On a blustery, grey day on the banks of the River Tay, it’s tempting to see the work of Spencer Finch as akin to those therapy lamps that simulate the sunrise, resetting the body clock, and allowing those of us depressed by the late dawn to leap out of bed, full of the joys of summer.

I don’t mean to compare Finch’s large-scale sculptural installations, delicate paintings and subtle interventions to a fancy alarm clock, but the work on show at Dundee Contemporary Arts does provide a sensory kick up the backside and, often using the simplest of means, transports the viewer to different times, places and climes, from a cloudy summer afternoon in Massachusetts to the clear skies of a winter morning in New Zealand.

The Massachusetts afternoon comes first, in the form of a light, airy installation that labours under one of Finch’s trademark descriptive titles, Sunlight In An Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004).

Finch spent this day in the late poet’s backyard logging the shade cast by the clouds overhead, later converting his readings into a huge cloud-shaped mess of blue, grey and purple colour filters of the sort used by photographers. These cellophane sheets are held in place with wooden clothes pegs, and suspended from the ceiling before a blindingly bright array of fluorescent striplights of varying colour temperatures, in an attempt to recreate the quality of the New England sun. As weather simulations go, Sunlight In An Empty Room isn’t much cop, a cobbled-together, jerry-built experiment that would raise eyebrows at a school science fair. But, as the plastic cloud shifts slightly in the breeze of the building’s air-conditioning, and the yellowish lights cast soft blue shadows on the walls, it’s clear that Finch is trying to capture the simple pleasure of observing a cloud making its way across the sky - and in this he succeeds.

Next door in the large gallery, Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004) is a constellation of softly twinkling lights hung from the ceiling. At first, it looks like a crude attempt to plot the stars, but the regular, modular construction of the light fittings and precise arrangement of differently-sized incandescent bulbs suggest the coloured balls and black sticks of chemistry lab models, a clue to the artist’s method. Finch made his skyscape by combining paints to match the black of the night, then - using a process I won’t pretend to understand - established the molecular ratio of each pigment in his mixture, and modelled the molecular structure of each pigment, with each of the 401 bulbs in the final installation representing a single atom. The sculpture is beautiful as it is, but when Finch’s process is revealed, it becomes more so, a rigorously scientific act of poetic transubstantiation, an encoded study of a single colour.

A new work, Sky (Over Franz Josef Glacier, April 8, 2008, 10:40AM) works in a similar way, but it’s leavened with a healthy dose of humour. A perfectly square pool of water, dyed bright blue to match the sky Finch observed back in April, feeds into a huge ice-making machine, which sporadically drops a load of ice-cubes on to a slipway, where they slowly melt and drip into the water below, and the process begins again. On one level, this closed system is as full of science and poetry as Night Sky, a tiny simulation of cracking glaciers matched to a minimalist liquid painting, but it’s also wonderfully silly, a great juddering Heath- Robinson contraption that wheezes into life - making visitors lost in contemplation of the deep blue pool at its base jump out of their skin.

On the wall opposite, another new piece sees Finch inspired by his first major show in Scotland to tackle a long-standing fascination with the Scottish Enlightenment. The piece 8456 Shades of Blue (After Hume) converts a thought experiment in David Hume’s 1748 paper An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding into a rough, real world demonstration, in which Finch dripped 28 colours of blue paint on to paper, dipping his brush in water after each drop, making each mark a shade lighter than the one before.

The final installation housed in two small rooms at the far end of the main gallery is an even subtler investigation of perception. In one room, five fluorescent lamps are wrapped in blue filters, in the other, the walls are clad in white paint mixed with Prussian blue pigment and lit with unfiltered lamps. In both rooms, the blue is barely there, little more than a slight cooling of the light, but, no matter how hard you strain to see a difference, Finch’s two methods produce identical results.

While 8456 Shades of Blue might have been conceived to match it’s debut showing in Scotland, all the pieces here seem very much at home in the austere rooms of the DCA. Even the sheen of the highly-polished floors - a flaw in the gallery’s design that tends to distract from the works - serve Finch well, offering a diffused reflection of Night Sky that tempers its hard, scientific edges, and allowing the faintest tint of blue light to leak out of the blue rooms at the rear.

