Scotland And Venice 2007 is a rather bland title for this, the homecoming show of the six artists chosen to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale, hiding the fact that it’s a tightly-curated group show that links fantastic and oblique looks at the world with meticulous processes.

The show opens with Lucy Skaer’s The Big Wave, a three-panel reworking in pencil and marker pen of Hokusai’s The Great Wave that distorts the original’s scale (Skaer’s big version is huge compared to Hokusai’s great work) and obliterates detail, the finicky curls of the source painting rendered in repeated sworls trapped inside grids of varying sizes. Using the same method, Leonora depicts a partial whale skeleton, this time taken from a small photograph - again, Skaer is playing with scale, converting miniature depictions to a size closer to the truth. Between the drawings, there’s an oak table which Skaer has inlaid with mother-of-pearl, set out in indistinct, blobby shapes. There’s nothing final about Skaer’s work: the large drawings are literally unfinished, edged with grids waiting to be filled, but more than that, this is an artist who takes points from the past, already recorded - Hisoku’s painting, the found table - and intervenes, dragging them into her present.

Rosalind Nashashibi shares Skaer’s investigative outlook, but her focus is on social groups, the rituals that bind them and contexts which define them. In a new film work, Bachelor Machines Part 1, the crew of an Italian cargo ship are under study. Long, lingering shots of the vessel, in contrast with the brief bursts of human action, hint that Nashashibi means to cast this ship as her protagonist, showing that the men on board are commanded by their ocean-going home as much as they are by their captain. No real conclusions are drawn, though, with Nashashibi preferring to hint. This strategy works well on film, but the diptychs and triptychs of photographs shown alongside Bachelor Machines suffer for it. Gumbi, Passolini, Cicciolina matches an African secret society with Passolini’s Oedipus Rex and a news clipping about La Cicciolina, ex-wife of artist Jeff Koons, one-time porn actress and politician. Intended as ‘visual poems’, I suspect that Nashashibi herself is the only person who can read them.

Charles Avery presents work from his Islanders series, about a fictional land with its own indigenous people, the If’en, and a complex mythology, including a vast array of gods. The August Snakes have long beards, like Chinese villains in silent films, while another god, Dha is shaped like the number two, shown in a drawing providing support for smooching lovers, and again in monumental form. Avery’s drawings of his islanders are glorious, matching wild imagination with impeccable draughtsmanship, showing the If’en philosophising in their local pub and at a crowded marketplace, where they hawk pickled eggs and pornography. It might sound a bit silly on paper, but there’s something about Avery’s apparent, though probably feigned, conviction that makes it easy to take this invented world very seriously.

Henry Coombes shares Avery’s humour, presenting a series of rather charming small paintings and collage works that, on closer inspection, are distinctly disturbing meditations on sexuality and class politics, full of impossible creatures and drawing heavily on the work of Landseer. The centrepiece of his installation is a truly remarkable short film, in which a submissive human-stag hybrid is gutted by a gamekeeper, its entrails exposed to feed an eagle.

Tony Swain is another maker of worlds. Working on newspaper, Swain allows his medium to suggest images, which he supplements with more collaged clippings. The results are impossibly dense, and rebuff any attempts to make sense of them, and this makes them hugely appealing, as the eye is led on a wild chase around each web of images. You can see where Swain is coming from, even if it’s hard to say where he ends up. This is work that takes on Dada and Surrealism, and undertakes an ambiguous inquiry of Modernist practice, which would be an awfully dry business if Swain’s unfettered approach didn’t reap such rich results, compelling and confounding in equal measure.

In amongst all this, Louise Hopkins’ work is something of a let down. Hopkins, like Swain or Skaer, makes work that rests on extant materials, painting on patterned fabric and maps. Hopkins rarely strays too far from her sources, though, ending up with patterned fabric with its pattern painted on top, or distinctly mappish map works, and there is not enough in the process to make up for this empty prettiness.

Hopkins does, though, fit in neatly with her peers, in what is a surprisingly neat show. Curator Philip Long has gathered together six very different artists linked both by strong themes - the recurrance of imagined worlds, or attempts to make sense of the one we have - and artistic tactics, in particular the use and reuse of extant material, from the day’s paper to Japanese art. This is more than a survey of current practice in Scotland, then, it’s a true group show, one that sheds new light on the work of the selected artists.

This review was first published in The Herald on December 21st, 2007.

