patterning and the weathered colour of red oxide as factors in their attraction.

At first glance, some of Ann Stokes more outrageous pieces such as birds in flight or illuminated crocodiles may seem twee or contrived; like them or loath them, her plates, in particular, are collectors’ items, prized just as much for their visual appeal as for their functionality. “Painting is what I pot for,” she has said and there’s no doubting her sincerity. Like Matisse, Picasso and Asger Jorn before her – and to whom she must, one hopes, acknowledge some kind of debt of gratitude – her painted plates of birds, fish and other creatures clearly have a loyal following.

Richard Demarco – Scotland in Europe: Europe in Scotland

2011-11-04T20:12:00.000-07:00

Richard Demarco – Scotland in Europe: Europe in Scotland

Scotland House

Brussels

Until November 21

It is a mark of Richard Demarco’s apparently ever-increasing stature that the Cabinet Secretary for Culture and External Affairs Fiona Hyslop could be persuaded, willingly, it must be said, to attend this somewhat idiosyncratic show – in a far from ideal exhibition space – in Scotland’s de facto ‘embassy’ in the heart of Brussels.

That said, and despite her ‘captive’ status, Ms Hyslop listened with wrapt attention as, virtually uninterrupted for over an hour, Prof Demarco unflaggingly, even though he is now in his eighty-second year, explained the significance of each of the fifty, or so, annotated photographs (supported by fascinating fragments from his vast archive of publications).

Here are the, by now, familiar images of Joseph Beuys, Sean Connery and Tadeusz Kantor. But despite – or even because of – their familiarity, these images still retain surprises and revelations. Through written annotation Demarco elevates the image to what has been described as ‘event photography’ – a purportedly new genre. So although the photographs may date from the 60s and 70s they are never faded, either conceptually or physically. Demarco prints them anew and with each new printing is a different annotation, providing endless variations on a theme. All are dated 2011.

Demarco’s written commentaries are almost always insightful and because the are always written anew (he is not of the digital age) the information can offer new perspectives. The images emphasise the multiple connections between Scottish and European art.

Commenting on Beuys’ Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony performed at Edinburgh College of Art in 1970 Demarco writes: “…Beuys stands sentinel over what he regards as the ‘Tomb of the Unknown Artist’…”. In another work featuring the Romanian artist Paul Neagu is written “…[he] made a definitive contribution to the 1972 Edinburgh Arts programme in the waters of the Firth of Forth on an incoming tide on Inchcolm, the island of St Columba…”

Here we are offered tantalising glimpses from the past, fragments of urgent art historical significance which may fade or be lost forever as the number of first-hand witnesses inevitably dwindles. One longs to see films and more extensive footage of the work of these masters. Where are the interviews, the exegesis and the analysis? A great deal, it must be said, is still retained by Demarco. But that magnificent memory too will fade and thus with great urgency facts, names and opinions must be sought and saved.

One of Demarco’s main tenets is that art originates in the meeting of friends. So, here too are such images – of Robert McDowell and Sandy Moffat, loyal supporters both. They are recorded as artists in their own right and as such are components in the story of a man who brought some of Europe’s best, but unknown, artists to Scotland – to his credit and to our lasting benefit.

If Ms Hyslop previously was in any doubt about Demarco’s achievements – or his high seriousness – she must have left with these reservations thoroughly dispelled.

BRUCE MCLEAN: A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE: a comic opera in three parts

2011-11-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

Bruce Mclean

A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE: a comic opera in three parts

Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art

University of Dundee

Dundee

Until 5 November

Bruce McLean’s career has been stellar ever since the early ‘sixties when his daring, idiosyncratic performance works challenged audiences with their combination of theatre, painting, sculpture, music and spectacle. Here, the Glasgow-born artist returns to home turf with a masterwork involving a cast, if not of thousands, then of scores of collaborators, colleagues, helpers and participants. Although the initial, one-off performance took place last week, the exhibition – a little like a series of relics with its props, cut-out figures, a stage and film clips – remains as a fascinating spectacle in itself.

A CUT is based loosely on characters – and characteristics – derived from Dundee’s traditional industries of jam, jute and journalism. In Mclean’s vision, which he developed with digital scenographer David Barnett and artist Sam Belinfante, these manifestations of Dundee’s industrial past and present, have been reinvented as food, clothing and media. These qualities, in turn, suggest the opera’s cast of a fat man (Desperate Dan?) , a “very rich woman with a large dress woman” (played by Mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg), a friendly giant and a band of mischief makers.

McLean organised a series of preliminary performances and workshops throughout the city, including the main square and the botanic garden. The dancer Adeline Bourret performed impromptu in front of the Caird Hall.

Material from these venues in the form of video and sound was incorporated into a final performance in which McLean loomed large – in a role resembling the Polish theatre director, Tadeusz Kantor. McLean was both observer and participator, orchestrator and audience. Periodically his shouts of encouragement and instruction punctuated the hour-long performance, honed in concept and rehearsal over an eight-month period.

McLean’s performances – if that is indeed the appropriate dramaturgical terminology – are so content rich, so full of visual and conceptual tropes that one is left at a loss to fully describe and catalogue their complexity. It is all one can do to let the eye and ear move, synaesthetically, over conflicting or harmonious imagery and sounds; to let the visual and aural cacophony and melody intertwine.

Although there there is no conventional linear plot, the opera addresses contemporary political and social issues such as consumerism, immigration and greed. A long, thin strip of red forms a stage, the back drop of which is a musical score, vastly magnified. A series of film projections flicker across this surface: singers from the botanical garden event; a whirring fan; the fat man, digitally enhanced, bending and moving; live video from the performance itself. It’s like a hall of mirrors, a cave of endlessly reflecting reflections. Ideas bounce and collide like the characters, shapes, sounds and images on the stage. At the conceptual centre is McLean, an impatient, witty bullet of creativity and intellect.

The etymology of ‘orchestra’ is based on the idea of rising and surging . It’s good to bear this in mind when pondering such a complex event. For days, weeks, months these images and ideas will surely well to the fore of one’s mind, resurfacing, demanding attention and understanding.

Colour, Rhythm and Form: J. D. Fergusson and France

2011-10-28T06:47:00.000-07:00

Colour, Rhythm and Form: J. D. Fergusson and France

Hunterian Art Gallery

Glasgow

Until 8 January 2012

This show by John Duncan Fergusson and his fellow painters G.L. Hunter and S.J. Peploe marks the fiftieth anniversary of Fergusson’s death at the ago of 86. Appropriately, the focus is on Fergusson’s connections with France where the Perth-born artist lived and worked for many years.

Divided into four sections – Paris; the South of France; the ‘Colourist’ exhibitions of the ‘20s and ‘30s; and Fergusson’s return to Glasgow on the eve of the Second World War – the show demonstrates Fergusson’s diversity, passion, independence of spirit, and his patriotism.

Writing in the latter part of his career Fergusson stated: “Art, as I understand it, cannot be produced by a nation lacking the spirit of freedom…in my opinion Art is not a matter of skill, but entirely a matter of free expression. Let’s have freedom in Scotland and Art may appear, I mean really Scottish Art….”

Such opinions endeared the painter to Nationalists such as the writer C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) with whom he collaborated on the publication ‘Scottish Art and Letters’; it has also, understandably, allowed Fergusson to be cited by commentators who make claims for the painter which can seem exaggerated. Was Fergusson really one of the originators of Modernism and a proto-Cubist?

Nevertheless, there can be no doubting Fergusson’s seriousness in wishing to elevate painting in Scotland to a higher level of national importance and it is perhaps this politico-cultural agenda which set him apart from the other ‘Colourists’ (they were not labelled as such until much later on).

Fergusson eschewed academicism for freedom of expression and in this he was greatly influenced from many quarters, not least Les Fauves and Matisse in particular, the Impressionists, the dancer Margaret Morris (his life-long companion) and the philosophy of Henri Bergson, to name but a few.

Fergusson’s prioritisation of colour and what he called ‘rhythm’ over the more formal aspects of painting comes at a price: his stylised representations of the human body (mostly female) can seem awkward in their depiction of bulging thighs, circular breasts and hoof-like feet, as in paintings such as ‘Les Eus’ (c.1910) and ‘La Déesse de la Rivière’ (c. 1928)

Fergusson seems on much firmer ground in essays where the arrangement of colour rather than depiction of the form is the priority in works such as ‘The Pink Dress, Cap D’Antibes’ which dates from towards the end of Fergusson’s career.

Clearly while it is important not to make exaggerated claims for Fergusson’s importance at a European level, it is equally clear that the painter’s popularity is matched by his talent – a fact which the French Government acknowledged in its purchase – at the 1931 Parisian group show Les Peintres Écossais – of ‘La Déesse’ (along with Hunter’s ‘Lac Lomond’ and Peploe’s ‘La Forêt’). Such accolades are rare and well-earned.

6 ° West — Inch Kenneth

2011-10-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

6 ° West — Inch Kenneth

An Exhibition by Artists’ Collective 6 ° West at St Oran’s Chapel, Isle of Iona 15^th – 22^nd October, 2001

Veronica Slater

Transit 24 Hour Tor Mor

An Roth Community Enterprise Centre

Craignure

Mull

Until March 31^st 2012

Click here for key to images

In June 2011, the four artists who comprise the collective 6 ° West – Anne Devine, David Faithfull,Mhairi Killin and Veronica Slater – completed a week-long residency on Inch Kenneth(InnisChoinnich), asmall island in private ownership a few miles north-east of Iona at the mouthof Loch na Keal. Curated by Alicia Hendrick (the fifth member of thecollective), the current show, which is open to visitors for one week only, isan essential response to the island, consisting of a one print each by Devine,Killin and Slater, and two by Faithfull.

Although the response by each artist to the geology, history,landscape and genus loci of the island is unique, there are a number ofstriking threads of continuity to be found in the artists’ prints. A widerunderstanding of both the residency process and the individual approaches ofeach artist to the challenges and opportunities of the isolated islandenvironment has been provided in a remarkably fine collection of photographs byShannon Tofts. Tofts’s work is both technically accomplished and artisticallymotivated so that he achieves a rare combination of record and response. Tofts is in a very real sense a collaborator in that his vision derives from asympathetic and emphatic response to the individuality of each artist.

Working in a recognisable personal idiom Faithfull (working atEdinburgh Print Studios) has created a three-part image focussing on therelationship between the island’s geology, landscape and fragments of text fromWilliam Golding’s novel, Pincher Martin,in an approach which might be termed‘geopoetic’. Faithfull’s approach is predominantly stylised and graphical; andalthough it’s clear that he is a gifted draughtsman and designer, his work canseem devoid of feeling. Here, however,the central image, derived from a photograph, shows a cave on the shore of theisland which might be read as a metaphor for a mouth and all the associationsof noise, language and song which that connotes. In an allied work, more technologicalthan geological, the image is of Inch Kenneth as plotted by a GPS system.

The central image of Devine’s print (made with print-makerElspeth Lamb), is, somewhat coincidentally, AgnusDei, ‘the Lamb of God’ and Devine is the only one of the artists to haveacknowledged the religious context of the Island’s history in an explicitmanner (Inch Kenneth houses a chapel of similar age to the 12^thCentury St Oran’s on Iona and like St Oran’s has a collection of ‘Celtic’ cross-slabs). In a complex image, Devine has conflatedreligious vision with a geological perspective, suggesting, perhaps, that bothviews have a validity and a mystery.

Mhairi Killin’s ancestors were silversmiths on Iona and shecombines this ancient art with her contemporary artistic practice; each feedsinto and complements the other. Here, various images such a stone markings,inscriptions and objects are woven together by silver wire suggesting acontinuity between past and present. Underpinning these images is a faintreproduction of a shipping chart, allowing for the introduction of idea ofvisual, historical and cultural ‘plotting’ and the contemporary metaphor of‘mapping a territory’. A piece of textin the form of a silver tag describes a ‘grass covered cairn 550m North East ofInch Kenneth House’ suggesting a much older, Neolithic context to the island’shistory. Killen’s work is at oncedelicate and strong, tentative and forceful.

Continuing the cartographical trope Veronica Slater haschosen to create an emotional and experiential map of her time on Inch Kenneth,concentrating on the dilapidated interior of the house itself as well asreferring to aspects of the island’s history and landscape. The house belonged atone point to the Mitford family and it was here that Unity Mitford, a Nazi sympathiser,lived on following an attempted suicide; she died in Oban in 1948. Such strangeand traumatic histories inform Slater’s image which seems like the visualrepresentation of layered memory where suggested synaptic events trigger series upon series of recollection.

In a similar way Slater has created a series of twenty fourworks which are on show in Craignure on the east of Mull. Some of these imageslink to the Inch Kenneth residency while others range more freely in theirdiversity and scope. However, central toSlater’s approach, is an over-layering of imagery which suggests that seeingand the process of perception is complex, involving various stages. One work which might stand as a useful toolin deconstructing Slater’s approach is her representation of the head of agolden eagle. This is what she describesas “an image of an image” in that it is derived from an ubiquitous postcard onsale on the island. But Slater’s eagle suggests a new way of looking, as if an‘icon’ had somehow become “de-iconized” allowing for a fresh approach to seeingthe reality of things, despite the fact that most people will never see a realgolden eagle.

GILES SUTHERLAND

Image copyright Veronica Slater

Mellis: Stokes – Colour and Form

2011-10-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

Mellis: Stokes – Colour and Form
The Collins Gallery
The University of Strathclyde
Glasgow
Until 12 November


‘Ribbed’, 2001 (detail) Photograph © Giles Sutherland

This unusual exhibition brings together the work of four artists from the same extended family: Margaret Mellis, Telfer Stokes, Ann Stokes and Charlotte Mellis. The aim of this brief introductory essay is not to assert the influence of one of the artists upon another nor to discuss complex familial relationships. Its purpose is, rather, to serve as a brief introduction to the work of each artist and, where relevant, to introduce the idea of a commonality of interest and perception.

Margaret Mellis (1914-2009) mother of Telfer Stokes (b.1940) , sister of Ann Stokes (nee Mellis) (b. 1922) and aunt of Charlotte Mellis (b. 1952) was married to the prominent critic, painter and poet Adrian Stokes (1902-1972) between the years 1938 and 1947.

From an art historical and critical perspective it important to consider, at least momentarily, the effect of the marriage on Margaret Mellis’s work, the development of her career and the evolution of a personal artistic vision.

Stokes and Mellis lived in Carbis Bay, near St Ives, at Parc Little Owles, Stokes’s house, between 1939 and 1946 in an artistic milieu, described by one observer like ‘fighting ferrets in a bag”. The community included the households of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, as well as Naum Gabo. Ann visited Carbis Bay in 1940 to assist with the birth of Telfer, Margaret’s son.

According to the prevalent social mores it is clear that Adrian Stokes expected his wife to adopt the more traditional roles assigned to women at the time, including house-keeping and child-rearing. Although a highly trained artist with a rigorous academic training firstly at Edinburgh College of Art under the tutelage of S.J. Peploe, and others – and later at Euston Road School, London, her work as an artist was expected to assume second place.

During the St Ives years Mellis worked in an idiom which was described somewhat whimsically as ‘Scottish Constructivist’. This included exquisite pieces such as the card and wood collage ‘Transparent Construction’ (1941), and the two fist-sized marble sculptures, ‘Divided Forms’ and ‘Two Forms’ (both 1943-4). Although emotionally mature, beautifully conceived, delicate yet strong – such original and poetic works were considered derivative, especially in respect of Nicholson and Gabo. It was a categorisation and judgement which attached unfairly and unjustifiably to a number of talented female artists of Mellis’s generation, not least her contemporary and friend, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004).

The score or so of works by Margaret Mellis selected for this Collins Gallery exhibition span, approximately, the last four decades of the artist’s working life. The exemplary selection includes ‘Landscape (Violet and Blue)’ (1962); ‘Interlocked Forms (Red, blue, purple, orange, yellow, white) (1964)1 and ‘Over the Moon’ (1975). All of these explore Mellis’s continuing fascination with abstraction which is, nevertheless, anchored in the observed world. The last is an example of one of Mellis’s many forays into what was then ‘new’ aesthetic territory where she paints on the ‘raw’ surface of an unprimed and unstretched canvas while also subverting the convention of the sixteen-square grid by overpainting with quasi-geometrical form in a muted palette of greys, browns and whites.

Also here are examples of Mellis’s envelope drawings where, for example, the form of the composition of ‘Margot’s Red Lilies’ (1989) is dictated by the shape of a deconstructed envelope which acts as a framing device. The composition, in turn, points to the unusual shape of the surface derived from an everyday object.

However, it is for her ingenious and extraordinary driftwood constructions that Mellis will be best remembered. These began tentatively at first, following her move, in 1976, to Southwold on the Suffolk coast to a house she shared with her second husband – the artist, Francis Davison (1919-1984). A number of commentators including Mel Gooding, Julian Spalding and Andrew Lambirth have written perspicaciously on this aspect of Mellis’s oeuvre. However, it seems clear that these assemblages, partially sculptural and partly concerned with paint and colour, owe their genesis to Mellis’s coastal years in St Ives, nearly four decades before.

These works, composed mainly of fragments from discarded boats and other structures found in or near the sea, are often characterised by the type of paint and colours used in a hostile marine environment – i.e. bright, colours in tough durable paint. Often such works repay careful consideration, and should be observed not only as a totality, but also in detail.

For example, careful focus on ‘Ribbed’ (2001) reveals a complex arrangement of colour, tone, material, texture and surface which reveals aspects of its construction, including a structural plywood backing-plate and the characteristic brass screws, hidden in earlier works, but now revealed as an essential part of the narrative of process and construction. It is quite astonishing to realise that this work, one of Mellis’s last, was made when the artist was eighty-seven years of age.

It seems fitting, that in Mellis’s absence – which defines a great and lasting loss – that some space should be given over to the artist in her own words. Here, in a passage quoted in a number of publications, she describes the genesis of an earlier work, ‘Bogman’ (1990) but which in many respects – such as scale, method of construction and material – is a companion-piece to the later work:

I found a boat skeleton in the marsh. It was half under water, but not rotted. The dark blue paint was cracked and curling off it. My friend carried it back to my house.