In Glasgow, The Common Guild have mounted a companion show in Douglas Gordon’s townhouse on the edge of Kelvingrove Park dedicated to works on paper by Finch, and the pieces gathered here also suit their surroundings to a T. Finch is still concerned with colour and light, but, instead of looking outward, seeking to make new sense of the world and the way in which we perceive it, he turns his attention to intimate interior spaces. A sequence of watercolours sees Finch document the colours of light that passed before his eyes during a day spent at his studio. Another set of studies, pastels this time, capture the colour of the ceiling in Sigmund Freud’s consulting room.

A set of inkblots that wend their way up the stairwell is known as 102 Colours From My Dreams. Each one was made by Finch at the moment of waking, and together they form a diary of colours he saw in his dreams. There’s no need to interpret these self-made Rorschach tests, though, as Finch helpfully provides titles that build up into an absurd, comic monologue, a jolly litany of disordered memories and strange fictions of the artist’s sleeping life, which match each colour.

These two shows demonstrate two sides of Finch, and the separation of his work does him a favour. Had Finch’s first major solo outing in the UK been a single-gallery affair, the large-scale pieces of the Dundee exhibition would likely have overwhelmed the more delicate material of the Glasgow display, and the more intimate works on paper might well have acted as distractions from the self-contained investigations of the grand installations.

By focusing on two distinct, if allied, strands of Finch’s practice, DCA and The Common Guild in total paint a better picture of the artist’s practice than they could have done alone.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 21st November, 2008.

At first glance, Richard Forster’s small drawings of the seashore look to be, well, a bit boring. Seen from the entrance to the gallery, the 40-odd works, all 5in x 7in, are arranged at regular intervals around the walls, and each shows the same dimly-lit grey scene, a sliver of sand, an expanse of sea, a stripe of sky.

Up close, though, they take the breath away. Forster is a remarkable draughtsman, capturing each spackle of foam on a cresting wave, the interlocking filigree pattern on the surface of the water as it is sucked away from the shore, and the sheen of wet sand as the wave finally recedes with a photorealistic intensity. In fact, it is sometimes hard to shake the impression that these aren’t drawings at all, but photographic prints, old daguerreotypes or calotypes perhaps, rescued from a forgotten Edwardian album.

This is not just down to Forster’s skill: these are not drawings of the sea and the shore, but drawings of photographs of the sea and the shore, meticulously made reproductions of throwaway, ephemeral snapshots. There is something determined, obsessive, even masochistic about this process. Forster worked at full tilt for four months to produce these drawings, and each gasp at the artist’s skill is matched with a shake of the head at this strange, zealous quest to make perfect copies of his photographic source material. advertisement

The time taken to make these works is more than a simple fact about their making, though: it is a clue that Forster’s subject is not just the shoreline, but time itself. These new works look old, the single, static viewpoint is undermined by the ever-shifting waters, the fast, instantaneous nature of contemporary photography is reconfigured by Forster’s slow transcription, and the slow process of examining his finished works, one by one. The sea is, too, inextricably linked to time, from the repeated crashing waves that mark minutes to the cyclic forces of the tides that mark the seasons.

Something like a narrative, the ordered passing of time, unfolds as these superficially similar works reveal their differences. There’s the ebb and flow of the waves on the shore, of course, but more than that Forster (who you might accuse of absenting himself as an artist in his all-consuming act of copying) makes himself known, the protagonist in a slow drama. For the most part, he sticks to the plan, relentlessly taking shot after shot of his patch of beach, with the same horizon line and measly strip of sky, but mistakes are made, and patterns form. On one short wall, three drawings offer more in the way of sky, with clouds lit from within by the moon or sun. In another triptych hidden inside the series, Forster traces the progress of a single wave, having taken three shots in quick succession (interestingly, in the publication that accompanies the show, these three alone are laid out together on a fold-out sheet).

One drawing stands out from its peers, because the horizon line is at an angle, a tiny difference that in this context seems nothing short of shocking. Perhaps Forster lost his footing, or nudged his tripod. The thirteenth and fourteenth drawings are, unlike the others, verging on the abstract, with soft white bands against a grey background, as if Forster, fingers feeling the chill after standing for so long on the same spot, shifted the focus of his camera a little to far, and pressed the shutter release a couple of times before he had a chance to correct the error.