At any degree show, the flow of work on show establishes a rhythm of sorts, with the dull thud of the mediocre punctuated by pulses of good stuff, and bad.

This year at Gray’s School of Art, that rhythm is distinctly askew, unbalanced and off-kilter. If you begin, as I did, with the painters and printmakers, prepare for that dull thud, and expect your heart rate to drop, your eyes to glaze over and your mind to wander, then brace yourself for the crash-bang cacophony of quality to be found in the Sculpture department, and the work of students on the new Photographic and Electronic Media course.

It’s not that the painting and printmaking is all profoundly poor, or ineptly executed - indeed, on a technical level, the printmakers show a confident mastery of their craft - but there is almost nothing here that grabs the attention. Even those artists that do show promise let themselves down. Alex Kay has forged an innovative practice, tying together his subject matter and working methods by weathering his canvases to match the earthy, grubby imagery, a mess of tangled tree roots and objects he has unearthed rather than found. But he shows too much, allowing lesser works to crowd out and overwhelm the best of his paintings. The same goes for the star of the Printmaking course, Jessica Crisp: her quiet, delicate and deftly executed work is inspired by travels across Central Europe, but, perhaps over-compensating for the unassuming nature of her practice, she bombards the viewer with images, rather than letting more eloquent pieces do the talking. There are, too, painters who haven’t quite found their feet. Gemma Dolbear certainly knows her craft, building up richly textured, almost sculptural surfaces from a restricted palette of earthy tones, but only truly shines when she teeters over the brink into abstraction, allowing her fascination with abandoned buildings to inform her work rather than dominate it.

While the best of the painting falls at the last hurdle, it is hard to pick out the best of the sculpture, since so much decent work vies for the attention. This is down to the fact that so many of these young artists seem to be having enormous fun, testing their own limits and pushing at the boundaries of sculptural practice. Kevin M. Jameson has been busy on the streets and in the shopping malls of Aberdeen, staging interventions that, roughly speaking, aim to puncture our tacit acceptance of everyday injustices. He has replaced promotional posters on buses with texts questioning their environmental impact, and put up signs beside CCTV cameras that read ‘Regardless of your will’. While some of these actions smack of sophomoric, solution-free politics, Jameson’s work transcends its subject matter, with the real meat resting in confrontation and disturbance of the status quo. Kelly M. Anderson, meanwhile, looks inwards, crafting bulbous polyp-like bubbles out of glass and resin, closely examining her materials of choice and, too, using off-cuts and failed pieces to question the status of her work. Martin Nelson’s work is similarly thoughtful, and thought-provoking, with digital pixels transformed into simple wooden forms, and blueprints drawn on the floor growing their own sculptures - cool and considered, these pieces suggest an unknowing and unknowable set of data, struggling to make itself understood. Lastly, Nathan Preston is only nominally a sculptor, working with film and animation. He has made an animated version of the shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho, and is engaged in an ongoing project to draw and animate, frame by frame, Buster Keaton’s One Week. These laborious projects are, at heart, about authorship and inspiration, emphasised by the choice of source material already utilised in contemporary art - Steve McQueen’s Deadpan restaged a Keaton stunt, and Douglas Gordon slowed down Hitchcock in his 24 Hour Psycho.

Strong stuff from the sculptors, then, but the first graduating class of the new Photographic and Electronic Media course are, arguably, stronger still. Ian Gildea is the best of the bunch, with work that drips with wit and a satisfying self-reflexive sheen. He has embedded a tiny video screen in a conker - so tiny it requires a magnifying glass to see it - showing a film of a growing tree, and made a gloriously pointless digital touch-screen version of his own sketchbook. The centrepiece of his exhibit, though, is a jerry-rigged Heath-Robinson contraption crafted from bike parts, a strobe light and a slide projector. The piece projects a film loop of itself in action, each flash of the strobe slightly out of synch, revealing the film strip as much as the image. Fergus Connor’s work has similar depth, consisting of video pieces that question the nature of theatrical performance - multiple Hamlets recite ‘to be or not to be’ - and draw on Greek myth, including a vending machine playing the part of Sisyphus.

This is a curious degree show, then, lopsided where most are patchy, but, dull, uninspired paintings aside, one that has much to offer.