I laid it down on the studio floor. It was nearly too good to do anything with, but not quite, because almost without touching them bits of wood came out of my wood pile and lay down on the broken bones, leaving little gaps and splits of different shapes and sizes. They tilted slightly at different angles. I kept going to see what was happening when I was supposed to be doing something else. Two or three hours disappeared in two or three minutes every day for several months. But while it lay on the floor it got kicked out of shape at least twenty times. Particularly by my photographer who put her stand on its chest and kicked its side out of the camera’s way. I quickly put the pieces back but by the end of that session it had been put out of shape at least eight times.

….I went to my studio and worked at top speed for 5 ? hours without stopping. I screwed everything into place. By then I knew exactly where each bit needed to go. There was no choice, but they had to be fixed at once. They couldn’t wait another minute.

When at last I could see it (you can’t look properly on the floor), I got quite a surprise to see that I had a kind of man there. Later I realised he was a Bog Man. His head and feet had been partially burnt and some of his bones broken. He might have been impaled on a plank which had become part of his body. Are those his feet which don’t touch the ground, but seem to hang on either side of what started as his body and which is burnt at the bottom?

This piece works by the left-out shapes, the splits and gasp left by the wood which doesn’t join and the angles at which the pieces of wood lie. The colour is equally important. I haven’t painted any of it.

I had no idea he would be a Bog Man when I started. (2)

In her given title for the work (given long after the work had been made) Mellis was obviously suggesting a specific link with a specific set of ideas, events or references. She may have been referring to the sacrificial bog victims found in Jutland in the 1950s as described by Seamus Heaney in his poem ‘Grauballe Man’: …The grain of his wrists/ is like bog oak,/ the ball of his heel/ like a basalt egg./ His instep has shrunk/ cold as a swan’s foot/ or a wet swamp root…3
Alternatively they reference may be to an object such as that of the Iron Age oak figure found buried in Ballachulish Moss in 1880. (4)

Given the fact that this is so clearly a family exhibition – in a number of significant respects –
there can be no omission of the rather poignant ‘Mother and Son’ (1993). The drift-wood relief is significant in a number of ways, not least its possible autobiographical ascription, an idea supported by other figurative pieces in Mellis’s oeuvre such as ‘Resurrection’ (1985), ‘Temptation’ (1986) and ‘Evening Walk’ (1986) all of which refer at least in some way to Mellis’s outlook following the death of Davison. The work itself shows a mother figure standing protectively next to her offspring.

It is only in recent years that Telfer Stokes has acknowledged the significant debt he owes to his parents in his own artistic development. Telfer Stokes has had a number of almost discrete artistic careers. Firstly in the early 60s he worked in New York while as a postgraduate Beckmann Fellow at Brooklyn Museum Art School. Here, he came under the influence of the American abstract expressionists. Discussing that period in his life Telfer Stokes comments:

…that was formative and at a moment in history too – the Cuban Missile Crisis ...... and Barnet Newman walked into the loft space I had on the Lower East Side, befriended me and encouraged me subsequently to keep doing what I was doing .... it’s a long story but he was a very important influence on me, especially his sculpture. Also Duchamp was someone at that time, I met briefly, significantly or not.(5)

Later, back in England, Telfer Stokes worked with text and constructed relief which culminated in what he considers to be a ‘disastrous’ show in 1972 at the Serpentine Gallery in London. From here Telfer Stokes moved into the medium of the artist book which allowed great conceptual freedom and allowed him to subvert convention and confound analysis. In texts such as ‘Back to Back’ (1980)and ‘Clinkscale’ (1977) he demonstrated creativity, inventiveness and freedom.
Discussing the diversity of his output, Stokes comments:

…I'm aware that the moves I have made in my practice don’t look as if they add up and there is an element of oscillation between extremes where thinking things like putting a book together conflicts with making things out of scrap which is much more instinctive and physical.

However these are the extremes – possibly I find it very difficult to combine them but making and thinking do play their parts together, like the titling of the sculpture comes from a more cerebral part of me.

I consult my note book when I'm looking for a title and writing in the note book is often the result of thinking or hearing something or reading something .... and I did try and make books in the most bizarre way where the set-up left leeway for the development of the book on the printing press itself.

However, in retrospective but not altogether serious analysis Telfer Stokes comments that

…what I was doing making books for 30 years was saying I'm not interested in my mother’s work etc. etc. - I don’t want to be connected - & yet all along the person whom I had admired was the same person as she admired - Alfred Wallis. And what a disaster is that !

Despite the whimsicality of such remarks concerning Alfred Wallis – the self-taught “naïve” artist who obsessively painted life in and around the St Ives harbour in a ‘flat’, non-perspectival style with a particular blue-grey palette – it is clear that he is admired by Telfer Stokes and that, inevitably, Wallis had an effect on Margaret also. Perhaps this was about work which thrived in proximity to the sea and gained its effect by the juxtaposition of texture, colour and shape? All of these aspects certainly inform Margaret Mellis’s work and they can be seen, too, in the new body of work Telfer Stokes has produced for the current exhibition.

Such pieces, often large, heavy, bold, muscular and masculine are titled by Telfer Stokes in a way which suggests cerebrality, thought and discourse. Titles such as ‘Chufter’, ‘Meme’, ‘Accidence’ and ‘Darkling’ are at once literary, discomfiting and enigmatic – and they form a kind of found poetry in themselves when mouthed and spoken. Telfer Stokes is uncharacteristically coy about their origins citing music as the likely source.

Handling these works in preparation for hanging and display emphasises their distance from delicate and precious art objects which are handled with white gloves. The solidity, grime and weight of these pieces – great slabs, beams and plates of steel cut with angle grinder and reassembled in rhythmic juxtapositions of colour and mass.

There is something joyful, unpretentious and weighty about these pieces – almost as far away as it is possible to get from the bookishness of Telfer Stokes’s previous artistic incarnation. And yet there is a connection:

I have come to make sculptural objects as a natural development from making visual books. The kind of freedom that I had going out with the camera and shooting for a book has been transferred to a visit with a trailer to the scrap yard. My material now is something more physically tangible – the need to transform the base material into something cohesive/whole, remains the same. I do not see my work coming from a sculptural tradition, although what I have made are three dimensional objects. I associate myself with an activity that brings material together: material with a history that has caught my eye because it has the potential to be transformed. (6)

As with Margaret Mellis’s work, these vastly different forms repay careful observation. Although the juxtapositioning of certain elements is clearly intuitive, the way in which this positioning is achieved is clearly not. In ‘Meme’, for example, four separate elements have been combined: a yellow rectangle, a blue-black bar, a rusted hexagon and an L-shaped patch of red. These elements are not merely placed adjacent to each other and welded together. A negative space for the L-shape has been created on the yellow rectangle, so that the L-shape is inserted; the same process applies to the hexagon which also serves as an articulation for the blue-black bar. In other words these pieces have not only been thought about in compositional terms, they have also been considered on a constructed level, serving well to illustrate his father, Adrian Stokes’s belief that the starting point for art was the material and that the viewer, when considering it, would summon textural, tactile and emotional memory.

Looking at Telfer Stokes work en masse it is clear that his interest in texture, pattern, relief, beginning and ending runs through it. In another of Telfer Stokes’s artist books, ‘The Song of the Thrush’, in which a continuous text joins disparate visual elements, the end-pages depict corrugated iron shacks and it is to this subject, either by design or happenstance, that Telfer’s cousin, Charlotte Mellis turns in a remarkable grouping of work on this visual trope.

In 1983, when South Africa was still under the cruel grip of apartheid, I visited Alexandra Township in Johannesburg. The images, sights, smells and emotions from that short visit in July of that year are permanently etched on my memory. These were released in a jumbled torrent as I began, recently, to look carefully at Charlotte Mellis’s unusual and memorable ceramics and pointed the way to another pressing, long-pondered question on the relationship between art and politics.

These discussions have been conducted loudly and frequently in the history of art – one need only think of the graphic war images of Goya to see that the Spanish artist felt that art’s purpose was a broadly political one. The debate which raged within the Surrealist movement as to the relationship between art and a radical left-wing reformist agenda is also illustration of this argument. The list of politico-aesthetic movements and individual agendas is long and mere citation here is not the purpose of this text.

But all of this is relevant in considering Charlotte Mellis’s ceramics derived from a series of trips to around the world where she was exposed to extreme poverty. A highly developed example of a mature response to more youthful experience is seen in a work such as ‘Shantytown’ (2010) which consists of fifty-eight individual ceramic pieces with each component building measuring 16 x 18 x 15 cm. Clearly a work which has taken a great deal of time and care to create, it represents both a political and aesthetic statement.

It is no surprise then to hear that Charlotte Mellis cites the US photographer of the Great Depression, Walker Evans as a major influence. In his work Walker Evans (1903-1975) combined social consciousness, aesthetic statement and political force. Such apparently incompatible aspects are, in fact, a mainstay of good photo-journalism to this day. A moving picture of poverty, an atrocity or famine must, in order to be effective, have a good compositional element to carry forward its full impact. Discussing her work Charlotte Mellis comments :

….the aim is to express ideas in concrete form, try to get a message across which might be a thought or a feeling or atmosphere and sometimes to communicate the ironies of endurance, the triumph (humour) of the human race over adversity. The purpose is more difficult to answer – when I make a bowl it is obvious… but a corrugated shed? Well…does it make you think? What does it make you think? It’s up to you.

The images of Walker Evans appeal to me emotionally; he is speaking to one directly about the plight of these people. There is an atmosphere around the ‘shacks’ and a stark loneliness, an emptiness. I seem to be drawn to the underbelly of life which I cannot exactly explain. I set off across the world with a pack on my back and was exposed to extreme poverty. This helped me develop social awareness. Colour is the upside of the belly.…Certain colours lift the mood. (7)

At Harrogate College of Art where Charlotte Mellis trained under Tim Proud and Dennis Farrell, she was greatly encouraged by a succession of visiting lecturers and external examiners such as Mike Dodd. She was impressed too by the hand-building and abstraction of Gordon Baldwin, an influence which persists until the present in respect of the construction techniques employed in her current work.

Charlotte Mellis expresses an early and enduring fascination with corrugations citing its repetitive pattern, its colour of red oxide and its “crumbling rusty deliciousness” as factors in its attraction. She also relates an anecdote which goes further towards a deeper explanation:
There used to be a collage by Francis Davison…. which hung by the front door of the house in Church Row and it was very stark, just some cut up pieces of cardboard placed in an abstract way. I was attracted to it – it seemed very unassuming and no one else seemed to notice it but because it was always there by the front door I saw it every time I came in or out. I was fascinated by its sheer humbleness.(8)

Charlotte Mellis, after extensive travel but no real direction, was taken under the wing of her aunt, Ann Stokes, who taught her how to be an effective potter, giving her the grounding which enabled her to move on to art college. Ann Stokes, largely self-taught, is a formidable talent in her own right. At first glance, some of her more outrageous pieces such as birds in flight or illuminated crocodiles may seem twee or contrived. But Ann Stokes’s work grows in stature and appeal the more it is considered. Her plates, in particular, are collectors’ items, prized just as much for their visual appeal as for their functionality.

Many of Ann Stokes’s works have a domestic purpose and origin which demonstrate her ability to run a household while maintaining the largely private and modest aspirations of the domestic studio potter. However, Ann Stokes has robustly resisted categorisation. For her, the earthenware vessels which she makes, with no regard for fashion or tradition, are objects to be painted and enjoyed – “painting is what I pot for,” she has said. Her mirrors, flights of fancy decorated with goats, or birds or fish are to be enjoyed and relished….like the life that Ann Stokes so evidently holds dear.

Like Matisse, Picasso and Asger Jorn before her – and to whom she must, one hopes, acknowledge some kind of debt of gratitude – her painted plates of birds, fish and other creatures excite and delight.

Rejected by both the ceramic and painting ‘camps’ Ann Stokes work was largely ignored by the mainstream but was collected by some discerning critic and admirers such as Lord Gowrie and Tanya Harrod, amongst others. Such fondness and admiration led, in turn, to the rather unexpected inclusion of a selection of Ann Stokes’s plates in the 1985 Hayward Annual exhibition ‘A Journey Through Contemporary Art with Nigel Greenwood’.9 Writing about Ann Stokes, Greenwood commented: “Elsewhere I may have voiced certain problems I have with craft when it is elevated to an art form, but with Ann Stokes’s work I have no problems – she has a true artist’s affinity with everything she touches.”10

A recent publication, edited by Tanya Harrod, has asserted Ann Stokes’s place, alongside her other family members, as an artist of stature and interest.11 It is difficult to disagree with such a position, although, as with opinions about any artist, there will be dissenting voices.
In conclusion, this exhibition presents the ideal opportunity to assess, by means of judicicous selection, the many cross-currents, affinities, sympathies and divergences relating to the work of each artist. Such diverse talent is surely a cause for celebration as well as reflection.

GILES SUTHERLAND
September, 2011

1 The colour ascriptions are written by Mellis as part of each work’s title on the reverse of the paintings
2 Quoted in Margaret Mellis, Andrew Lambirth, (2010), p. 161 – but originally from a catalogue of Mellis’s exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, London in 1990
3 ‘Grauballe Man’ North, Faber & Faber, London, 1975
4 Such finds were and are relatively common in Europe and were the subject of an exhibition in Silkeborg, Denmark
5 Telfer Stokes. Interview with Giles Sutherland (via email) 21-22 September, 2011
6 Telfer Stokes, ‘Wall Pieces’ (Artist’s Statement), North House Gallery, Essex, 17 April – 15 May, 2010
7 Charlotte Mellis Interview with Giles Sutherland (via email) 20 September, 2011
8 ibid.
9 Nigel Greenwood (1941-2004) was an art dealer and commentator on the visual arts
10 Quoted in Ann Stokes – Artists’ Potter, ed. Tanya Harrod, p. 123
11 Ann Stokes – Artists’ Potter, ed. Tanya Harrod, London (Lund Humphries), 2009

ART ROOT - Dunbar 24 & 25 September 2011

2011-09-14T06:57:00.000-07:00

ART ROOT is the first Open Studio event to take place in Dunbar and surrounding areas with over 30 East Lothian Artists opening their studios on the weekend of Sept 24 & 25th September 10 to 5.00pm

Cycle routes and free shuttle buses connect all venues from Dunbar Railway Station

Demonstrations and workshops for all age groups FREE

Info Point: John Muir’s Birthplace 126 High St Dunbar 01368 865899

http://www.artroot.co.uk/

Body Bags: Simonides

2011-09-09T07:01:00.000-07:00

Body Bags: Simonides

Edinburgh College of Art

Until 9 September

As visitors enter one of Edinburgh College of Art’s north-facing painting studios – with the Castle as its dark, craggy backdrop – they are met by a mildly shocking sight: four body-bags laid out neatly on the floor, on a carpet of sand.

It’s usually an emotionally jolting experience to confront in reality what one normally experiences as a removed and mediated image, whether on television or in newspapers. Here, the bags, with their efficient design of perimeter zip and plastic wallets at head and toe, are sombre reminders of many conflict zones. The epitaph which accompanies them, an elegiac couplet translated from the Greek into Scots by the poet Robert Crawford, reads: “Ootlin, tell oor maisters this: / We lig here deid. We did as we were telt.”

(Stranger, tell our masters this: We lie here dead. We did as we were told)

It’s a stark phrase, intensified by Crawford’s iambic pentameter, which catches the rhythms and cadences of the language most people in Scotland still recognise, or speak. Despite its contemporary tone, it was written by the poet Simonides of Ceos in the 6^th century BC during the Greco-Persian wars. These particular lines refer to the Spartan war dead at Thermopylae after their defeat by the Persian army. Although it’s nothing new to draw parallels between past and present events, the torrent of imagery from Iraq, Afghanistan and, now, Libya, make the imagery more urgent and potent.

Crawford has collaborated with the photographer Norman McBeath and there’s a wonderfully tangential relationship between word and image so that unusual associations are created by mere juxtapositions. A series of bottles tucked into the pigeon-holes of a dovecot is set alongside ‘Bonnie Fechters’: “Wha gied yir youthheid aince, fir yir cauf kintra…”; while an iron trough for feeding livestock has the lines: “Frien, this is nae grand laird’s mausoleum. / A puir man needs nae big lair. This’ll dae”

Sometimes, the relationship between the photographs, and the antique casts amongst which they are set, sets up some odd but moving associations. The picture which accompanies ‘Cairn’ – “Here the mool smuirs Pythonax an his brither…” consists of two ancient standing stones; while in the room itself, the cast heads of two horses, much changed through time and wear, eerily echo the forms of the giant boulders.

This is a gentle but powerful combination of word and image. Augmented by the hauntingly beautiful presence of vases of lilies – and the college’s long-undervalued but thankfully restored collection of casts of classical statuary – it makes for a deeply contemplative and rather humbling experience.

Robert Rauschenberg: Botanical Vaudeville

2011-09-09T06:55:00.001-07:00

Robert Rauschenberg: Botanical Vaudeville

Inverleith House

Edinburgh

Until Oct 2

Robert Rauschenberg, who died in 2008 at the age of 82, was the a US artist of great stature – at least the equal of his contemporaries Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Claes Oldenberg and Andy Warhol. Rauschenberg transformed the detritus of the technological and consumer society into art, elevating the mundane into the extraordinary. Although sharing some of the methods and aims of the European Arte Povera movement, Rauschenberg’s was an emphatically American vision, as demonstrated by his materials – discarded road signs, shiny mirrored steel, glass and enlarged, reproduced images.

This show, the first major collection to be seen in the UK for around thirty years, consists of nearly forty works, made between 1982 and 1997. These range chronologically from the assemblage (Rauschenberg’s term is ‘combine’ ) Global Chute (Kabal American Zephyr) made from metal duct, a mapped globe and tool handle to Untitled (Glass Tyres) – a blown glass sculpture derived from car tyres. Other works include Uptown Pig Pox (1988) – a painted, life-size aluminium sculpture of a pig ‘saddled’ with an assortment of garish ties; and Eco-Echo IV (1992-93) – a large, motor-operated fan activated by sound.