Then, as the long series of drawings draws to a close with a run of drawings made from clear, crisp images, the last one looks to have been taken carelessly, with the camera pointing down. It would be a stretch to call these drawings a new sort of self-portrait, but Forster is doing more than presenting a dispassionate survey of the changing sea, he is present in these drawings, sharing two intimate experiences: the brief, immediate act of taking photographs out in the world, and the long hard slog in the studio, transcribing them. This might, though, be an illusion.

It’s easy to assume the drawings are arranged as the photographs were taken, but it is possible that Forster’s project is even more deliberate: it could be that he spent as long at the beach as he did wielding a pencil, selecting and ordering his photographic prints before making his drawings, like a film director in the edit suite, with a plan to manipulate his audience, purposely crafting the hint of narrative structure that appears as they pace the gallery.

This is rewarding work. Forster’s deceptively simple, apparently repetitive set of drawings offers a display of virtuoso draughtsmanship backed with a rich meditation on place, time and the nature of photography and drawing.

Outside, the latest instalment in Ingleby’s Billboard for Edinburgh public art project, Rachel Whiteread has taken over an advertising hoarding high on the wall of the gallery building. Instead of blowing up one of her collaged works on paper, Whiteread has picked a photograph of her installation Place (Village). The village in question is made up of vintage doll’s houses, some home-made, which Whiteread has been collecting for 20 years, each one empty, and lit from within.

In installation form, Place (Village), which has been shown in different configurations in Boston, London and Naples, is sad and a little spooky, like a ghost town in miniature. Here, on a grey wall, under grey Edinburgh skies, after Forster’s incessant monochromes, the red roofs, and backlit windows form a jolly, twinkly, positively Christmassy scene. After Mark Wallinger’s plain, dry offering - he presented a simple slogan text, “Mark Wallinger is innocent” - the billboard project has found its feet, showing the potential of the innovative format to transform an artist’s work.

This review was first published in The Herald on 4th November , 2008.

In 1927, when Hannah Frank began to submit her work for inclusion in the Glasgow University Magazine - first poetry, then illustrations - she adopted the pen name Al Aaraaf. The pseudonym was borrowed from the title of a poem by Edgar Allen Poe, one inspired in part by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe’s observation of a supernova, a star that appears suddenly in the heavens, shines with a greater and greater intensity, only to disappear again. It’s a charming choice of alias, full of youthful ambition, and one that contains, too, more than a hint of the doomy romance that runs through Frank’s Art Nouveau-inspired work in pen and ink.

But in retrospect, whatever Frank’s gifts, prophecy is not among them. Far from shining brightly and briefly, she was to continue working steadily, seriously and prolifically, for decades (she finally downed tools in 2000, aged 92, on the completion of a last sculpture, Standing Figure) and in relative obscurity, her talent only fully recognised now, with an exhibition in celebration of the artist’s 100th birthday.

Born in 1908, the daughter of Charles Frank, a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who found success in Glasgow selling photographic supplies from a shop on the Saltmarket, Hannah Frank’s career began with a compromise suggested by artist and family friend John Quinton Pringle - rather than devote herself wholly to her art, it was decided that Frank should attend Glasgow University, taking night classes at the School of Art. Compromise might not be the right word, though: Frank’s illustrations are informed by a passion for literature, spun out of quotations from Coleridge, Keats and The Rubaiyat, as well as biblical scenes, mostly drawn from the Book of Job.

If her literary influences are clear, a glance is enough to tell that Frank’s talent was forged at the Glasgow School of Art. There are nods to the Glasgow Style, and the influence of both Margaret Mackintosh and Jessie M King is clear. That said, Frank ploughed her own furrow, looking back further to Victorian illustration and, with her liking for strong contrast effects and adherence to a strict black and white palette, borrowing from Aubrey Beardsley. This blend of influences results in a strong, decisive graphic style in which economically described figures and faces are set against stylised grounds. In Woman With Book, a drawing from 1934, Frank dispatches her central figure with a few concise, careful strokes, only to lavish attention on the decorative floral patterns that frame her subject. Night Forms, from 1932, features Frank’s trademark female figures. Described in long, languid lines, these witchy, sultry women, with long, strong-jawed faces and dark robes, dominate this exhibition, reappearing in the spooky Moon Ballet of 1934, and again in Misericordia, a 1937 illustration, and putting in a final appearance, more stylised still, in Dance, which sees a single figure described in two swooping lines. It might be a stretch to call Frank’s work proto-feminist, but these female figures, who almost always appear as couples or in huddled groups, are studies in both independence and companionship, and there’s no mistaking that these are works by a woman artist, about women’s lives, and their bodies.

