At first sight, the work of Lotte Gertz appears rather slight. The pieces on show at Mary Mary all share a washed-out look, with light grey backgrounds and a muted palette, torn edges, apparently apathetic marks made with pencils, crayons or oils, and various bits and bobs tentatively stuck to their surfaces.

Stand before one for a while, though, and it becomes clear that Gertz isn’t in the business of hastily dashing off vague abstracts, but a precise, thoughtful maker of images that take time to resolve. When they do, that first impression fades fast. The title of Mr Sophistication (I Am Stage) gives a hint, but look before you read and it slowly becomes clear that the rectangle missing a side is indeed a stage, and the flurry of curved lines above are the curtains that frame it. Its neighbour offers a little more, with zig-zag marks in black wending their way across the paper to offer the barest suggestion of the pitched roofs of a row of houses, and, with that realisation, the six little marks on the right become a table, with a sewn-on button completing the picture of domesticity. And when Gertz edges over the line into outright representation, she remains subtle, with clock faces reduced to a circle and two lines, and interior space boiled down to a few angled lines.

This experience of looking, and looking again, sets up the viewer well: with a few connections made, more hove into view, and Gertz slowly but surely exposes her themes, and, perhaps more importantly, her method of making work.

The first clear signal of that method is Gertz’s refusal to restrict herself to a single medium. Every work on show combines collage, drawing, painting and printing, with a few tiptoeing toward the sculptural. Woodcut prints are sliced or torn then put to use as a surface on which to draw or paint, or, in little slivers, applied in turn to a woodcut surface. Other elements are rendered with everyday objects. Matches, half-unravelled threads, off-cuts of leather and elastic bands are glued over drawings, buttons are sewn onto paper.

These materials are not, though, simply everyday detritus. Many have a common source, clothing, and most are items that we all lose easily or discard with little thought. Buttons pop off shirts and roll away, loose threads are picked at and flicked off, spent matches are dropped to the floor, red Post Office elastic bands litter closes and streets. With these familiar objects, which must be lost for her to find them, Gertz is subtly evoking bodies moving through space and time, building a physical human presence out of the faintest possible traces. And, alongside these distinctly human materials, there are recurring motifs that reinforce the idea of a barely-present body in transit: boxes and containers are everywhere, and, more obviously, houses and theatres.

To call this shadowy presence a character would be a step too far - you can’t, after all, tell much about a person from a few bits of frayed nylon, the odd button and a hint of an unpacked box - but, as these materials are used again and again, Gertz creates the distinct impression that her works are inhabited, by someone.

That someone might well be Gertz herself. Every one of the collaged works on paper in this show bears very deliberate traces of the artist who made them. Some are subtle - those woodcut backgrounds are peppered with fingerprint smudges - others are in plain sight, and delivered with a nod and a wink, as in Blue Box: Match Play, Match Spent, in which the walls and roof of a house are built of crayons drawn with crayons.

If the missing figure is Gertz, her sources and references are almost absent too. The architectural forms only-just-represented in Blue Box or Standard Houses: History, Her Story have their roots in the houses of Gertz’s native Denmark. More specific still, those clock faces are lifted from a single scene in Casablanca. The evocative title of To The Roof! With A Couple Of Things That Looks Like Wings is a distorted quotation from a Brecht poem. Few, if any, viewers would catch these allusions, and it is clear that, just as Gertz makes a given piece using a process of revision, layering up elements from what might be called preparatory works, only to paint or draw over them, so she lights on a source, turning it over in her mind, discarding some elements and retaining others, until that first thought or image becomes something else entirely.

And it seems safe to say that these processes of thinking and making are not just similar, they are intertwined, with materials suggesting new thoughts, and references reconsidered as the possibilities of a drawn line, painted smudge or applied object offer new directions. Much of this internal dialogue is, of course, private, known only to Gertz herself, but just enough leaks out to the viewer. The result is a curious mirroring, as gallery-goers seek to tease out the imagery and meaning in these works - are, for example, the two hands of Hands and Graphite Wheel applauding the unseen performance implied in Mr. Sophistication (I Am Stage)? - or consider the intention behind the use of materials, they reflect Gertz’s mode of practice. And so these private, subjective works, when they are released into the public sphere of the gallery, become private and subjective once more, in the minds of those who see them. It’s an indirect, subtle and almost teasing form of communication between artist and viewer, this, but a powerful one. By never stating her case, and working in whispers and hints, Gertz passes on her ideas with a sort of generosity. By abstaining from bald statements she rewards those willing to put in the work required to uncover the ties that bind these pieces together. Gertz cares little, I suspect, whether her audience’s specific thoughts match her own, satisfied that the gentle experience of discovery her work prompts in the viewer corresponds with the dialogue between ideas and materials at the heart of her practice.

This review was first published in The Herald on February 22nd, 2008.

Every winter, Sorcha Dallas steps out of the usual round of showcases for represented artists and presents a group show, lightly curated around a theme suggested by the work of one artist on the gallery’s roster. This time, it is Sophie Macpherson’s sculptural forms that inspire Re-Make/Re-Model, and the tie that binds the artists gathered here, albeit loosely, is performance.