More than a quarter of the works here carry the term ‘glut’ in their title – the description derives from a series made during the recession of the ‘eighties which had its origin in a surplus of the world oil supply. Initially the series consisted of work containing signs from defunct petrol stations but later included other materials. The idea of surplus economic waste is seen in works such as Le Coon Glut and Urban Katydid Glut, both dating from 1986, which include discarded aluminium US street signs. These works become not only a tangled mass of objects but also a lexicographical scrap heap where the broken, fragmented names such as ‘Tropicana Pkwy W’, ‘Palm Tree…’ and ‘Gulfs…’ create a bizarre, urban ‘found’ poetry.

As a foil to Rauschenberg’s ‘combines’ the artist also created a quite different series of reflective brass, bronze, copper and aluminium plates which he etched with words and images. A work such as Fossil Lace (Borealis) 1992 – which introduces the idea of palimpsest, where successive layers seem to have been removed and added – assumes a kind of ethereality quite at odds with its more garish, object-derived counterparts.

Often the imagery laid down on these burnished metallic surfaces is photographic and, in combination, these pictorial fragments create puzzling, quasi-narratives as in Party-Bird (Night Shade) (1991) where an exotic bird, foliage and various metallic structures enigmatically combine. Elsewhere the allure of some pieces is augmented by a combination of cryptic imagery and strange beauty as in Wire Fur (Night Shade) which appears to be derived from air-borne seeds caught in a metal fence.

What transpires from this inspiring show is the voracious, questing nature of Rauschenberg’s intellect, his willingness to experiment and his apparently boundless imagination.

Tony Cragg: Sculptures and Drawings

2011-09-09T06:54:00.000-07:00

Tony Cragg: Sculptures and Drawings

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Edinburgh

Until Nov 6, 2011

Currently Director of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the sculptor Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949 but has been based in Wuppertal, Germany since 1978. Although Cragg describes himself as a “radical materialist” the term does not refer to consumerism but rather to his approach to materials, the stuff and substance of which our world is made – including, as Cragg observes ‘the neurons which comprise the human brain’. The etymology of the term ‘radical’ embraces the idea of a root cause; and so Cragg’s approach is motivated by the desire to test, explore and experiment with all manner of substance and object.

Such an approach is immediately evident on a first encounter with Cragg’s work. The shapes, forms, colours of his sculpture and wide range of materials from which they are fashioned (including plastic, fibreglass, plywood, marble and bronze) make a startling impact. Although his work is diverse in scale, substance and approach it is also clear that this wonderfully adventurous sculptor works thematically, in series, and that these run in parallel, like trains of thought where one idea somehow links to another.

Indeed, some of these twisting, laboriously honed forms seem to be metaphors of their own creation. A work such as ‘Early Forms St Gallen’ (1999) – an enormous twist of cast bronze nearly three metres long – can be viewed spatially and temporally. ‘Reading’ the work from one end to the other, one sees the clear form of a bowl or mortar at one end which then morphs into geometrically-defined variations of itself. It gives the appearance of having been manufactured using state-of-the-art computer-modelling. In fact, every aspect bears the touch of the human hand, from the original model through to the creation of a mould, and then to the final casting and finishing.

Such works are completed using fabrication methods and numerous assistants and technicians in Cragg’s workshop – a vast, former tank maintenance depot in Wuppertal. The premises bear witness to the enormous scale of much of Cragg’s work (some of it so bulky and heavy that it cannot be shown inside the SNGMA) as well as to the size and ambition of Cragg’s grand projet.

Such large-scale engineering processes are complemented by Cragg’s complex, energetic drawings which, despite initial appearances, are based on an observable external world and are neither conceptual nor imagined. In one series of photographic prints, which show the pouring of molten iron in a foundry, the materiality and physicality of Cragg’s work is strongly emphasised –

laying down a heavy, solid challenge to some of the flimsiness of current fashionable ‘conceptualism’.

This major show, the first of Cragg’s in the UK for over ten years, is a triumph and a must-see for those keen to see how the boundaries of modern sculpture can be pushed ever outwards.

Hiroshi Sugimoto & 'Heirlooms' at Dovecot Studios

2011-09-09T06:52:00.000-07:00

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Edinburgh

Until 25 September

Heirlooms

Dovecot Studios

Infirmary Street

Edinburgh

Until 4 September

Japanese photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s collection of 26 large-scale photographic prints explore electricity, as well as delving into the history and nature of photography itself. One series, Photogenic Drawings, derives its name from a collection of negative plates made by one of the earliest exponents of photography, Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877). The other, Lightning Fields, probes the hidden world of violent electrical discharge, captured directly on photographic film.

Sugimoto has taken a number of Fox Talbot’s plates (now in Sugimoto’s collection) and reprinted from them. The results are as revelatory as they are mysterious and beautiful. It’s entirely possible that these images are being seen for the first time, as it is not at all certain that Fox Talbot printed the negatives. As well as standard forms of photograph (often involving portraiture) Fox Talbot also created images without a camera by placing an object (such as a fern leaf or shark’s egg-case) directly on light-sensitive paper.

The ghostly, faded ethereal images (greatly enlarged by Sugimoto) emerge from a buried, distant past. Because of these photographs’ direct relationship to reality (they are, in fact a true ‘index’) the images appear and feel real, not imagined. By contrast, Sugimoto’s direct capture of electrical charges both records the behaviour of this mysterious energy and also suggests that on this micro level, patterning and form link to other, more familiar, phenomena such as vascular systems or the behaviour of water.

The exhibition at Edinburgh’s Dovecot studios, collectively entitled Heirlooms, is divided in two – the first, based on Indian and South-east Asian materials belonging to collector Jonathan Hope; and the second, the response of three British weavers to the Indian fabric tradition. Hope’s collection of elegant and often complexly-patterned wall hangings, sarongs, kemben (breast wrappers), kain panjang (hip cloths) and selendang (shawls and head covers) dates from the 1600s to the present day.

Embedded within the collection is a complex story of politics, trade, industrialisation, spirituality and aesthetics. The replacement of eastern hand-woven cottons by their finer, more closely woven counterparts made in Holland at the beginning of the industrial revolution changed the way that dyes and batik methods were used. The closer weave allowed for more delicate patterning and finer working detail. Looking at these beautiful objects makes the point that visual abstraction is not solely a modern idea. Although many of the motifs are based on the observed world (such as wings or warriors) some appear as pure abstraction – geometric shapes and blocks of bold colour.

The response of Deidre Nelson, Naomi Robertson and Sarah Sumison to Indian textile traditions is individual and carefully considered. Sumison in particular shows an implicit understanding of the significance of colour with the delicate intricate silk tapestry Threads of Life.

It’s clear from the content of both shows that the worlds of ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’ are intertwined and should never be regarded as separate.

Nina Rhode, Cara Tolmie, Soil

2011-07-27T01:29:00.000-07:00

Nina Rhode: Friendly Fire

Cara Tolmie: Read Thou Art and Read Thou Shalt Remain

Dundee Contemporary Arts

Dundee

Until 31 July

Soil

Hannah Maclure Centre

Abertay University

Dundee

Until 19 August

Berlin-based artist Nina Rhode, who was born in 1971, has the uncanny ability to make serious points and discuss difficult ideas while neither being too solemn – nor taking herself too seriously.

Rhode is fascinated by kinetics, geometry and colour so her absorbing, fun sculptures and installations prove both entertaining and thought-provoking. Rhode is indebted to both arte povera and the work of US sculptor Louise Nevelson, as demonstrated by ‘Procurator,’ which consists of hundreds of burnt-out fireworks assembled in the shape of a church organ. Getting close, it’s possible to smell the cordite and musty cardboard and to delight in Rhode’s passion for imbuing the discarded object with new form and meaning. In a similar vein, Rhode has fashioned ‘Gong’ from old rope, a large log and used stone-cutting disks. Inspired by more ornamental Japanese gongs this participatory work draws in a delighted audience of all ages.

Rhode’s ‘wheels’ are a more thoughtful, kinetic equivalent to Damian Hirst’s ‘spin’ paintings. While Hirst’s works remain frozen in time, Rhode’s pieces – sometimes powered by electric motors – rotate to create endless combinations of colour and pattern. This is best seen in a work such as ‘Dreirad’ (Three Wheels) where the strobe lighting, triggered by a motion sensor, illuminates the patterned rotating disks.

Elsewhere Rhode’s shimmering, distorting optical and mirrored surfaces play incessantly with our perceptual mechanisms and instincts, wrong-footing us in surprising, unnerving and humorous ways.

By contrast, Glasgow-based Cara Tolmie, who is significantly younger than Rhode, indulges in a perplexing and at times impenetrable and incoherent intellectualism which eschews perspicacity – not because of its inherent philosophical complexity but rather because its core idea and the way this is expressed lacks clarity. Tolmie’s three-part work ‘Read Thou Art and Read Thou Shalt Remain’ (a film shot from a moving vehicle, a written description of the film and the translation of this into a video ‘opera’ involving three characters) seems to have real promise, but fails to deliver. It’s as if there’s a good idea somewhere inside struggling to find coherent expression.

A more engaging and approachable show at Hannah Maclure Centre plays on the dual meaning of ‘soil’ - as a verb conveying ideas of filth and despoliation and as noun, connoting a complex and sustaining medium for growth. Much thought has clearly been given to the rich possibilities offered by such meaning and the invited participants, who include the artists Dalziel and Scullion, Jonathan Baxter and Stephanie Bourne, as well as SIMBIOS, a multi-disciplinary research team at Abertay which works on complex environmental and ecological issues.

Since C.P. Snow famously invoked the notion of the ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and science facing each other in mutual incomprehension, the efforts of those who strive for intelligent discourse across the so-called ‘divide’ must be lauded. So here, for example, it’s worth being reminded, as Jan Hendry does successfully – in an installation of rock samples, pigment and colour studies – that the origins of art as an essentially mark-making exercise began with the use of soil as pigment. One of Hendry’s samples is yellow ochre, collected in Buckhaven, Fife.

Such fundamental thoughts and connections are important, especially in the certain knowledge that without healthy soil, the biosphere would collapse irreversibly.

The Herring Road

2011-07-22T16:56:00.000-07:00

The Herring Road
The Peter Potter Gallery
Haddington
Until July 23

The herring fishery dominated Scotland's coastal towns for over a century until massive over- exploitation of this natural resource saw an irretrievable decline in the early and mid-twentieth century.

The herring industry has been the subject of numerous literary and pictorial representations, the most famous of which is Neil Gunn's novel The Silver Darlings (1941) set on the Caithness coast in the mid-nineteenth century.

Hugh MacDiarmid's poem 'With the Herring Fishers', written when the poet was living on the island of Whalsay in Shetland in the late 1930s, conveys the essence of small resilient community in a primeval struggle with nature to secure a livelihood:

"I see herrin' "— I hear the glad cry
An 'gainst the mune see ilka blue jowl
In turn as the fishermen haul on the nets
And sing: "Come, shove in your heids and growl."

"Soom on, bonnie herrin', soom on," they bawl,
And "Come in, 0 come in, and see me,"
"Come and gi'e the auld man something to dae;
It'll be a braw change frae the sea!"

0 it's ane o' the bonniest sichts in the world
To watch the herrin' come walkin' on board
In the wee sma' 'oors o' a simmer's mornin'
As if o' their ain accord!

For this is the way that God sees life,
The haill jing-bank o's appearin'
Up owre frae the edge o' naethingness
—It's His happy cries I'm hearin'.

"Left, Right — O come in and see me,"
Reid and yellow and black and white,
Toddlin' up into Heaven thegither
At peep o' day frae the endless night!

Below is unmediated publicity material from The Peter Potter Gallery documenting and publicising a fascinating project: The Herring Road - this is part of Lost Landscapes - an ambitious project by The Peter Potter Gallery that traverses boundaries between art, ecology, archaeology and local history.

Elizabeth Blackadder

2011-07-20T05:16:00.000-07:00

Scottish National Gallery
Edinburgh
Until 2 January 2012

In the short film accompanying this major retrospective (which celebrates Dame Elizabeth Blackadder’s eightieth birthday), the artist says that she doesn’t talk about her work: “It’s the paintings…!” she insists. Clearly, the show’s curator, Philip Long, has a point when he observes that Blackadder’s work is deserving of greater critical attention – although it is already the subject of a number of publications including a substantial critical monograph.

There is no doubt that Blackadder is both immensely talented – and prolific. The numerous works here demonstrate rare levels of draughtsmanship and an omnivorous curiosity in her immediate environment. Early works such as ‘Fifeshire Farm’ and ‘Dark Hill, Fifeshire’ – both lithographs were completed in 1960 – show a compositional assurance and a confident handling of the medium which one would normally associate with a more mature artist. The ink study ‘Impruneta,’ completed four years earlier while Blackadder was on a travelling scholarship from Edinburgh College of Art, is similarly masterful, conveying the essence of the Tuscan landscape without getting overly bogged down in extraneous detail.

Blackadder’s association with ECA was strong and enduring: in 1956 she was appointed as part-time lecturer and from 1962 onwards she worked in a full-time capacity. Arguably, her appointment and indeed her successful career are due in large measure to her role in perpetuating the methods and subject matter of her teachers who included Philipson, Gillies and MacTaggart. As an exponent of the ‘Edinburgh School,’ Blackadder’s interests lay in the painterly surface of her work, the primacy of colour and a firm compositional sense.

Much of the artist’s popularity stems from her subject matter, which extends to cats, flowers, still lifes and to a lesser extent landscape. It’s relatively easy to trace a line from the French masters such as Bonnard, Matisse and Cézanne through Gillies and then to Blackadder’s own style. For her, still life is about exploring objects in various compositional combinations; often these are presented against a surface such as a table-top portrayed with non-traditional perspective. But Blackadder always stops short of partial or total abstraction despite the influence of the American abstract expressionists who inspired her to create larger, bolder more colourful works. A sense of contemplative calm endures through her compositions, an aspect which was heightened through her discovery of and subsequent influence by the Japanese tradition in object-making and colour.

Blackadder clearly chooses to explore the beauty and wonder of life as if insulated from the darkness of genocide or environmental disaster or a hundred other pressing concerns. Although it’s interesting to speculate on how her great talent might have explored such issues, this is to miss the point because her subject matter is a true reflection of the artist’s interests and personality.

Clearly she stands head and shoulders above the majority of Scottish painters who continue to be fixated on similar subject matter.

Consider the Lilies

2011-07-12T16:49:00.000-07:00

Consider the Lilies: A Second Look
McManus Galleries
Dundee

Until 4 September

This show of paintings from the City of Dundee’s collection was originally conceived to celebrate the refurbishment and reopening of the McManus Galleries. The project began with an exhibition held at the Dean Gallery, Edinburgh in 2006. In 2007, the show then toured to London at the Fleming Collection and Kirkcudbright. The exhibition was rehung at The McManus when it reopened in February 2010.

The show’s present incarnation, is a second, modified hang in George Gilbert Scott’s splendid gothic revival building – now modified and modernised by Page/Park architects. Located in the relaxed, considered and redefined civic space of Albert Square, the McManus now no longer feels and looks like a traffic island

Just as the revamped civic space has created a renewed dialogue with the building, so Scott’s reinvigorated Victorianism now creates a renewed context for the display of art.

This selection, built around the years 1910 to 1980, focuses on Scottish artists many of whom have some association with the city. Thus are included well known figures such as Alberto Morocco, S J Peploe, John Bellany, ‘the two Roberts' (Colquhoun and MacBryde) and James McIintosh Patrick. There are many lesser known names also including David Foggie, Alan Fletcher and Stewart Carmichael. The last, a Dundonian, who died in 1950 studied in Antwerp and was Governor of Dundee College of art from before the war until his death.

Carmichael’s work, like that of a number of others, here came from the now disbanded Orchar Collection.

Disappointingly, only two women artists feature – Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Anne Redpath, although the contemporary collection includes work by emergent artists such as Pernille Spence and Anya Gallaccio. Barns-Graham – whose reputation has continued to grow since her death in 2004 – is represented here by what appears to be a work of almost total abstraction, ‘Orange, Black and Lilac Squares on Vermillion’. Painted in mid career in the late Sixties, it is in fact a form of notation - the changing colour sequence reflects the phrasing of the Lord’s Prayer

Far from cool and considered intellectual abstraction Barns-Graham’s work was always rooted in her experience - emotional and physical - of the world

Redpath, Barns-Graham’s senior by nearly twenty years, was a very different kind of painter and whereas the younger artist escaped the belle peinture ethos of Edinburgh College of Art (where both artists trained) Redpath was content to work within its idiom. ‘Eileen in a White Chair’, painted in the mid-Fifties, was considered by Redpath to be less portraiture and more an essay in composition and paint. Despite the vigour of its brushstrokes and the vivid colour of its paint, the subject, a young woman, appears morose and introspective. Atypical, it reveals something of Redpath’s promise had she chosen to take her work in another direction.

As the show’s titles implies, this collection certainly deserves a second look.

McTaggart's Scottish Shorelines - Paintings from East and West

2011-07-09T02:13:00.000-07:00

St Andrews Museum
Kinburn Park
St Andrews
Until 4 September

Since the ill-advised decision to close The Crawford Arts Centre in 2006, those wishing to experience the visual arts in St Andrews have been presented with slim pickings – quite an irony given the current stellar status, by association, of the university’s art history department.

The current venue, although conservative, uncomfortably small and oddly old-fashioned nevertheless deserves praise for its current show which focuses on the major theme of the Victorian Scottish painter, William McTaggart – the sea.

Given that St Andrews is a coastal town from where one can also see one of McTaggart’s favourite painting spots – Carnoustie – the choice is appropriate.

McTaggart, who was born in Aros, Kintyre in 1835 and whose father was a labourer, trained at the Trustees Academy (which later became Edinburgh College of Art) returned frequently to his native patch to paint. From the capital he moved to Lasswade in Midlothian where he spent the last years of his life engaged in studies of the land and rural landscape around him.