Sidebar

Also using video is Mark Duguid. Already a recipient of an RSA award, and a Peacock Visual Arts Award, Duguid has taken on the old Hollywood adage ‘never work with animals or children’ by doing the exact opposite. An arranged set of monitors display not-quite-still lives - a twitching insect, impassive horse and a languidly shifting snake - as if Duguid is cutting himself out of the equation as a sculptor, and displaying potential sources. Another piece features stop-motion animation, and again Duguid takes a step back, using narratives gathered at workshops with local school children.

This review was first published in The Herald on June 18th, 2007.

A human take on nature's wonders

Two shows opened at Aberdeen Art Gallery last night, and both are concerned with the natural world and our relationship to it.

First come Dalziel + Scullion, with a long, engrossing video work, Some Distance From The Sun, that traces the evolution of plant life over the millennia, from the primitive seaweeds to complex flowers. Botanical samples float across the screen against a stark white background, shot in close up, so that any sense of scale slips away, turning the tiniest lichens into a forest of trees. The soundtrack, by Glasgow musician Mark Vernon, gurgles, burbles and hums, an attempt to recreate the sounds of growth, of life itself.

Movement is key here. The slowly panning camera suggests both inexorable evolutionary progression and the physical movement of plants, as fern fronds unfurl and seed pods pop. It's a simple piece, but one that it is easy to become lost in, absorbed by this careful presentation of natural forms, which Dalziel + Scullion have not only documented, but transformed, allowing the plants to tell the story of their own development.

In the next room is Unknown Pines, a suite of six prints, showing, in hyper-real detail, a short section of tree trunk. They are, technically, superb images - every last knot and crack stands out, a weeping ooze of sap glistens and the tiniest crenellation on a scrap of surface bark demands attention.

There is, if not quite a polemical edge to these works, then a political one. Dalziel + Scullion are explicitly attempting to alter the way their audience engages with the natural world.

Each of the pines is labelled with its common name and its Latin classification, but in lavishing attention of their subjects, Dalziel + Scullion look past the colloquial naming, the hierarchical scientific ordering, the imposition of human ownership through naming, and focus on the trees themselves. In effect, these works are portraits, and Dalziel + Scullion are - though I suspect they might take issue with the word - humanising the pines.

At this point, though, the duo are hoist by their own petard. Their aim is to do away with the casual, dismissive human view of nature and replace it with a closer, more personal appreciation, but, in this near-fetishistic presentation of natural forms, the pair have replaced scientific objectification with objectification of another type. If human attitudes to nature are colonial, then Unknown Pines is a failed attempt to foster a post-colonial approach, ultimately casting the pines as noble savages - it is impossible, of course, to patronise a tree, but these works almost manage it.

In the second gallery, David Blyth, mounting his first, long-overdue solo show, also displays a fascination with nature and its processes. His Knockturne is a complex, multi-faceted installation - one that fizzes with symbolism, subtly suggesting possible interpretations, only to counter them thanks to a slippery internal logic.

That logic rests on a seemingly illogical fusion of themes - the life of cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, and Blyth's stint working with a farmer during lambing season, a project that coincided with the birth of his first child. At the centre of the room is an ejector seat. It is being dragged along by 31 lambs, still-borns granted a new life of sorts, mounted and stuffed by Blyth. Corralling this flock is a fence bearing spinning wheels bound up with telephone cords, and, on washing lines woven from twigs, sheepskin Babygros - or spacesuits? - are hung out to dry.

Outsize balls of wool are peppered with needles, like organic Sputniks. On the wall, a silk parachute serves as the screen for a projected montage of footage from Tereshkova's flight, inter-cut with shots of a spinning wheel, a nod to the cosmonaut's unlikely career path, which began in a textile mill and ended in space.

Taken together, this is an almost overwhelming array of allusion and reference. Birth and rebirth are central, and there is a whiff of sympathetic magic, as if the installation is the apparatus for some arcane ritual to breathe life into the lambs and give Tereshkova a second chance to fly. But the temptation to read Blyth's work as religious, with space flight analogous to communion with the heavens, is tempered by a bathetic descent into the domestic and quotidian - it is a work about lives lived on the farm, in the mills and at home. There is, too, a harder, pseudo- scientific edge to the piece, in the matching of life cycles to cyclical orbits, and the fusion of high technology with low.

This confusion is Knockturne's great strength. Standing before it, one can never quite grasp the whole, nor can one resolve the connections between its disparate elements, but there remains a strong sense that resolution is possible, and that, given enough time, this is a work that will reveal itself.

This review was first published in The Herald on February 16th, 2007.