Macpherson’s work tackles the idea of performance at a tangent. Her White Screen dominates the small gallery space in which it is housed, a zig-zag wooden construction, whitewashed on its front side, the rear distinctly unfinished, with a surface marked by a repeated diamond motif. Next door, Untitled Set-Up suggests a temporary outdoor theatre. Two black wooden walls are set upon a white disc, the interior of the barely-sketched room facing a grubby curtain tacked to a roughly-hewn strut on the wall. A third, untitled, sculpture is more ambiguous. Again set on a plinth, this painted concrete structure might be an uncomfortable, restrictive piece of Brutalist costume jewelry, an architectural maquette for a theatre building, or another hinted set.

This is either set design for a play that has not yet been performed (but might be) or the remnants of an imagined production. A fanciful idea on paper, perhaps, but Macpherson’s slightly slapdash methods of making lend her work a genuinely evocative air - the unfinished reverse side of White Screen suggests that there was no need to complete a face that would never be seen by an audience, while the scale of Untitled Set-Up quickly indicate that it is taking a further step back from the stage, offering a model of a set that will never be built. Taken together, the works here suggest performances somewhere between the am-dram and the avant-garde, and one can easily imagine the nonexistent body of work for which Macpherson is playing set designer.

Macpherson’s work also sets the stage for a pair of real performances, or, rather, a pair of recorded performances, both of which tackle the usual problems of performance art, questioning the status of the performance itself, its documentation and later presentation.

Babette Magnolte’s 1978 film Water Motor is a record of a dance solo by Trisha Brown, filmed twice over and projected first in real time, then again at half speed, the two sections divided by slow fades to black, like the curtains drawn at intermission. Mangolte explicitly sets up her camera as a proxy for a rapt viewer - one is barely aware of Magnolte’s cinematography, which has the camera follow Brown’s movements closely but unobtrusively, without cutting - as if, in the first, real-time episode, she aims to present a ‘true’ record of Brown’s dance. This truth is quickly undermined by that distinctly theatrical fade and the re-presentation of the piece in slo-mo: if the opening section is true, the closing one is a faded memory, recasting Brown’s jerky, half-formed, high-speed gestures and sudden springs into a languid, graceful, more traditionally balletic form.

The idea of recording artist as proxy audience member recurs in the DVD presentation of a pair of performances by Linder, Nothing for Ray Johnson, filmed on the exhibition’s opening night. The anonymous videographer has made an unsatisfactory record of Linder’s improvised combining of music and gesture, but it is meaningfully unsatisfactory. We see the artist, backed by guitarist and double bass player, her face obscured by a mask that bears a crude drawing of a rictus grin, make considered gestures and wild vocalisations to match the howl of feedback and tuneless textures produced by her accompanists. But the viewer’s view is never clear, with the original focus of the performance shifted to the obscuring arm of the bassman, or, uncomfortably, to the engrossed faces of the original audience. The silent attention of the primary audience ends up serving as a barrier, like the roving camera itself, to experience: it is clear that, on the night, this was a powerful performance, but here, the secondary audience in the gallery is left struggling to appreciate it, more voyeurs than viewers. As a record of a performance, Nothing for Ray Johnson is a failure, but in failing it anchors Re-Make/Re-Model, firming up the deliberately noncommittal presentation of disparate artists linked by a loose theme.

And, with these ideas bouncing off the gallery walls, the notion of performance begins to infect the other works on show, to the point that it is hard to tell whether looking at the works here with performance in mind is a useful route to understanding, or a gloss enforced by the context that, elsewhere, might well be irrelevant.

Martin Soto Climent’s humorous little arrangements - Detained Chain, a pair of lime-green knickers stretched between two beer bottles, and Parachute, a pair of mucky high heels suspended from a plastic bag - here become artifacts of performance, potential and past. The beer bottles threaten to break into a high-kicking burlesque, the suspended heels look knackered after their daredevil jump, while their assembly, and the hunt for junk, adds a further nod to the performed.

Alongside her performed and recorded piece, Linder is showing a brace of new collage works in the tradition of what remains her best-known work, the sleeve for Buzzcock’s 1977 Orgasm Addict single. That image, a naked woman with an iron for a head and mouths for nipples, was an explicit attack on the representation of women in contemporary media, these latest pieces are subtler, more ambiguous, and, here at least, take on the air of the remains of a performance. Charming Maid sees a soft-focus 1970s album cover with a woman’s torso burnt out to reveal that she is stuffed with flowers. The Luminous Flux obscures twin images torn from a 1960s magazine. In one panel, Nureyev’s loins are girded with a garland, and John F. Kennedy’s face is partially obscured by more flowers, but in this context, thoughts of feminism and feminity fade, replaced by a need to reconstruct Linder’s actions in making these works, the cutting and placing that make up the performance of collage.

Like Magnolte’s slow motion reprise of Brown’s dance, the interpretation forced on these works by the show around them is, if not exactly false, then questionable. And that’s where Re-Make/Re-Model reveals its strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, in tying together Macpherson’s suggestive sets, Magnolte’s eloquent film and Linder’s performance and its presentation, the show is a taught one, a deep look at performance and the performed.

On the other, it is almost overbearing, the curatorial conceit leading viewers down blind alleys, nudging them towards considering collage and sculpture, first and foremost, as recorded actions.

Either way, this is a show worth seeing, whether you end up infected by its premise or not.

This review was first published in The Herald on January 11th, 2008.