Some might say that the sea was in the artist’s blood as he was inexorably drawn to it throughout his working life to paint its moods, light, patterns, forms and the history of those who lived – and died – by it.

This selection, drawn exclusively from the collection of Fife Council – certainly makes this fact plain and attempts, if somewhat weakly, to place McTaggart in a modern context by including a single work by the contemporary artist, Will Maclean, as well as poetry written in a workshop held by David Kinloch. The poems demonstrate the participants’ response to McTaggart’s sometimes fey and ethereal studies which adorn the walls rather pompously in their ornate gilded frames. One wonders how the paintings might look if framed using modern techniques and more experimental lighting?

If McTaggart’s unconvincing rosy-cheeked figures which appear to dissolve into the landscape (a metaphor for the indivisible relationship between humanity and nature ?) leave you occasionally irritated and dissatisfied then this is more than compensated for by his skill in conveying not only a visual experience but also a quasi tactile and aural one.

As a genre painter, however, McTaggart was no slouch as his 1858 work ‘Going to Sea’ – painted when the artist was just twenty-three – demonstrates. The narrative content is quite explicit – an old salt regales two youths with tales of awe while their companion, another boy, gazes inland, full of doubt.

Some of McTaggart’s most popular works are here, including a smaller version of ‘The Storm’, a composite picture with elements of narrative, seascape and landscape. But despite the human sadness encapsulated in several works concerning emigration which McTaggart painted decades after such events actually took place, one is left wondering if it is in fact those works without a human presence, such as ‘The Wave’ painted in 1881, where the artist reached the pinnacle of his career. The sense of gentle movement, solitude and beauty seems unsurpassed in most other works and goes some way to explaining the ill-founded belief of McTaggart’s association with Impressionism.

Exhibition Lotte Glob – 50 Years in Clay: A Major Retrospective

2011-06-24T05:24:00.000-07:00

Lotte Glob, Sculpture Croft, 105 Laid, Loch Eriboll, Sutherland, Scotland

(Published in Ceramic Review Issue 250, July/August 2011)

When Sutherland-based Danish potter Lotte Glob was in her early twenties she was working in her native Denmark with her English husband, the late David Illingworth. The couple had met a few years previously when Glob travelled to Scotland to seek work as a potter and had eventually arrived at Illingworth’s remote workshop in Morar in the West Highlands. Glob recalls: ‘My first daughter, Shona, was born in Denmark in 1966 when we were living in a little cottage near Fjellerup in Djursland, north of Aarhus. I had her the night after firing this big wood-fired kiln for the first time! For twenty hours we were firing this kiln…I was black and we were all naked because it was so hot. I went straight from the firing into the hospital.’

The memory and imagery is stark, tough, feisty, and romantic – signalling a birth amid heat, fire, and earth. It might stand as a convenient metaphor for all of Glob’s work as well as highlighting the continuing strong bond between this immensely talented artist’s work and her family.

GARDENS

Showing me around her ‘sculpture croft’ on the shores of the dramatic glaciated fiord, Loch Eriboll, with its characteristic limestone topography and fauna, she points to various small-scale ‘sanctuary gardens’, which she has created for each of her four youngest grandchildren: Alina, Sonny, Finn, and Ava. The spaces are individual, idiosyncratic, sheltered, and nourishing. Each has its own intimate atmosphere characterised by combinations of Glob’s sculpted ceramic forms and sensitive, intuitive plantings of predominantly native species of trees, flowers, and shrubs. Alina’s garden, for example, is circular with plantings of silver birch, cherry, hazel, lingonberry, and anemone. Finn’s garden, by contrast, is more square, and is planted with bamboo, oak, blueberry, and marguerite.

The garden as dedication has a long and passionate tradition; here it is also a celebration of regeneration – of both land and family. Glob bought the sixteen-acre croft around twelve years ago. At that time it was bare, neglected, and ecologically depleted. In the intervening years she has succeeded in creating what seems nothing short of a minor miracle. Previously over-grazed by sheep and deer, with heather and grass eaten almost to the root, there now stands an exemplar of what can be achieved once the native ecology is allowed to return to some semblance of balanced normality.

Glob explains the evolution of her croft: ‘I first fenced it from the road to the shores of Loch Eriboll so as to keep the sheep and deer out. Now the grass, flowers, and trees are growing again in abundance with new birds arriving – the latest incomer, a pheasant. A small native wood has been planted (with some ‘immigrants’ as well) with a small scattering of fruit trees and fruit bushes: apple, plum, cherry, pears, currants, raspberries, blueberries, and even sweet chestnut and walnuts. Little by little other sculptures are emerging through the long grass, heather, and flowers. Running across the hill, hiding behind rock and heather or bowing to the sky, sending beams of light out into the universe and mirroring the landscape. Even the rhubarb and potatoes look happy guarded by a two-legged creature, and on sunny days my bees are enjoying the new growth of the garden.’

GESAMKUNSTSWERK

Glob’s croft land includes, as well as her garden and woodland, a dwelling house, kiln, and studio workshop. Unsurprisingly, given Glob’s Scandinavian reverence for nature, there’s also a sauna on the shores of the crystal clear loch. Even in inclement weather, of which there is a good amount, the setting is paradisiacal. The environment oozes fecundity and creativity. It is a gesamkunstswerk in the making and Glob describes the setting out of her sculptures and the process of creating her retrospective as being akin to painting: ‘It evolves unpredictably under its own momentum and creative logic… I don’t have a plan or a diagram.’

Much of the work to be included in the show has never been seen before in the UK, as it was housed and stored in Denmark. Glob’s parents were enthusiastic, if critical, supporters of her pots and as a result over several decades Glob gave them representative samples of what she considered to be her best work.

BACKGROUND

Glob enjoyed highly formative apprenticeships with some of Denmark’s best-known artists, including the ceramists Gutte Eriksen and Erik Nyholm. She also spent time in the company of the great Cobra artist Asger Jorn, who as well as painting, enjoyed a prolific career as a sculptor in which clay was a frequently used medium.

From Eriksen, Glob learned to transform clay from dead matter to living material. The basis of Eriksen’s approach – down to earth and practical – was the importance of the base to any vessel. This fundamental instruction, learned by Glob at a very young age, has been a constant throughout her working life, whether in the making of domestic tableware or ceramic sculpture. The Golem-like cephalous beings of The Loch Eriboll Chorus – whatever the other aspects of their nature – stand on broad feet and are supported by stocky legs recalling the shape and feel of Eriksen’s mazagran goblets.

The exhibition will therefore present an important and rare opportunity to assess the progress and evolution of Glob’s work over nearly five decades. The earliest pieces will date from the late 1950s and thus were made when Glob was a teenager. There are also highly significant pieces from the mid-sixties, including Bog Doll, Eat Your Heart Out, Baluba Muse, and Old Bull, which already demonstrate an affinity with form and an impatient experimentalism – both important characteristics of Glob’s long-standing approach.

Old Bull, in particular, evinces its own genesis and process in a transparent manner; the taurean form has been reduced to the most basic elements and these components (legs, trunk, neck, and head) have been fashioned from wheel-thrown pots, assembled and conjoined to create something archetypal, rough, and vaguely threatening. Looking at it takes the mind back to a more primitive, atavistic, and elemental context; the work is modern only inasmuch as some of Picasso’s own similar motifs were such. In other words, the work reveals a dialogue with the essential past, borrowing (in the best sense of the term) from the Cycladic and Minoan traditions, to name but two influential elements. It was undoubtedly from her father, an eminent archaelogist, that Glob learned to value and evaluate the forms of the past, thus absorbing the archetypicality of shape and function that has endured for thousands of years.

At her best Glob seems to act almost like a conduit for the elemental influences around her, so that in much more recent work, such as the platter Loyal Loch (2009), there is a sense of the temporal vastness of geological process, with a much more impressionist feeling of light in combination with sea and sky; glaze becomes a kind of deepening, optically enhanced ‘paint’, and the term ‘stoneware’ connotes something much more than its normal limited sense.

In this setting, the extent of Glob’s considerable opus will be laid out, considered, and enjoyed in its native element.

Patricia Cain: Drawing (on) Riverside

2011-06-19T12:12:00.000-07:00

Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery
Glasgow
Until 14 August

Over the past four years the former Pointhouse shipyard on the Clyde has been a hub-bub of activity around the construction of the new Riverside transport museum designed by Iraqi architect, Zaha Hadid. Hadid’s building is a typically grandiloquent, arresting but oddly minimalist gesture – an essay in line and form. Seen from the air, the latest addition to Glasgow’s rapidly regenerating waterfront resembles a wave or gently-cascading waterfall. The completion of a Hadid building is rarely a quiet affair – the new museum, which opens on 21 June, is no exception and has already attracted international attention.

During the construction process Glasgow-based artist, Patricia Cain, has acted as a kind of unofficial ‘artist-in-residence’ for the project. She has skilfully recorded the nuts, bolts and guts of the building – now artfully concealed behind Hadid’s gleaming, zinc-plated exterior. Using a variety of techniques – and collaborating with a number of other artists and designers – Cain, with a great deal of dogged determination, has succeeded in assembling a large body of work which demonstrates a mature skill in conception and execution.

Cain’s work with architect-artist Ann Nisbet takes the form of a large stylised sculpture which uses the languages of ship-building, architecture and sculpture – a wooden-ribbed hull has been plated using the same technique and materials as Hadid’s larger structure. Elsewhere – demonstrating diversity of technique and an enquiring, experimental approach – Cain has worked with digital and graphic artist Phil Lavery to create an elegiac film of Glasgow’s recent past which incorporates words by the late Edwin Morgan, music by P.J. Moore and film clips showing the demolition of parts of Glasgow in the 1960s Oscar. Cain’s collaborations with glass artist Alec Galloway and printmaker Rosalind Lawless show a real exchange of ideas and techniques.

Cain carefully considered the content of her show – to contextualise her own approach she has included work by other artists such as the great Muirhead Bone and the lesser known William Simpson.

Cain’s imagery is devoid of a human element – an essential component in the progress of the structure and one which Cain’s artistic predecessors such as Léger, Stanley Spencer and, indeed Bone, did not ignore. This ‘omission’ may disappoint some who see such large scale construction as an partnership between human toil and technological prowess. But it’s clear that Cain’s focus is very much on the formal and compositional aspects of the building process. Here, she succeeds wonderfully.

The British Art Show 7

2011-06-11T07:19:00.000-07:00

Centre for Contemporary Arts; Museum of Modern Art; Tramway
Glasgow
Until 21 August

The British Art Show is an unwieldy creature – spread across three Glasgow venues the quinquennial exhibition, which aims to provide a snapshot of contemporary art in Britain, consists of the work of 39 artists working in a variety of media including film, sound, painting, drawing and installation. It needs a good deal of dedication and time to absorb what’s on offer. On the whole it’s energy largely wasted.

The majority of the artists are based in London – although many are not British. One curator, Tom Morton, is also based in the metropolis, while the second, Lisa Le Feuvre, worked there until last year. A smaller number live in Glasgow while none appear either to come from or to be based in Wales or Northern Ireland. Already this selection appears to be weighted in one direction – urbanised and metropolitan. Exceptionally , George Shaw, who was born on Coventry now lives in Devon; but his work, paradoxically, refers to the bleak urban decay of his early years in the English Midlands.

Perhaps the issue of an artist’s domicile is unimportant as Shaw’s work would seem to demonstrate? Certainly, looking at all of these works in totality, their concerns seem universal and if the term can be applied to art, stateless. Many however are unequivocally urban, such as Sparticus Chetwynd’s ‘The Folding House’, Matthew Darbyshire’s ‘An Exhibition for Modern Living’ or the installation by artist duo Cullinan Richards whose use of cheap everyday materials such as tape, polythene and light tubes recalls an earlier era of ‘anti-art’ and Arte Povera.

There is skilful craft here and when it comes together with well constructed ideas such as Steven Claydon’s Trom Bell (cast at Whitechapel Bell Foundry) or Charles Avery’s powerful drawings depicting a alternative dystopian reality, the effects can be moving rather than empty.

Of all the artists here, one in particular appears uncomfortably incongruous for Alasdair Gray is from an older generation of artists and he works in a readily identifiable graphic style. Recognising this the curators have displayed his work (both at MoMA and CCA) adjacent to that of Mick Peter. Like Gray, the Glasgow-based German draws and paints but his work is tangential, tentative and wholly based on a set of ideas such as those in ‘Two Clerks’ which derives from one of Flaubert’s novels.

The show is subtitled “In the Days of the Comet’ which is taken from a 1906 novel by H. G. Wells – the metaphor is apt in that BAS reappears at regular intervals and illuminates, albeit very dimly, the night sky of contemporary art. In the clear light of day, of course, most comets are invisible.

Narcissus Reflected

2011-06-05T06:44:00.000-07:00

Fruitmarket Gallery
Edinburgh
Until 26 June 2011

In Greek mythology Narcissus was the beautiful youth who, after falling irretrievably in love with his own reflection, was transformed into a flower by the gods. The myth has acted as a fecund, endlessly fascinating and enduring source of inspiration and has been explored by artists as diverse as Caravaggio, André Masson and Mat Collishaw

Here the show’s curators, Dawn Ades and David Lomas, in a deeply thoughtful and provocative selection, explore the myth as it reveals itself in contemporary and surrealist art. Following the theme of reflection, both literally and metaphorically, are (predominantly photographic) images by Bill Brandt, Claude Cahun, Cecil Beaton, Jean Cocteau, George Minne, Paul Nash and Yayoi Kasuma.

The dual centrepiece is Salvador Dalí’s painting Metamorphosis of Narcissus which the Catalan artist from 1937, and a remarkable study in pencil and collage by the San Franciscan artist Jess (Collins) completed in 1991. Accompanying Dalí’s image is his poem of the same title and year in an original edition. Both painting and poem are examples of the surrealist’s ‘paranoiac-critical’ method where he drew associations between thoughts and objects that normally were not rationally connected.

In the poem Dalí wrote:

Narcissus, in his immobility, absorbed by his reflection with
the digestive slowness of carnivorous plants, becomes invisible.

There remains of him only
the hallucinatingly white oval of his head,

The poem is thus partial description of and counterpart to the painting which in typical Dalí complexity is divided into two parts: one in which a figure kneels by the water and the second, a mirror image of the first, where a stone hand echoes the shape and form of the body as it holds aloft an egg or bulb from which a flower sprouts.

In a curious echo of this process, the poet Thom Gunn wrote an ekphrastic accompaniment to Jess’s (and Caravaggio’s) imagery: “Narcissus cannot see himself as we can;/ as he leans over the surface, absorbed…”

Gunn’s welcome inclusion here signals another important aspect of the Narcissus myth and hence of this show in that it has lent itself over the years to homo-erotic interpretation. The closer these works are examined the closer the connection with this particular aspect. Certainly Charles Henri Ford’s and George Platt Lynes’s respective photographs (both taken in 1937) make this aspect explicit.

But Narcissus in his youthful body has a certainly androgyny and the subject’s attraction to others is equally strong, thus the inclusion of Kusama’s Narcissus Gardens. The work, which consists of numerous reflective spheres, occupies almost the entire upper gallery floor and as the viewer weaves in and out of the work it’s obvious that we have become implicated in it and almost duped into its inclusion – suddenly around us is a kaleidoscopic multiplication of our own reflections, each one staring back echoing our every gesture and expression, noting our presence and exposing our vanity.

Cabin: Codex

2011-05-27T04:17:00.000-07:00

Cabin: Codex
Centrespace
Visual Research Centre
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art
Dundee Contemporary Arts
Dundee
Until 29 May 2011

The Centre for Artists Books was set up in 1999 to collect, display and produce artists’ books - that curious, neglected and little understood sub-genre of visual culture. This lively, fascinating and well-conceived show celebrates the centre’s re-opening.

A nebulous concept, the artist’s book is often characterised by its relative brevity and its emphasis on the visual, as well as the textual. Artistry can take place in the book as object, or in its content – or both. Thus the genre is about as open-ended as it’s possible to be as not all of these objects take actual ‘book’ form. So here one can browse leaflets, postcards, boxes, folded paper, laminated cards and a variety of other forms, as well as what’s more commonly understood as books themselves.

The curators of CABIN: CODEX, while punning on the Centre’s acronym, also introduce the original idea of the codex as a bound collection of folios (leaves) or manuscripts. The etymology is from the Latin for a block of wood or tree trunk which in turn came to mean a block split into leaves or tablets. The book form as we know it has endured for at least two millennia – and continues to evolve, although here artists’ e-books have not yet made a showing.

The show aims to demonstrate the scope and scale of the CAB collection and has been split ingeniously into three conceptual and physical elements – the feral, the urban and the in-between. Each space is defined by its own mural backdrop in the form of wallpaper. The urban space consists of brick while the feral is defined by wood; in-between is, well, between the two: a neutral grey. Here one can sit on a concrete or wooden bench and browse the discrete, categorised sections (the in-between space, appropriately offers no such seating). The wallpaper’s bricks themselves present a kind of found poetry with the individual brickworks’ names still legible: Etna, Millstone, Shotts. Such is the reader’s involvement that quite quickly one forms the inescapable feeling that we are (as the curators have intended?) part of the overall plan of this gesamkunstwerk.

There are well know names here: Helen Douglas, David Faithfull, David Shrigley, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and Andy Goldsworthy to name a few, as well as a plethora of the less famous. The publications range from the downright cynical and disturbing (Bedbug’s mock children’s book ‘Having an Accident’) to the humorous (David Shrigley) to the minimal (David Faithfull’s ‘Bunker’). In all, it’s a cornucopia of ideas, visual and literary, that emphasises the genre as vital - bursting with fresh inspiration and strange moments.

The RSA 185th Annual Exhibition

2011-05-09T22:42:00.000-07:00

Royal Scottish Academy

Edinburgh

Until 8 June 2011

Last year the RSA broke with tradition by presenting the work of members alongside invited artists in a curated show. The longstanding open submission takes place later in the year. Last year’s curator, Ian McCulloch presented a variety of vivid, powerful expressionism, reflecting his own practice and approach. This year Victoria Crowe, adopts a similar approach by inviting artists and architects who echo her own aesthetic. So, generally – the work is measured, contemplative and less frenetic. This a welcome policy as it clearly allows for the airing of different voices and currents.

The show is subtitled Hidden Aspects of the Artist’s Work – Inspiration and Process so adjacent to work by Andrew Mackenzie, Stuart Duffin, Will Maclean, Iain Stewart, Anne Bevan, Bridget Steed and Philip Reeves, are a number ‘research cases’ containing sketchbooks, implements, tools, paint, photographs and a host of other items used by the artists as they edge their way towards a completed work.

Ken Currie came to prominence in the 1980s as one of a number of Glasgow-based artists working in a figurative tradition; his worked has developed and evolved over the intervening years until the point where his style is now unmistakable. Fascinated by the human face, in particular, Currie presents what at first appears to be an unrelentingly bleak vision of humanity. Bloodless, mean and strained these images seem to come from a netherworld of nightmare. Here, his enormous canvas ‘A Hunting Lodge’ conflates Victorian Scotland with Soviet Stalinism. Instead of inebriated, tweed-clad aristocrats and industrialists, various apparatchiks appear coldly sober, fatigued by their roles as interrogators and torturers – it’s easy to miss the tell-tale pliers protruding from the back pocket of one goon.

Elsewhere, returning to a more grounded solidity, Lorna McIntosh’s considerable body of work evokes 16th and 17th century emblem books. Mottos, epigrams and text from these eminently collectable publications supply the titles for McIntosh’s geologically-derived studies; thus the audience is left to ponder the nature of the relationship between the words of a title such as ‘Whose veil is removed I’ and the form of its subject matter: a study in deep umber reds, like blood-stained soil.

There’s a host of talent here and despite the enormous stylistic range this show feels unified, and thematically coherent. Linkages and connections are everywhere: from the tusk above the mantelpiece in Currie’s painting and Bridget Steed’s contemporary scrimshaw (decorated whale’s teeth), to the intense, small-scale focus on landscape adopted by McIntosh and Briony Anderson. Anderson concentrates on a philosophical approach to her subject interspersing a studio-made book of her works with texts. In the overall context one, in particular, seems apposite: “the invitation to look at a view is a suggestion to look at nothing – or more precisely to look at looking itself.”

The Phenomenon Known as Ricky

2011-05-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

Richard Demarco – Artwork

The current plethora of Richard Demarco-related events and exhibitions around Edinburgh signals a kind of homecoming for the wayward and lovable genius that is the phenomenon known as Ricky.

A recent double page spread in The Times (27.11.10) recorded Demarco’s receipt of top honours from both the Polish and German state for services rendered in the promotion and dissemination of art and ideas from these respective countries.

Demarco activities in eastern Europe from the late ‘sixties onwards signaled his own attempt to ‘demolish’ the Berlin wall twenty years before it happened. His orchestration of a meeting (which also included Sean Connery) between Joseph Beuys and Tadeusz Kantor at ‘The Poorhouse’ in Edinburgh in 1973 was as symbolic as it was actual. Two giants of the post-war European avant-garde were meeting in Edinburgh under the aegis of The Richard Demarco Gallery at a time when Scotland was mired in its inward-looking industrial decline and effete belle peinturism.

Edinburgh and Scotland weren’t ready for Beuys and Kantor but they came anyway. Without Demarco’s intervention and charisma they wouldn’t have.

These and some of the enormous totality of Demarco’s other achievements have been acknowledged by the revamped, reinvigorated RSA under the enlightened leadership of Bill Scott and Arthur Watson. Elsewhere, I wrote:

The stature of the artists in this show (10 Dialogues: Richard Demarco, Scotland and The European Avant Garde )– Alastair Maclennan, Ainslie Yule, David Mach, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Rory McEwen, Paul Neagu, Günther Uecker and Marina Abramovic, as well as Beuys and Kantor – illustrate the regard in which Demarco is held, as well as the internationally acknowledged stature of those with whom he has worked.

It’s tempting to regard 10 Dialogues as a coda to Demarco’s long, distinguished and, at times, precarious career but rather than rest on his laurels, in the offing, as ever, are a series of events and exhibitions including a show in Brussels and a presence at the Venice Biennale.

Those who were lucky enough to listen to Edi Stark’s recent all-too-short interview with Demarco on BBC Radio Scotland (broadcast on 11th December) may well have felt pathos (either sympathetic or empathetic) at the image of an eleven-year-old Italian boy being beaten to a pulp in the showers by four older youths in Portobello Baths. Italy had just declared its support for the Nazi regime, at a stroke turning all of those with Italian origins from citizens into enemy aliens. Incidents such as this coupled with Demarco’s Roman Catholicism forever confirmed his outsider status. As such he has always served on the side of the underdog, eschewing fame (he had the chance to bring Rothko, Rauschenberg and de Kooning to Scotland) and preferring to be a risk-taker in the name of truth. He has a genuine integrity in this regard which is greatly to be respected. His mission was therefore to release artists from the “biggest prison ever created by humanity” – the ‘eastern Europe’ which resulted in the carve-up at Yalta.

Throughout his life he has combined many roles: teacher, promoter, gallery-owner, writer, lecturer and indefatigable proselytizer for the necessary healing energy of art. All of these activities have been undertaken at great cost to his own artistic development. As a draughtsman he has an excellent eye, and his compositional sense – combined with swift, deft once-only mark-making – singles him out as a recorder or landscape and townscape of great skill. It is interesting to ponder Demarco’s potential achievements solely as a visual artist had his energy not been channeled into so many other time-consuming causes.

Anyone who doubts Demarco’s artistic talents can judge for themselves from two Edinburgh current shows – at the RSA and the Scottish Gallery.

John McCracken 1934-2011

2011-04-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

This review, which was published in The Times on 25 September, 2009 is reproduced here in tribute to John McCracken who died on 8 April, 2011. See Michael McNay's Obituary of John McCracken in The Guardian

John McCracken

Inverleith House

Edinburgh

Until Sunday, October 11, 2009

The American artist John McCracken first came to prominence in the early ‘sixties as his work progressed through various forms of abstraction until, later in that decade, it took the form largely in which it appears here. Experimenting first with ‘gestural’, ‘patchwork’ and geometric abstract painting, McCracken then moved on to relief sculpture and the monochromatic works with which he is identified now.

McCracken’s forms are bold, colourful, carefully crafted – and arresting. They take the form of large, vertically-oriented, highly polished fibreglass blocks which stand around eight feet high. They have a presence which is at once mystifying but deeply absorbing. They provoke questions and demand answers. To what do they relate? What are they about? What do they ‘mean’? McCracken has commented that colour itself is the ‘material’ with which he works and which holds his deepest interest. That colour is in itself an abstract entity only serves to heighten the intrigue.

Assessing and understanding McCracken’s approach necessitates placing him in the overall context of American abstraction and, in particular, the dynamic experimental milieu of the Los Angeles art world of the 1960s. McCracken’s contemporaries included figures such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Frank Stella – all of whom were highly innovative and often controversial exponents of various types of abstraction.

McCracken’s work here, most of which has been made in the current decade, has been given titles such as ‘Spaceway’, ‘Stardust’, ‘Lust’ and ‘Ray’. This nomenclature offers a partial but useful inroad to his thinking in that the sculpture relates in part to light. Light and colour are inextricably linked and his use of bright primary colours, as well and black – and white – allows the highly polished surfaces to act as efficient reflectors. The works appear to resonate with luminosity and ‘energy’.

McCracken has stated that his influences also include the shiny paint jobs on custom cars and even surfboards. Like any abstract artist his work needs an in-road but once this has been established, the terrain of his thought opens up rewardingly.

Jeff Koons / Rosemarie Trockel: Drawings, Collages and Book Drafts

2011-04-17T19:14:00.000-07:00

Jeff Koons
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
Edinburgh
Until July 3

Rosemarie Trockel
The Talbot Rice Gallery
Edinburgh
Until April 30

The language of consumerism, advertising and mass media pervades the work of US artist, Jeff Koons. A portfolio of four colour lithographs made between 1988 and 1989 – ‘Art Magazine Ads’ – depict the artist in a number carefully constructed compositions which were placed simultaneously as advertisements in four leading art magazines. The works thus fulfilled a dual role as artwork and publicity. While the artist apparently considers his work to be devoid of cynicism there is certainly, at its core, a media-savvy individual who is adept at generating self-publicity by knowingly courting controversy.

These four images are in themselves disconcerting - full of paradox and shifting meaning. One shows the artist carefully posed, coiffed and made-up sitting in front of a class of infants - chalk in hand. Behind him on the blackboard a series of words and phrases (“Exploit the Masses”; “Banality as Saviour”) jar with the otherwise innocent imagery.??

Although all of Koons' work is linked, it is also categorisable and made in distinct series. Koons was famously married to Italian porn-star Ilona Staller, aka “La Cicciolina” and here a number of other works dating from the same period as ‘Art Magazine Ads’ show Staller and Koons collaborating in a kind of publicly-staged synthetic eroticism. ‘Made in Heaven,’ a huge billboard-sized image shows the naked couple suggestively but awkwardly posed atop what looks like a giant piece of excrement.

Koons is an artist of ideas who conceives but often does not actually make work in the conventional sense. The fact that this rather large sample was part of the d’Offay collection says a lot about the cynical and sometimes uncomfortable relationship between wealth, status, collectability and hype.

It would be difficult to find an artist more directly opposed to Koons’ approach than Rosemarie Trockel. The work of this rather austere German, now in her late fifties, diverges radically from Koons’ superficiality and commercialism. One suspects, also, that her sexual politics would be sternly dispproving of Koons’ bland eroticism. Like a whole generation of post-war German artists, including Beuys, Richter, Uecker and Kippenberger it is clear that Trockel - sensitised and deeply intellectual – has had to find a way of dealing with her nation’s trauma. Her approach has been to challenge the patriarchy (as she sees it) of the art tradition and to establish new modes of thinking and seeing.

Thus her work, never easy on the eye or mind, remains resolutely discomfiting, awkward and challenging. Her series of Book Drafts, for example, suggest putative publications by means of covers which reveal complex and dark subject matter. One, possibly autobiographical, allusion is suggested by a hand-lettered title ‘She Became More and More a Painter de Dark Couleur’. Another, untitled, work depicts the lower-half of a woman dressed in a brightly coloured skirt while a butterfly rests on her shoe; a sweet, innocent representation but for the fact that the figure has only one leg. Here we might assume the image acts as a metaphor – perhaps for the crippled psyche of a nation or an individual.

Taken together, these shows present radically differing agendas demonstrating the range of approach and subject matter contemporary art can embrace.

RSA New Contemporaries 2011

2011-04-08T22:49:00.000-07:00

Royal Scottish Academy

Edinburgh

Until April 13

Since its inaugural show in 2009 the RSA New Contemporaries graduate exhibition has rapidly become one of the most eagerly anticipated events in the Scottish visual art calendar. New Contemporaries showcases the best talent in art and building design from the country’s art and architecture schools.

Its not an uncommon view that Scotland punches well above its weight in the quality of its visual arts and this show certainly lends credence to this opinion. There’s a wealth of promising talent here and it’s certain that a number of important careers will be launched, especially in painting and printmaking. Charlene Noble, from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee uses a technique called scanography – creating prints with a flatbed scanner. In the right hands the results are startlingly effective with Noble providing visual clues to her process by placing a vase of flowers next to her floral prints. It proves, if any such proof were needed, that artists are never slow off the mark in embracing new technologies in pursuit of their ends.

Stephen Thorpe from Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen is a painter of great promise and although his work here is ambitious in scale and scope, it suffers from lack of clarity by trying to achieve too much too soon so that the overall message – a kind of tableau in the manner of De Chirico full of trompes l’oeil and other tropes – gets submerged by the cleverness of the artist’s technique. Ruth A. Nicol from Edinburgh employs a simpler approach – a juxtaposition in two linked but separate works which show respectively an urban wasteland (Clydeside) and a rather more serene Highland landscape. Although the theme isn’t new the handling of paint and the keen compositional sense augur well for the artist’s future development.

Although its status as a university-level institution is relatively new, Moray School of Art’s two representatives - Colin Bury and Libby Amphlett - do well to hold their own amongst the sixty or so other graduates here. Bury’s installation of saplings (including oak) and scaffolding is part homage to Joseph Beuys whose work in raising environmental consciousness is well known.

From Glasgow there’s a clutch of notable work especially Paul McDonald’s photographic essay on the theme of prostheses and Andrew Nice’s photo-realist pencil portraits. Alex Thornton has produced a remarkably mature series of paintings indicating that the influence of the Abstract Expressionists of the 50s and 60s still, remarkably, lives on to this day. But here Thornton manages to walk the very thin line between derivation and influence, with work that clearly belongs only in the latter category.

With only a few days left to run this show is a must for those keen to keep abreast of recent developments.

Geoff Uglow: Letters from Barra

2011-03-29T03:18:00.000-07:00

The Scottish Gallery
Edinburgh
Until April 2

Since graduating more than ten years ago with first class honours from Glasgow School of Art, Geoff Uglow has exceeded initial expectations about his prodigious talent as a dedicated, serious and disciplined painter. The business of painting is a complex matter but somehow Uglow manages to make it look simple, clear and focussed – all hallmarks of a master in the making. He directs his gaze around him at land, sea or buildings and manages to combine vision with emotion, thought with feeling. In this case, he spent six weeks last winter working on Barra; the results are quite simply spectacular and a joy to behold.

Uglow’s vigorous working pace is indicated here by the paintings themselves; each is dated and, in some cases, major works are separated only by a day or two. Broadly these acrylics can be divided into two categories: smaller pieces where the paint is sometimes more thinly applied (in many cases in little more than a wash) and larger, more heavily worked studies. Both approaches are linked and each influences the other; combined they demonstrate great versatility and imagination. They are full of the light and the changing mood of sea and sky: behind them, providing precedent and context, is the great genius of Turner, Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning to name but a few. In the work dated and titled 16.11.10 almost all connections to landscape and externality are lost; what remains is mostly an inner landscape informed by external events. Here, great daubs of red and black merge into greys, delicate violets and whites. A smaller work, completed two weeks later, is divided in two along a vertical axis: below, off-white and above a sombre grey – sea or land meeting a darkening sky or a divided, ambiguous mood?

And yet, as if to bring his audience, and perhaps himself, back to earth there is a small study – almost Redpath-like in its charm – of a tiny cottage, one window illuminated against the falling night, huddled into the open landscape. It’s a universal image, one imagines, conjuring ideas of refuge and warmth against a hostile environment

This Cornishman has studied hard the language of his artistic forebears but somehow, remarkably at such a young age, he has managed to forge a style all of his own. Uglow’s work demonstrates, once again, the diversity and quality of art that this country inspires – proving that art both is a continuum and a community.

Our Houses - Their Stories

2011-03-16T04:37:00.001-07:00

Our Houses: Their Stories

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum Glasgow

Until 2 April 2011

Amid the visual melée of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery’s east court, sheltering in a small unsigned alcove, is a modest assortment of photographs, household objects, written records and other memorabilia. But linger awhile and the display begins slowly to unravel its meaning and purpose – it’s here under the auspices of the small-scale, community-based initiative Here We Are. Established in 1998 and based in the village of Cairndow on Loch Fyne – not fifty miles distant from Glasgow city centre – this development trust and social enterprise exists mainly to assist with the development and sustainability of the local community. In 2009 Here We Are received £49,000 of Heritage Lottery Funding for an unusual but important local history project – Our Houses: Their Stories. Propelled by the enthusiasm of prime movers Alice Beattie and her daughter, Dot Chalmers, Our Houses: Their Stories seeks to illustrate and document the links between the village’s houses and the people which inhabit them. “This is the biography of the houses of Cairndow as well as the story of those who lived – and live – in them and their livelihoods and their occupations. It is about the impact of where you live on your life: and on your way of life on your house,” explains Christina Noble, one of the project’s directors. “One of the first things we did at Here We Are was to photograph all Cairndow’s one hundred and seven houses. In our early days Alice Beattie meticulously recorded data about who lived in which house from the first 1841 Census. More recently, as we collected, scanned and catalogued our photo collection we began to amass a photo gallery of people who had lived, and live, in Cairndow. Out of this emerged the idea for Our Houses: Their Stories.” Cairndow, which lies in the Parish of Kilmorlich was fortunate in having records from a variety of sources, including the local estate (many of the houses were at one point ‘tied’) and the Census. But more contemporary technology has allowed the organisers to record extensive audio and video interviews with Cairndow’s inhabitants, many of whom talk passionately and informatively about the relationship with the houses they inhabit. Touch-screen technology allows links to be made with particular families and their place of residence; or to access the history of habitation relating to a particular dwelling.

Very few of the village’s dwelling houses are modern, meaning that time has allowed the accumulation of memory, experience emotion, and a sense of continuity – all of which have affected the human occupants. This is a phenomenon well understood by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his now famous text The Poetics of Space. At the same time the occupants have affected, sometimes profoundly and sometimes minimally, the buildings and their architectural integrity. The project therefore records a two-way process and illustrates the symbiotic relationship between buildings and people.

As well as all of this the venture has linked the local and the voluntary with the national and the professional, calling upon the expertise of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, the architects and archaeologists Simpson and Brown and the School of Scottish Studies Archives at The University of Edinburgh.

Although currently modest in scope, it’s easy to see how Our Houses: Their Stories could act as an inspiring model for community participation at a national level by fostering social cohesion and a sense of place.

* OUR HOUSES: THEIR STORIES can also be seen at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, from 13 March to 2 April 2011.

CORRECTION: Giles Sutherland’s review ‘Freedom at last for art made in Polish prison’ (23 February) referred to “Warsaw Press Centre” and “Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts”; this should have read Wroclaw Press Centre and Wroclaw Academy of Fine Arts

The Society of Scottish Artists 114th Annual Exhibition

2011-03-01T20:21:00.000-08:00

Royal Scottish Academy
Edinburgh
Until 3 March 2011

The Society of Scottish Artists operates what is, in effect, the essence of true democracy. As an exhibiting society, with a show-case annual open exhibition, the society invites contributions from professional and non-professional members alike. Office bearers and council are by no means guaranteed selection, while the work of students and recent graduates is placed alongside that of long-standing professional members - as well as invited international artists.

So its comes as no surprise this year to find the work of students in Scottish art schools - Libby Amphlet, Daniela Justiniano, Anna Geerdes, Pia Mannikkö, James Kail, Lyndsay Gauld and Paul MacDonald - alongside that of stalwarts Lys Hansen, David Faithfull, Reinhard Behrens, Philip Reeves, Miriam Vickers, Diana Zwibach and June Carey.

The work of invited Québécoise printmaker Marianne Chevalier is especially welcome. Chevalier’s bold and disconcerting silkscreen prints contain imagery that depicts a strange netherworld of zoomorphic forms garnered both from reality and the deeper recesses of the imagination.

Katy Thomson, from Edinburgh College of Art, has also created an elaborate internalised environment which assumes physical form in her installation, The Battle. Here toy soldiers go to war against a nightmarish assembly of plants and objets trouvés; it’s good to see that the spirit of Fluxus, Joseph Beuys and Arte Povera still permeates the teaching in the capital’s art school.

Not all works are impressive because of their large scale or complexity - as in Thomson’s case. There are smaller, quieter, more delicate pieces, easy to miss in the visually complex and demanding environment of a group show of this scale – for the SSA this year shares the RSA galleries with the The Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour (RSW) and Visual Arts Scotland (VAS).

Susie Wilson’s miniature book of prints, ‘Hidden Inside’ is full of fragile and subtle imaginings whereas Jennifer Bruce’s ‘Chennai’, in the same medium, presents the ‘diary’ of an imaginary ‘lapdancer’: “Tonight the club was packed…about midnight a group of seven guys…they were the usual lot….I knew what to expect…”. Bruce’s work is all the more effective because of the dissonance between the medium and its content.

Christopher Wood has acted as an effective and affable SSA President for the past year; his work as a visual artist here is also impressive as he combines materials such as plywood, canvas and paint in abstracted compositions which hint at narrative.

It would be possible to write in complementary and constructive terms about the vast majority of work in this show. If there’s any forum which can be said to represent the current state of the visual arts in Scotland, it is here; on this basis, our artists continue to flourish and our institutions of teaching remain world-class.

Maly Festival Makarewicza – Edicja Swiata (Small Festival of Makarewicz - World Edition)

2011-02-24T00:00:00.000-08:00

Wroclaw Press Centre
Wroclaw
Poland
Until 26 April 2011

Art has many histories; some flow like great rivers on the surface while others are small, underground currents occasionally surfacing as springs and wells. History is a construct – a series of putative connections usually almost subjectively devised and presented as a truth. Such is the case with the art of Poland which is found and documented in official galleries and publications. But here, the artist was often a subversive and all Poles are taught from childhood the story of 16th Kraków artist Wit Stwosz who was such a maverick that as punishment for his dissidence he had a nail driven through his cheeks by the city authorities.

Stwosz was a great craftsman who made the famous altar at the Church of St Mary. Wroclaw-based Zbigniew Makarewicz comes from a different tradition and a different history – one that can be traced back to Duchamps, the Dadaists, the avowedly Polish 'Sensibilists' - and the Absurdists, including Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, playwright, photographer, painter who famously committed suicide on 1 September 1939 as the Wehrmacht unleashed its Blitzkrieg on its proud, valiant and doomed neighbour.

Witkacy (as he is universally known) is cited by Makarewicz as a hero and artistic progenitor. Makarewicz’s stance is deeply rooted in the art of the 60’s and 70’s when ‘Happenings’ – a branch of performance art – were at their height. Nearly 40 years ago he participated in the Atelier 72 exhibition which saw 40 Polish artists taking over Richard Demarco’s Melville Crescent gallery.

As if to prove the point, Makarewicz, at the opening of his exhibition of work by friends and fellow artists persuaded his audience to participate in such an event. Doubtless feeling somewhat foolish everyone removed their left shoe, and placed their foot on a sheet of A4 paper while Makarewicz read from a Polish-Spanish dictionary entreating the audience to raise their fists in the air like superannuated Sandinistas while chanting “Viva Zapatero!” The joke derives from a Polish saying which roughly translated is “the shoemaker doesn’t have a shoe” meaning that one is so preoccupied with others’ needs that there is no time to attend to one’s own (‘zapatero’ is of course Spanish for ‘shoemaker’).

The whole performance felt hopelessly and ludicrously anachronistic; but such is Makarewicz’s galanterie (he still greets women by kissing their hands and snapping his heels together) that he pulled it off, everyone willingly signing their sweat-stained ‘artwork’ before passing it to Makarewicz’s long-suffering assistant.

The venue for this show is the Wroc?aw Press Centre – the mid nineteenth century headquarters of a vast Silesian mining conglomerate which comprised five storeys of ornate German industrial architecture. Above the entrance is the word SALVE above which are a coat of arms and the figures of two pick-wielding miners. Now an office block the building presents ample space for the display of artworks. It would be nice to say that Makarewicz has used this to full advantage; but he hasn’t. In the make-do, makeshift spirit of his heyday artworks are suspended from nails crudely driven into plaster-work and most of the works go unlabelled and undocumented. But that’s all part of the approach and ultimately the charm and meaning of this eccentric and idiosyncratic personal collection.

Makarewicz seems unfazed by the chaos, apparently enjoying the Dada-esque spirit of the whole undertaking. He’s in his element. He’s showing his collection, works by friends (some from Scotland including Iain Patterson, Richard Demarco and recently graduated Becky Campbell) to which he has a personal connection. So, instead of worrying about the apparent lack of pristine professionalism, you enter the spirit of Makarewicz’s mentality. And you find treasures like the work of Jacek Szewczyk, Rector of the Wroclaw Academy of Fine Art whose drawings are modern, Breughel-esque manifestation of chaos and disorder. Elsewhere there are the quiet, refined abstracted landscapes of Alfons Nawarecki and the wire sculptures of Miroslaw Struzik.

Most of this work will never reach the history books nor will it probably find its way into the Wroclaw’s planned museum of Contemporary Art. But somehow being in a museum would kill the spirit of such works; being here somehow they are more free to be themselves.

Andy Goldsworthy - Photographs

2011-02-09T07:00:00.000-08:00

Andy Goldsworthy
The Peter Potter Gallery
Haddington

Until 26 February 2011

Since coming to prominence as a sculptor of nature twenty years ago the work of Andy Goldsworthy has been characterized by two crucial elements: photography and ephemerality. Both are inextricably linked because many of Goldsworthy’s works – fashioned from materials such as ice, water, mud, leaves, twigs and snow – have an extremely short life-span, recalling the words of Burns

But pleasures are like poppies spread,

You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed;

Or like the snow falls in the river,

A moment white-then melts for ever;

So, in many instances, photography is the only way in which much of the sculptor’s work can be shared with an audience.

Goldsworthy’s link with Burns is more than superficial as both share a fascination with the poetry of nature and both draw inspiration from the same part of Scotland – Dumfries and Galloway. It’s here that the majority of photographs (of which this show entirely consists) were taken, many recording work Goldsworthy has made near his home in Penpont.

One early work consists of a series of carefully folded rhododendron leaves which, gradually decreasing in size, form of a spiral. The form recalls Matisse’s famous L'Escargot and it may also be Goldsworthy’s tribute to the pioneering work of the Victorian polymath D’Arcy Wentworth Thomson whose highly influential publication, On Growth and Form sought to explain and describe such natural phenomena in terms of geometry and mathematics. Goldsworthy’s work, or a least his photographic record of it, is distinctly celebratory, relying on the shockingly contrasting tones of the dull red soil and the slippery, shiny lime-green of the non-indigenous leaves.

Goldsworthy revels in such stark disparities, highlighting in his work not only the subtlety of colour in nature but its garish, joyful differences. Elsewhere, in two other delicate constructions, Goldsworthy has created two circles which derive from the amazing colour contrasts found in autumnal leaves – in this case fagus sylvatica, or beech.

Goldsworthy’s art is its often painstakingly constructed; certainly this is the case in the images of various winter ice sculptures made adjacent to a small burn. Goldsworthy must have spent many hours patiently holding the ice fragments together until the freezing process joined the jagged, random elements together to form arches and free-standing assemblages.

If there is a disappointment here it lies in the fact that no actual works are on display – for Goldsworthy uses many materials which do have substantial longevity, such as stone, wood and even blood. Even one such sculpture would have satisfied the need for a tactile, physical experience. However, it’s a major coup that this lively - but sadly underfunded - gallery has delivered the work of such a popular artist.

* This show is the first in a year long series of events at the Peter Potter Gallery which link art, archaeology and landscape.

John Makepeace: Enriching the Language of Furniture

2011-02-08T22:51:00.000-08:00

John Makepeace: Enriching the Language of Furniture

The Collins Gallery

Glasgow

Until 5 March 2011

For the past few decades furniture designer John Makepeace has been at the vanguard of that quiet revolution which has seen the re-emergence of quality British craftsmanship in wood. Inspired in part by the ideals of William Morris and John Ruskin but influenced by everything from ‘green’ architecture and structural engineering to anthropology and behavioural science, Makepeace is much more than your average designer-maker.

A true visionary and a founder member of the Crafts Council, Makepeace was one of the first British craftsmen to espouse entrepreneurialism as an necessary adjunct to making: without the creation and expansion of markets, he has consistently argued, there is little point in fashioning products which do not sell. His vision therefore is ‘holistic’, all encompassing . It might have been for Makepeace’s particular modus operandi that E.M. Forster coined that prophetic phrase ‘Only connect…Live in fragments no longer…’ which foresaw the necessity of de-compartmentalising mental attitudes and disciplines. So, in such ventures as the Parnham and Hooke Park Colleges, Makepeace as pedagogue insisted on cross- and multi-disciplinary approaches, stressing his students’ need to understand such apparently unconnected subjects as forestry, design, business studies and wood-working.

Here, Makepeace’s career – firstly as a designer-maker and, later, solely as designer – is given a place in the limelight. Unbelievably, this touring show is Makepeace’s first solo UK exhibition. In furniture design and making it’s relatively easy to sort out the dilettantes from the skilled and impassioned. It’s clear that these extraordinary, classic, contemporary pieces are the work of a true master who has learned his trade the old-fashioned way: painstakingly, working his way through an apprenticeship, never taking ‘no’ for an answer.

This blend of skill and ingenuity, creativity and craft are found time and time again in these immensely varied pieces. For Makepeace’s artistry is questing, energised; he is continually seeking out the new, pushing back the boundaries.

An early work, such as the ebony chair, Mitre – made for the Queen’s and The Duke of Edinburgh’s silver wedding anniversary – finds a later echo in Sylvan, made from English oak. Both pieces are suggestive of a tree’s growth – a notion enhanced by the appearance of being fashioned from single pieces of steam-bent timber. In fact, neither have used this technique and are instead made by inserting fillets into long linear cuts in the wood. In Sylvan, the supple, grainy oak twists as well as bends, acting as a metaphor for suppleness of its designer’s mind and his awareness of the totality of the term ‘function’ which embraces the psychological as well as the practical.

The Knot chair, made a few years later, takes some of these ideas in a different direction where back and seat slabs of bleached burr elm are joined by sinuous oak arms and legs.

As if to make the point that his work is never static, nor formulaic but, rather, a series of eclectic originals, Makepeace has included a pair of recent, ultra-modern, Zebra cabinets which make full use of the contrasting qualities of holly and black oak. Now in his early seventies (but looking ten years younger) Makepeace still seems ahead of the field. Catch him if you can.

Tour Venues

Somerset House, London 16 March - 15 April 2011

Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, Hampshire 26 April - 16 July 2011

Lotherton Hall, Aberford, Leeds, Yorkshire 23 Sept - 20 Nov 2011

Jonathan Horowitz Minimalist Works from the Holocaust Museum

2011-02-08T22:47:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Horowitz
Minimalist Works from the Holocaust Museum
Dundee Contemporary Arts
Dundee
Until 20 February 2011

The New York-based multi-media artist Jonathan Horowitz in his first major UK show does not shy away from tackling difficult, disturbing subject matter. His approach is, rather, confrontational, uncompromising and polemical. Many will find his championing of various ‘right-on’ causes including a selection of charities – in which giving is aestheticized by the artist –both nauseating and moralising.

Here, Horowitz’s views seem more like a reminder of British student politics in the 1980s and, as such, appear quaint, outmoded and hopelessly simplistic. Most of his artworks push their viewpoints with all the subtlety and finesse of an out-of-control juggernaut. With an apparent lack of irony one of Horowitz’s pieces includes a life-size photograph of a US Army tank (Pink Tank 2005/2010). This image (on which a pink ‘bumper sticker’ ribbon motif has been superimposed) confronts the viewer at the entrance to the show. This is in-your-face discourse and as such can be read as a useful metaphor for Horowitz’s approach.

Horowitz seems to have a particular dislike of the actor and director Mel Gibson, now notorious for his drunken racist and anti-Semitic rants. In his 20 minute Apocalytpo Now, (which recalls Gibson’s 2006 film, Apocalypto) Horowitz intercuts fragments of Hollywood disaster films, documentary footage of natural disasters and an interview with Mel Gibson. Somewhat bizarrely, the work is packaged and sold for its ‘carbon neutrality’ – and we are told that it is ‘powered by renewable energy’ while the booth in which the film is housed is made form ‘recycled’ materials. All of this lends nothing to the quality of the art and appears rather as another irritating gimmick.

Elsewhere, Horowitz (described in the publicity material as a ‘vegan’) does not entirely lack wit as his monument to the soya bean (staple of vegetarians) Tofu on Pedestal in Gallery, 2002 demonstrates. A cube of off-white tofu has been placed on top of a white pedestal inside the ‘white cube’ of the gallery space. Pillow Talk Bed from 2002 might be seen as the antithesis of and homage to the slightly earlier work My Bed, by Tracy Emin. Horowitz’s bed is, by contrast, clean and pristine with the ‘occupants’ indicated by the names of famous couples on the pillows.

The misleading and some may feel, disingenuous, title of the show derives from Horowitz’s desire to tackle what, we must presume, he sees as the bland neutrality of the art chosen for The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (designed by James Ingo Freed and opened in 1993). Gravity by Richard Serra, Memorial by Ellsworth Kelly, Consequence by Sol LeWitt and Loss and Regeneration by Joel Shapiro are all examples of minimalist abstraction and were chosen to complement Freed’s design. Discussing the relationship of the museum’s architecture to the Holocaust, Freed said, “There are no literal references to particular places or occurrences from the historic event. Instead, the architectural form is open-ended so the Museum becomes a resonator of memory.” In other words, Freed’s purpose was to allow visitors to bring their own imaginative experience to the buildings and its art. So, in his reimagining of the works of these artists, this is a purpose which Horowitz has clearly misinterpreted.

Horowitz clearly courts controversy in his replication of the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign which overhung the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. In 2009, the sign was stolen and recovered, cut into three pieces. It has now been replaced with a copy. The motivation for the theft remained a mystery but eventually was revealed as having been perpetrated by a neo-Nazi. But this symbol is so potent, so freighted with ideological, historical and political baggage that any artist toys with it at their peril…and there is real danger here that Horowitz’s act may cause real and lasting offence.

Claudia Wegner

2011-01-05T10:55:00.000-08:00

Claudia Wegner

I first came across Claudia Wegner’s art work several years ago when I visited her home and studio in rural Perthshire. Claudia’s partner, the wood sculptor Nigel Ross, in the course of making his large, outdoor sculptural works, had amassed a vast pile of discarded off-cuts. Claudia had begun to use these large and unwieldy chunks of oak and elm as the starting point for a new series of paintings. These she treated as randomly shaped ‘canvases’ onto which she directly painted her complex and often disturbing figurative and narrative works.

The idea of an artist achieving a paradoxical notion of ‘freedom through constraint’ is not new; Claudia, in the spirit of the true artist who is compelled to create irrespective of circumstance, used these ‘found’ shapes and forms to guide the course of her work. In one, entitled ‘’ a female form is defined by the chance edges of the timber. Her breasts - on which two poppy motifs have been transposed – bleed and this blood drops like a painful red milk into an upturned helmet. Like a woody palimpsest a repeated text –also painted in blood red – reads ‘Do not abuse the red poppy’. The words are a warning, perhaps, against drug abuse or the futility of war. It is a shocking and arresting image, uncomfortable and uncompromising. Such images find their roots deep in the northern European tradition of image making which stretches back to the work of Grünewald, Dürer and nearer our own time to the German Expressionists, some of whom, such as Eric Heckel, used wood as a medium (in the form of the wood-cut) as a means of expression. Claudia Wegner is steeped in this tradition and her art historical allusions are deliberate and profound. As an Austrian, who grew up in the southern province of Carinthia and was trained at the Berlin Kunstakademie her frame of reference is undisputable and genuine.

Parallel to her career as a professional fine artist Claudia has also pursued a parallel career in mycology and her membership of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Mykologie, Österreichische Mykologische Gesellschaft and Journées Européennes du Cortinaire attests to this passion and to the growing consensus – both in the UK and internationally – of her expertise. Claudia had always kept these two areas of her life separate until recently when she was struck by the idea of combining them. This idea has developed into an exhibition on the theme of Medical Mushrooms which was held at the The University of Dundee in 2009. Claudia has explained: “I have always kept these two parts of my life separate but I brought them together to create a series of large paintings around some of the most important medicinal fungi. The paintings should express my feelings for and show the complexity of the world of fungi. I hope to share my passion for these wonders of nature of which the beauty and benefits are often neglected.”

Claudia worked on a series of large paintings and ceramics which introduce her interest in such species as Trametes versicolor, Auricularia auricula-judae, Tremella mesenterica, Grifola frondosa and Pleurotus ostreatus. These species of fungi – all of which are visually intriguing and have immensely interesting formal properties – are also, additionally, important because of their medicinal properties. Much work on this subject has been done by Professor John Smith of The University of Strathclyde who, in collaboration with Neil Rowan and Richard Sullivan published, in 2002, Medicinal Mushrooms. This important, ground-breaking study aimed both at the specialist and the lay-person has acted as an invaluable source of information and inspiration in Claudia’s painting.

One of these works is a triptych depicting Trametes versicolor. In Medicinal Mushrooms Smith et. al. have explained that “…the multicoloured cap resembles a ‘turkey tail’ and occurs as overlapping clusters on dead logs in most parts of the world. This is not an edible fungus but hot water extracts have been used in traditional Chinese medicine from historical times for a wide range of ailments…Modern studies have produced two extremely important compounds, PSK or ‘Krestin’, a water-soluble protein-bound polysaccharide-peptide both derived from mycelial cultures of the fungus. PSK has been shown to act directly on tumour cells (cytostatic and cytotoxic) as well as indirectly in the host to boost cellular immunity…”

In her painting, Claudia attempts to show a number of aspects of the fungus. Importantly, however, her approach should not be confused with botanical illustration. While the later is just that, i.e. illustrative, Claudia’s method differs in that it is inherently interpretive. Claudia combines a number of elements in a composite work which shows differing aspects of the fungus simultaneously. Although Trametes versicolor is recognisable and botanically identifiable, she has also shown a number of different fruiting bodies, with the intention of depicting the variety of the fungus’ colour and form. The colours of trametes range from brown and black through to much more vivid blues, fringed with yellow.

Additionally the fungus is found in large multiple clusters as well as in smaller, isolated units. As a scientist, Claudia has examined the species at a microscopic level. When fungal spores germinate, they develop into microscopic, cylindrical, elongated structures with cross walls: the hyphae. In most cases the hyphae join up and form very fine filaments, the mycelium, a felt-like web of varying density. These numerous and diffuse mycelial threads are distributed within the substrate, i.e. soil or wood, from which they are able to extract nutrients and carbohydrates. Claudia’s painting shows both the mycelium and the fungus’ spore vessels, depicted as complex and intriguing structures which remain, by definition, hidden to the human eye.

In a British culture with an avowed ‘fungi-phobia’ there can seem little doubt that Claudia’s technically brilliant and artistically sensitive work will arouse interest in what to most people remains an obscure and vaguely threatening subject. By showing the beauty and the potential utility of these plants and their potentially benign import for humanity – and thus demonstrating the very real fusion of art and science – Claudia’s art work is deserving of a wider and appreciative audience.

All images courtesy of redegggallery.com

Uinneag Dhan Àird an Iar: Ath-lorg Ealain na Gàidhealtachd (Window to the West: The Rediscovery of Highland Art)

2011-01-01T16:35:00.000-08:00

Uinneag Dhan Àird an Iar: Ath-lorg Ealain na Gàidhealtachd
(Window to the West: The Rediscovery of Highland Art)
The City Art Centre
Edinburgh
Until 6 March 2011

Not long ago it was impossible to study for a degree in Scottish literature or art history in Scotland. These subjects have only received proper academic treatment in the last 40 years or so. As a corollary it's inevitable that the study of Highland art should now be the subject of serious scholarly analysis. This exhibition is the culmination of just such an exercise: a collaboration begun in 2005 between the University of Dundee and Sabhal Mòr Ostaig - the Gaelic-medium university college on Skye. The project takes its title from Sorley Maclean's poem 'Hallaig': "Tha bùird is tàirnean air an uinneig/trom faca mi an Àird an Iar" [The window is nailed and boarded/through which I saw the West].

Gàidhealtachd art -as it has been properly termed - is a problematic area. Any history suggests a continuity and a set of influences passed from one generation to another. But the history of art in the Gàidhealtachd appears far from continuous and the binding thread - if there is one at all - is not visual, but linguistic for there is an insistence here on the link between the Gaelic language and visual art.

But the problem of defining Gàidhealtachd art remains. Is this art made in the Highlands or by Gaelic-speaking practitioners; or art relating to its landscape or its culture? All of these definitions must apply as all are represented. The show includes Jon Schueler's Summer Day, Sleat and documentation of Joseph Beuys' Celtic (Kinloch Rannoch) Scottish Symphony created in Scotland in 1970 under the auspices of Richard Demarco's Strategy: Get Arts exhibition. Schueler was an American living in Mallaig and Beuys a German who made work in Scotland over a series of eight brief sojourns.

Visual art in the Gàidhealtachd might rightly be said to begin with the writing of The Book of Kells, created in Iona around 800 AD by followers of St. Columba. Remarkable carved stones and crosses were made all over Scotland around this time and in the centuries immediately after this. In the Middle Ages a school of sculpture flourished predominantly in Argyll producing many remarkable carved stone slabs.

In the mid-Victorian period Thomas Faed began to treat Gàidhealtachd subject matter seriously in works such as The Last of the Clan. It was only with William McTaggart who, thirty years after Faed's painting, treated the aftermath of Highland Clearances with serious attention in an idiom which today we regard as 'modern'. McTaggart's The Sailing of the Emigrant Ship (curiously not shown here) with its clear anti-emigration stance is as hard-hitting a piece of social commentary as found anywhere.

There are inevitably huge lacunae here so the idea of an art historical tradition remains contentious. Inevitably then the bulk of this show consists of contemporary and 20th century art - and it is from these periods that some of the richest, most complex and engaging work is to be found. Among these are Crossing to Finlaggan by Frances Walker and Norman's Shaw's drawings derived from aural interpretations of landscape. Near the entrance one is greeted by Arthur Watson's and Will Maclean's Crannghal - a full-size maquette for a bronze casting of the same name sited at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig. The work relates to a curach - a boat made from hide and wood, popular from the time of Columba. The arresting skeletal form acts as a vivid symbol for the spread of knowledge.

However, the show poses as many questions as it answers not least of which is the exclusion of a host of other contemporary artists. This is a ground-breaking show which lays some of the groundwork for a more probing and representative future Gàidhealtachd art history.

Joan Backes – How the Artist Looks at Trees

2010-12-22T15:51:00.000-08:00

It is a truism yet, one hopes, not a facile observation, that the link between art and nature is strong and enduring. Since humanity was first motivated by a mimetic impulse — borne out of wonderment and fascination — the urge to record nature, to comment upon it and in some way to participate in it has been unstoppable.

The history of the tree – as metaphor, symbol, subject and object – has been a long one in art-historical terms. Joan Backes, who has worked closely with natural subject matter for many years has concentrated on the tree, in particular, for the last decade. For Backes, the tree is both metaphor and actuality, symbol and object. The tree – a source of so much of the physical fabric of our built environment – is also a vast repository of human association where myth, metaphor, art and symbol collide and intertwine.

It would be a skewed reading of Backes work to see it as solely or primarily 'eco' or 'environmental' art, caught up with the pressing concerns of deforestation and global environmental Armageddon which, we are continually told, seems to be nigh. Many will interpret Backes work as such but this is – and always will be – a facile but perhaps inevitable reading, given the times we live in.These are issues which Backes understands well as her participation in the 2008 exhibition 'Nature Interrupted,' curated by Elga Wimmer at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York, so amply demonstrated. Here, Backes exhibited one of her increasingly well-known leaf 'carpets' (measuring 14' x 6' ) consisting of over one thousand leaves where each has been individually placed as part of an intricate pattern. The leaves were laminated in an acrylic seal and placed on the gallery floor.

Backes' art is essentially affirming and celebratory not sorrowful or despairing. Thus, it is set apart from so much earnest but rather single minded ‘issue’ art which has become all too common in recent years. Not long ago, Backes exhibited a related work Carpet of Leaves 2010 at the tiny Sleeper gallery in Edinburgh. Discussing these 'carpet' works Backes has commented that

...when I began making them I wanted to bring the “outside in” to the Gallery. I thought about how we have made indoor carpets with motifs from leaves to decorate their surfaces. I wondered how it would work to bring the leaves directly into the gallery and to make an arranged carpet - as we humans try to order gardens and nature outdoors. But in this case I would use the real leaves from nature.

Each rug is different. I spend a lot of time planning the best arrangement and dimensions specifically for each site. Some have been oval, some round, others rectangular and some very long rectangles. For each ‘carpet’ I add leaves from the place where it is exhibited. So every ‘carpet’ holds leaves from every past site as well as ones from its current site. For the Sleeper ‘carpet’ I actually featured leaves from Scotland in the center. The Scotland leaves have a distinct ring around them of dark oval leaves from Massachusetts where I currently live. So the ‘carpets’ have stories like that if people wish to learn about them.

These ‘carpets’ are, therefore, possessed of both a specificity and a universality – they celebrate the local while affirming the universal. They are also a way of arresting time — of preserving the leaves in a perpetual Autumnal state, and as Backes says, ‘bringing the outside in’...

Backes' works are sometimes simultaneously symbolic and non-symbolic; often, they can be read in multiple ways. Another work which Backes showed at Sleeper, Tree, Edinburgh, 2010 is a detailed study, in acrylic, of the bark of a tree. Like Carpet of Leaves 2010 this painting captures a certain genus loci while extending outwards in relevance and meaning. The image, is both objective and subjective in that it records impassively – like a taxonomic process – while also being suggestive in the way that, say, a botanical illustration could never be.

Where should we place Backes work here – her unadorned ‘objective’ painting of bark and her infinitely more decorative and colourful leaf ‘carpet’ (although a better term might be ‘leaf floor tapestry’) ? It’s neither fanciful nor unreasonable to suggest that Tree, Edinburgh, 2010 is part of an interlocking tradition in western art which can be traced at least as far back as Dürer’s Das grosse Rasenstück (1503). The selectivity and focus which Backes applies to her bark study is no less intense than Dürer’s choice of an apparently ‘mundane’ subject which, as we now appreciate, contains infinite wonders.

As anyone with more than a passing interest in trees will be aware Backes has actually painted the bark of a Scots Pine (pinus sylvestris). That identification is so readily made is a testament to Backes’ skill and dedication —but why not name the work ‘Scots Pine, Edinburgh, 2010’ or even ‘Pinus sylvestris Edinburgensis MMX’ ? Instead, Backes has chosen an apparently 'neutral' nomenclature which also simultaneously rejects an accepted scientific methodology. Backes herself points to this ambiguity when she explains “I wanted to explore the possibilities of making a painting to read abstractly when viewed close-up while the painting would also represent something when viewed from a distance.” Could the viewing process — the way in which we look at such a work — itself be seen as a metaphor? The common catchphrase ‘He couldn’t see the wood for the trees’ suggests itself in such context. In other words, too much intense focus on the detail of things prevents us seeing the larger picture. Backes, she seems to be saying, offers both possibilities to the exclusion of neither.

The carpet, it goes without saying, has a long history. Traditionally made from wool or other natural materials these objects, both functional and decorative, from Turkey to Romania and from Afghanistan to India are traditionally made by women and children with motifs and decorative elements which reflect cultural specificity. Has Backes has built on this ‘female’ and ‘domestic’ tradition by deliberately appropriating some of these associations?

Like Backes’ tree paintings these ‘carpets’ use and celebrate local material and mix it with material from further afield. The patterning inherent within the carpet can be read as a kind of narrative – not necessarily a logical or sequential one. The narrative leads the eye which seeks and requires sense, order and patterning. We are lead down an avenue of similarly coloured leaves, or a cluster of species, or a linked assortment of shapes….Each indivual will formulate a unique reading. My own reaction was one of surprise and delight for this was the first time I had encountered Backes’ work. I set about trying to decode the work at my feet. What were the secies of trees from which the tress came? How had the artist ordered them? By colour? By shape? By species? By size?

Does the meaning of this work — and other similar pieces by Backes — extend beyond the surface appearance? Should the ‘carpet’ be seen as a metaphor for something else? Or should it be celebrated and enjoyed for what it is - a collection of ordered shapes and patterning; a joyful celebration of nature? Perhaps we should incline towards the latter view, remembering the words of Gertrude Stein who, in another context, famously said: “A rose is a rose is a rose.” A metaphorical reading, although not impossible, is not necessary. It is certain that in making these works Backes brought to bear her own personal associations of making. But these are by association personal and unknown; it is the viewer’s experience which is important in this respect.

Discussing ways of reading Backes’ work, Jonathan Goodman (critic, Art in America) has observed:

While the paintings make no overtly political claims…Backes has found a way of painting non-objectively, as well as referencing the actuality of nature, her double set of meanings do not suggest a dichotomy so much as a union in which one way of seeing is equivalent to, and perhaps identical with, the other…Backes’ strengths as a painter are wonderfully exacting in her renditions of trees; her examples do not appropriate but rather incorporate a visual complexity operative in several fields of the imagination at once. We may well read her interpretations as evidence of the worthwhile desire to identify and preserve, as well as seduce, the eye.

Explicitly, through her work, Backes not only celebrates nature and shares with us her joy and appreciation of it she also implicitly resurrects the notion of the decorative and the idea of beauty. In this she shares an outlook with many artists of stature and takes her place in a long and distinguished tradition – one which, as already noted begins with Dürer but nearer our own time can be found in the work of Van Gogh and Matisse. These artists celebrated the vivid colour of nature, often focusing on trees, leaves and flowers. One may also point to other American artists, contemporary and near-contemporary, such as Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell who also have done with paint what Backes does with raw material – that is, to celebrate the colourful vivacious energy of nature.

Richard Demarco at 80

2010-12-19T17:49:00.000-08:00

Richard Demarco at 80

Richard Demarco

Venetian Church Under Scaffolding

monotype with watercolour & pencil

W:25.5cm H:25.5cm

The current plethora of Richard Demarco-related events and exhibitions around Edinburgh signals a kind of homecoming for the wayward and lovable genius that is the phenomenon known as Ricky.

A recent double page spread in The Times (27.11.10) recorded Demarco’s receipt of top honours from both the Polish and German state for services rendered in the promotion and dissemination of art and ideas from these respective countries.

Demarco activities in eastern Europe from the late ‘sixties onwards signaled his own attempt to ‘demolish’ the Berlin wall twenty years before it happened. His orchestration of a meeting (which also included Sean Connery) between Joseph Beuys and Tadeusz Kantor at ‘The Poorhouse’ in Edinburgh in 1973 was as symbolic as it was actual. Two giants of the post-war European avant-garde were meeting in Edinburgh under the aegis of The Richard Demarco Gallery at a time when Scotland was mired in its inward-looking industrial decline and effete belle peinturism.

Edinburgh and Scotland weren’t ready for Beuys and Kantor but they came anyway. Without Demarco’s intervention and charisma they wouldn’t have.

These and some of the enormous totality of Demarco’s other achievements have been acknowledged by the revamped, reinvigorated RSA under the enlightened leadership of Bill Scott and Arthur Watson. Elsewhere, I wrote:

One of the exhibits here is a short film, dating from around 1970, of a group discussion. The group, which includes the art critic Cordelia Oliver, the Scottish artist Fred Stiven and, pivotally positioned, Richard Demarco discuss the work of the Romanian sculptor Paul Neagu – who is also present. The excerpt is remarkable in a number of ways not least because all, with the exception of Demarco, are no longer alive; but more than this it illustrates what Demarco was (and still is) all about: dialogue, conversation and what he refers to as the “meeting of friends” as the true catalyst for art and ideas. It’s a precious moment among thousands of precious moments captured by the cameras of Demarco and others such as George Oliver and Rory McEwen.

The stature of the artists in this show (10 Dialogues: Richard Demarco, Scotland and The European Avant Garde ) – Alastair Maclennan, Ainslie Yule, David Mach, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Rory McEwen, Paul Neagu, Günther Uecker and Marina Abramovic, as well as Beuys and Kantor – illustrates the regard in which Demarco is held, as well as the internationally acknowledged stature of those with whom he has worked.

It’s tempting to regard 10 Dialogues as a coda to Demarco’s long, distinguished and, at times, precarious career but rather than rest on his laurels, in the offing, as ever, are a series of events and exhibitions including a show in Brussels and a presence at the Venice Biennale.

Those who were lucky enough to listen to Edi Stark’s recent all-too-short interview with Demarco on BBC Radio Scotland (broadcast 11.12.10) may well have felt pathos (either sympathetic or empathetic) at the image of an eleven-year-old Italian boy being beaten to a pulp in the showers by four older youths in Portobello Baths. Italy had just declared its support for the Nazi regime, at a stroke turning all of those with Italian origins from citizens into enemy aliens. Incidents such as this coupled with Demarco’s Roman Catholicism forever confirmed his outsider status. As such he has always served on the side of the underdog, eschewing fame (he had the chance to bring Rothko, Rauschenberg and de Kooning to Scotland) and preferring to be a risk-taker in the name of truth. He has a genuine integrity in this regard which is greatly to be respected. His mission was therefore to release artists from the “biggest prison ever created by humanity” – the ‘eastern Europe’ which resulted in the carve-up at Yalta.

Throughout his life he has combined many roles: teacher, promoter, gallery-owner, writer, lecturer and indefatigable proselytizer for the necessary healing energy of art. All of these activities have been undertaken at great cost to his own artistic development. As a draughtsman he has an excellent eye, and his compositional sense – combined with swift, deft once-only mark-making – singles him out as a recorder or landscape and townscape of great skill. It is interesting to ponder Demarco’s potential achievements solely as a visual artist had his energy not been channeled into so many other time-consuming causes.

Anyone who doubts Demarco’s artistic talents can judge for themselves from two Edinburgh current shows – at the RSA and the Scottish Gallery.

10 Dialogues: Richard Demarco, Scotland and The European Avant Garde.
RICHARD DEMARCO AT 80: A LIFE IN PICTURES (RSA Library)
RICHARD DEMARCO HRSA
RSA
Print works
(Friends Room)

(All at The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh Until 9 January 2011)

Also:

Richard Demarco
The Scottish Gallery
Edinburgh
Scotland and Italy in Watercolour
Until 24 December

Michael Lloyd - Twelve Vessels

2010-11-29T03:18:00.000-08:00

Michael Lloyd — Twelve Vessels

Innovative Craft

Dovecot Studios

10 Infirmary Street

Edinburgh EH1 1LT

Until 11 December 2010

The term ‘vessel’ is loaded with meaning and association but at its core is the notion of a receptacle for conveyance or deposition. Doubtless, however, the term’s etymological freight was uppermost in the mind of silversmith Michael Lloyd when he conceived this wonderfully elegant and simple project by inviting eleven sets of friends each to commission a vessel based on one month of the year which held significance for them.

For Lloyd’s Twelve Vessels of Life, Love and Death — to give the undertaking its full title — is about the celebration of the fundamentals of human existence. Explaining his approach, Lloyd writes that the “…collection embraces my love of the natural world and our place, as part of nature, amongst it…” Twelve Vessels, he continues is “…a recognition not only of the beauty of nature but of the profound events that mark our lives as we progress from cradle to grave — of birth, of love, of survival, of loss and death.

It’s plain from examining, admiring and even coveting these objects (all of which, on a practical level, could be used for drinking) that Lloyd’s impassioned love of nature is complemented by his skill as a crafter and worker of metal. His chasing, planishing, polishing, raising, sinking and repoussé — along with the engraving of George Lukes and the gilding of Stephen Wood — celebrate nature as well as underlining the sanctity and delicacy of life. For, with the exception of one (September’s, commissioned by John and Jenny Makepeace) all bear motifs derived from plants and trees.

August’s goblet was commissioned by Michael Lambert who comments: “A shared wonder of nature first drew me to Michael’s work and his delicate observation of flora made him the obvious choice from whom to commission a special piece of silverware to celebrate the August birthday of my son. Decoration of this vessel with the subtle chasing of rosa rugosa is particularly apt given the profusion of wild roses that bejewel the hedgerows around our family home in Northumberland….”

A number of these vessels bear inscriptions. Alexander and Lucinda Scott, for whom Lloyd made March’s vessel, chose a verse from The Song of Solomon which provides the inscription around the base of the goblet: “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.” The floral motif is the guelder rose, bursting with buds, evocative of fecundity and sensuality.

Chris Philipson’s late wife Patricia is commemorated in July’s vessel, a small eight-sided cup, which bears the stylised motif of the wild poppy. October’s vessel (similar in form and size to July’s) was made for Amanda Game in memory of her late husband, Andrew Raven. Here, Lloyd uses an expertly drawn hawthorn motif as an elegiac device celebrating Raven’s love of wild land and his belief in the importance of humanity’s stewardship of our common home.

This show, beautifully lit and carefully presented, is a joy; moving and uplifting by turns it celebrates the sacred communion between life and death, and humanity and natural world.

Crafts Magazine - review of Michael Lloyd 12 Vessels by Giles Sutherland

10 Dialogues: Richard Demarco, Scotland and The European Avant Garde

2010-11-27T15:15:00.000-08:00

10 Dialogues: Richard Demarco, Scotland and The European Avant Garde
The Royal Scottish Academy,
Edinburgh
Until 9 January 2011

Magdalena Abakanowicz
The Court of King Arthur

One of the exhibits here is a short film, dating from around 1970, of a group discussion. The group, which includes the art critic Cordelia Oliver, the Scottish artist Fred Stiven and, pivotally positioned, Richard Demarco discuss the work of the Romanian sculptor Paul Neagu – who is also present. The excerpt is remarkable in a number of ways not least because all, with the exception of Demarco, are no longer alive; but more than this it illustrates what Demarco was (and still is) all about: dialogue, conversation and what he refers to as the “meeting of friends” as the true catalyst for art and ideas. It’s a precious moment among thousands of precious moments captured by the cameras of Demarco and others such as George Oliver and Rory McEwen.

Demarco has touched the lives of innumerable artists but the curators have wisely chosen a small number to represent the spirit of Demarco’s achievement. 10 Dialogues, while clearly a tribute to Demarco (now in his eightieth year) and a celebration of his work as collaborator, facilitator and friend, is much more than this. It’s a visual-historical document and a forward-looking show of fresh ideas, demonstrating both Demarco’s intellectual vivacity and the new, innovative spirit of the RSA.

While it contains important documentation and work by the giants of twentieth century art — Tadeusz Kantor and Joseph Beuys — it also has new work by Alastair Maclennan, Ainslie Yule, David Mach and Magdalena Abakanowicz. All of these — as well as Rory McEwen, Paul Neagu, Günther Uecker and Marina Abramovic — have worked with Demarco in the past. Many met each other only because of Demarco, either on board the Marques, the sailing ship which he chartered for his famous Edinburgh arts expeditions or through some theatrical or visual arts event.

Abakanowicz’s specially commissioned monumental sculpture series ‘The Court of King Arthur’ is a vastly different affair to the type of work the Polish artist was making when she was first encountered by Demarco in the late Sixties. Back then, she came to prominence for her tortured, disconcerting anthropomorphic ‘Abakans’ ; these metal figures, like giant chess pieces, are less shocking perhaps, but equally present. By contrast, Mach’s work although clever and amusing often seems to lack serious intent and here he is the joker in the pack.

It’s hard to escape the raw power and violence of Uecker’s ‘paintings’ — full of sharp pointed objects and smashed fragments of rock and wood. Uecker was one of a generation of artists who came after Beuys, carried by the older artist’s confident assertion that it was possible to successfully confront his country’s recent past through art. Beuys’ famous ‘blackboard’ from his Three Pots for the Poorhouse ‘action’ — along with editioned prints and a sled from his 1970 work The Pack — represent what Demarco considers his most important ‘collaboration’.

Tadeusz Kantor (a Polish Jew and therefore a victim of Germany’s brutality) met Beuys through Demarco’s offices in Edinburgh in 1973. Kantor’s production of his last work, from 1988, I Shall Never Return can only be represented here by a series of props and films; nevertheless it’s possible to gain a sense of the visceral, haunting, orchestrated danse macabre of the live stage.

Combined, these images (there are hundreds here and hundreds of thousands in the Demarco Digital Archive housed at the University of Dundee) and art objects tell a remarkable story of how one man — a human dynamo, a visionary, erratic, unpredictable, impossible, lovable genius — brought the spirit of the post-war European avant-garde to Scotland.

Joseph Beuys
Blackboards and drawings of pots from
Three Pots for the Poorhouse aktion

Oscar Marzaroli: Photography 1959-1968

2010-11-20T15:23:00.000-08:00

Oscar Marzaroli: Photography 1959-1968

Bourne Fine Art

Edinburgh

(Until 27 November)

What is photography’s primary purpose? In the popular imagination, at least, it is most often associated with memory — and by extension, with recording. Despite photography’s other uses, it is these qualities which are to be found most often in the work of the Italo-Scottish photographer, Oscar Marzaroli, who died in 1988 at the age of fifty-five. Like the great nineteenth century photographer of Paris, Eugène Atget and Scot, Thomas Annan before him, Marzaroli was a photographer of the city — for it in was in his native Glasgow that he found the textures, contrast, light and compositional opportunities which most keenly fired his imagination.

Whereas Annan had been commissioned by the City Improvement Trust to record Glasgow’s vanishing closes and wynds during a period of sustained urban redevelopment in the 1860s, Marzaroli’s ‘project’ was largely self- initiated and self-financed. Aware that the developments of the ‘sixties were to have a long term impact on the city-scape and its people, Marzaroli set about recording the changes he saw all around him.

Marzaroli’s tone in this body of work is affectionate, celebratory and participative. Looking at these images, with their astonishing sense of composition and atmosphere, one is aware of the emotional closeness between subject and photographer. In one of Marzaroli’s most reproduced works, Castlemilk Lads, from 1963, a group of four pre-adolescent boys peer inquisitively into the camera’s lens, against a backdrop of urban demolition and renewal. But it’s also possible to suppose that the photographer is one of their number or, at the very least, is known to the tough, street-wise kids who constitute this paradoxically tender group ‘portrait’.

The idea of portraiture — in the broadest sense of that term — is at the core of Marzaroli’s work. Blessed with a sensitive compositional eye, partially honed from an education at Glasgow School of Art and stints as a photo-journalist in Stockholm and London, Marzaroli had the uncanny ability to frame his shots of people, in particular, with apparent ease and minimal intrusiveness. Time and again Marzaroli succeeded in achieving emotional and physical closeness to his subjects without interfering with their sense of composure and individuality. In the 1963 image Carnival, Glasgow Green, a youth gazes lovingly at a manikin-topped gaming machine while betraying no sense of the photographer’s presence. In the more robustly humorous Hingin out the Windae, Gorbals, from 1964 — which depicts a corpulent, head-scarved tenement dweller surveying the street below — Marzaroli conveys warmth and humour without condescension.

While ‘genre’ painting refers specifically to studies of people there is no equivalent terminology when applied to photography. If there were, then Marzaroli would be one of the twentieth century’s genre photographer’s of note. Two works from 1962 show the same group of boys— both are titled Football, Forth and Clyde Canal, near Pinkston. In the first, the boys are seen from a distance; one ‘heads’ the ball while the boy to the left is poised to strike it with his foot. The small group is framed by an apparently defunct signal on one side and an empty, open building on the other. In the second the same group are seen much closer up so it’s possible to make out the details of their clothing and the concentration on the boy’s faces. Again the urban landscape finds a reiteration in the boys’ physicality and gestures, for in the background a massive cooling tower echoes one of the boys’ wide-legged stance. The boys are so caught up in their game that nothing else around them seems to matter, least of all the presence of an apparently unremarked photographer.

Such tender elegies form part of Marzaroli’s invaluable legacy: a long and lingering visual love poem to the people and places of a long-vanished Glasgow.

Jo Roberts - Field Studies

2010-11-13T17:35:00.000-08:00

Jo Roberts

Field Studies

Timespan

Helmsdale

Until 21 December

THE term ‘field studies’ conjures up the idea of scientific investigation and observation — perhaps some aspect of natural history, geology or geography. Moreover, field is, in itself, a wonderfully multi-layered word which combines the idea of a specific — and usually academic — discipline with agricultural or even geomorphological terminology.

‘Field Studies’, therefore, has been deliberately chosen by the Warwickshire-based artist Jo Roberts for its multiple associations and connotations. Roberts recently completed a residency in Timespan on the east coast of Sutherland, an area renowned for its geological interest. Part of Timespan’s enlightened approach (as a community museum) emphasises the importance of geology in understanding many other aspects of the locale. It’s what the philosopher and writer Kenneth White describes as ‘geopoetic’ in that the underlying geological structure and substance inform all other aspects of life.

Roberts has used geology as a metaphor for describing and understanding her art and how it might be approached. This fact becomes readily apparent in the various drawings, displays, artefacts and writings which comprise this challenging and exciting project. Indeed, Roberts’ multidisciplinarity combines community involvement, social history, geography, writing, cartography and ‘emotional charting’ — and has led her to resurrect a piece of obsolete terminology to describe her approach. Thus she describes herself as a commentariographer which she defines as ‘someone who writes, mediates, ponders, portrays or records. One who comments on current events and produces an expository treatise. ‘ Although eye-catching it’s not a particularly usual piece of terminology and more accurate may be Joseph Beuys’ term ‘social sculptor’. Beuys believed that art could play an extended role in peoples’ lives and that a definition of the artist should not be confined to conventional notions of depiction, mimesis, representation and aesthetic construction. Roberts’ approach is now no longer unique or even unusual in that many ‘artists’ have expanded their role and practice to cover areas once considered irrelevant to the making of art.

A display of geological texts and maps emphasises Roberts’ own connection and fascination with the discipline and a series of sparse pencil line drawings engages the various visual metaphors in which Roberts delights. One shows what appears to be a depiction of rock strata but instead of various items of geological terminology one finds descriptions of Roberts’ various means of artistic practice: painting, performance art, multi-media, text-based, textile, film and video, conceptual, sculpture…..

Elsewhere, Roberts uses a similar approach to describe and document her residency programme which she plots in a time-line against a geological cross-section of Sutherland. A hand-drawn map of the county of Sutherland documents Roberts’ travels and adventures rather like the maps of early explorers to whom cartography was that curious mixture of the scientific and the artistic. Although Roberts has not quite written ‘here be dragons’ there is a sense of an adventurous and playful spirit at work with spirited annotations such as “Skerray – the bestest little PO and shop in the world. PS I fear that it has stolen a piece of my heart”; “Made pilgrimage to Inchnadamph Hotel where geologists Peach and Horne stayed --- he’s the one who’s responsible for all of this”.

However, the centrepiece of this exhibition is undoubtedly the collection of boxes (each made by an individual contributor) invited by Roberts to fill their allocated box with anything of their choosing. Around 100 individuals from the communities of Skerray, Kinbrace, Kinlochbervie and Helmsdale have taken part and the results are as diverse as they are surprising. Like tantalising but unexpected presents the boxes invite opening and discovery. While some are factual and prosaic others are cryptic, poetic and contemplative. While some are ‘off-the-cuff ‘and rapidly executed others are painstakingly-crafted and detailed. And although many of the makers’ names are known a substantial number prefer to retain some kind of anonymity.

One participant asks : “why do I feel so compelled to garden when I live in such a beautiful landscape?” Attempting to answer his or her own question, they respond: “Is it the challenge? The desire to tame the wilderness? A primitive instinct to mark one’s territory? To enclose a safe place? Although such questions are largely rhetorical the artist gives an answer in the form of an extended panorama in pencil of a fecund and beautiful garden in the midst of the denuded Highland landscape. Here, the artist seems to suggest, are not one but two human constructs.

Given the fact that those invited to fill these boxes were given carte blanche by Roberts, it is surprising how many of the artists (if that is indeed the most accurate term for describing this kind of temporary involvement with visual art) have chosen subjects close to home, either in the immediate community, locale or their own domestic setting. Meg Telfer from Skerray for example has chosen to focus on the fragility of this small community, centring her work on the term decimate. In recent years a much higher than average death rate has occurred in this small township. Telfer’s text and imagery refers to Lachesis, in Greek mythology the second of the three Fates whose Roman equivalent was Decima, from where the term decimate (meaning removal of a tenth) derives. In the Roman army decimation was a disciplinary procedure where, following serious misdemeanours, every tenth legionary was compelled to take their own life or to be killed.

Another anonymous Skerray resident offers and intimate and touching self-portrait of her own life – we must assume that the artist is a woman, given the box’s contents: foetal scans, felted woollen tapestry, musical scores for the pipes (The Brown Haired Maiden) – as well as images of Lamigo Bay.

Part of Roberts success therefore must centre on her ability to encourage those who have deemed themselves ‘uncreative’ or ‘not artists’ to create work with depth, meaning and integrity.

One of Beuys’ great, but often misunderstood, catch-phrases was ‘Everyone an Artist’ – by which he meant that creativity exists in all of us. It is the finding and nurturing of this quality which is so difficult and so easily destroyed. Fortunately, through Roberts’ intervention, we are lucky enough to witness the inner creative lives of many people which would normally go unremarked or — far worse —undiscovered.

Gray Stuff: Designs for Books and Posters, 1952 – 2010 & Alasdair Gray: Portraits

2010-11-10T11:23:00.000-08:00

The Talbot Rice Gallery Gray Stuff
The Round Room
The Talbot Rice Gallery
Mural by Alasdair Gray

Gray Stuff: Designs for Books and Posters, 1952 – 2010

The Talbot Rice Gallery

Edinburgh

(Until 11 December)

Alasdair Gray: Portraits

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Edinburgh

(Until 3 February)

The writer and artist Alasdair Gray is that rare thing – a polymath of complementary talents whose gifts are prodigiously but equally distributed. In this capacity he shares some similarities with William Blake with whom he has often been compared – both by himself and others.

Gray’s is a rich and seemingly unfathomable talent: to date he has produced around twenty books (most of them illustrated and designed by himself), painted countless murals, produced scores of posters and numerous paintings, written plays and screenplays – the list goes on and on. Now, at the age of seventy-five he shows no sign of slowing down.

Gray’s unstoppable output is demonstrated in two current exhibitions and a newly published book (he refers to the publication as an ‘autopictography’ rather than an illustrated autobiography). The book provides a keen insight into the development of the artistic and literary talents of this remarkable man. However, it comes almost as a shock to read early on the categorical statement “This book is not an autobiography despite personal details given to explain how and why, at different times, I came to make certain in a certain way…” Asked why he does not regard A Life as such Gray responds simply that his written life story would be “…much, much longer…with many more personal details.”

The Talbot Rice Gallery Gray Stuff
Cupola in the Round Room
The Talbot Rice Gallery
Mural by Alasdair Gray

Gray describes a bookish, awkward, asthmatic and somewhat lonely childhood in Riddrie in the east end of Glasgow during which time his mother encouraged him to join Miss Jean Irwin’s week-end art classes at Kelvingrove Museum , “…for the next five years Saturday mornings were my happiest times,” recounts Gray. Art school followed where Gray pursued his own idiosyncratic course under the gentle tutelage of Walter Pritchard in the Mural Department.

For decades Gray’s first novel and magnum opus, Lanark, was a much discussed ‘work-in-progress’ before its eventual publication in 1981. The novel reflects many of Gray’s own experiences, including his slavish working on a plethora of murals around Glasgow. In the Talbot Rice Gallery wall space is given over to displaying the genesis of the graphical aspect of Gray’s books, including this world-famous cult classic. Thus there’s a rich representative display of Gray’s ‘graphicism’ – from The Fall of Kelvin Walker to Mavis Belfrage and from Unlikely Stories, Mostly to 1982, Janine.

Alasdair Gray

Judy Macrae, 1969

pen on paper

23.5 x 31.5 cm

Gray’s graphical style is unmistakable, characterised by bold, stylised imagery often with an architectural or figurative focus demonstrating a careful study of form and proportionality. His ability to capture a genuine likeness with a few deft and judicious strokes of the pen is beyond doubt, as seen in his 1969 portrait of his friend, Judy MacRae. Gray’s work as a serious painter is perhaps less well known but his allegory Eden and After, from 1965, recently acquired by the National Galleries, demonstrates that Gray’s immense artistic abilities are not confined solely to stylisation and illustration.

· Alasdair Gray, A Life in Pictures, is published by Canongate, priced £35.00

Alasdair Gray, notebook,
Gray Stuff, The Talbot Rice Gallery

The Talbot Rice Gallery Gray Stuff
Installation view