One very much gets the impression that Frank is not a woman who does things by halves and, by the early 1950s, she turned away from drawing and illustration completely, taking up sculpture full-time. Studying under Benno Schotz, the long-serving head of the Glasgow School of Art sculpture department, Frank began modelling in clay in a bid to gain a better grasp of anatomy, so as to improve her drawing, but instead found a new metier. Her fascination with the female form continued apace, but in marked contrast to the willowy figures that fill Frank’s drawings and engravings, some of her small-scale sculptures have the bottom-heavy fecundity of fertility idols, while others mix classical reclining poses with attenuated limbs and worked surfaces that call to mind Giacometti.

There are some previously unseen works here in the University Chapel, too, pastel drawings discovered by Hannah’s niece, Fiona Frank, in an old suitcase stored in the attic of her aunt’s care home, carefully wrapped up in sugar paper. All are undated, but, going by the hairdos and frocks of Frank’s sitters, they look to be from the 1940s or early 1950s. The pastels are not as immediately striking as the earlier illustrations, and are perhaps best seen as a digression, but they are valuable, showing another side to Frank’s practice. For all her devotion to a monochrome palette, the pastels reveal that she had an eye for colour, perhaps discovered in response to her mother’s exasperated request, quoted in a wall text: “Give me colour!” There are hints, too, that, though many of her preparatory sketches from life and self-portraits in pencil lack spark, Frank was more than capable of working quickly, abandoning the precise, deliberate touch that characterises her stylised graphic work to produce strong, lively pieces. Seeing them, and the last drawings in pen and ink, which offer clues that Frank was moving towards a fresher style, still indebted to Art Nouveau but dropping the decorative trappings learned from Mackintosh and King, it seems a shame that she gave up on drawing in favour of making sculpture.

Still devoted to poetry, and still in possession of the confidence and ambition that lie behind her old nom de plume, Hannah Frank has said that she hopes, quoting Longfellow, to “leave footprints on the sands of time”. With this exhibition, she has her wish. I doubt it will be the last retrospective look at the work of a Glasgow artist who, better late than never, has made her name at 100.

Hannah Frank: 100th Birthday Exhibition is at Glasgow University Chapel until October 11.

This review was first published in The Herald on 26th September , 2008.

Four years ago, Kate Davis mounted a show at Sorcha Dallas called Participant. It featured drawings and screenprints of bottles, glasses and cutlery striking oddly human poses, each packed with art-historical allusions, but the piece that stood out was a big plinth, painted a slightly queasy, fleshy pink. There wasn’t much room for it in such a small gallery, so visitors had to make up their minds whether to edge around it, and squint at the other works from too close a vantage point, or clamber on top of it to get a proper look. Whichever course they took, Davis had made certain that they’d follow the implied instruction in her show title.

Now, the plinth is back, transformed, and Davis has titled her collection of new works Outsider.

The structure has been split in two - one half for each gallery space - upturned and fitted with a glass front, turning it into a scruffy version of a museum display cabinet. It’s not pink any more, but traces of its former colour can be seen through scuffs in its surface, now black. Another trace of its former purpose remains, as the upright cabinets have been placed close-up against the gallery doors, but this time the platform is a barrier, casting the visitor as the outsider of the title. Despite the stand-offishness of its new form, the ex-plinth is a highly personal work: sandwiched behind the glass are neat stacks and scruffy heaps of Davis’s belongings. There are old blankets and sleeping bags, tights and sunglasses, compilation CDs and books. Lots of books, by Kafka, Woolf, Hughes and Plath, and - lest viewers take this library as a series of clues - a guide to gluten-free cooking. advertisement

The drawings are in what Davis, a consummate draughtswoman, has made her trademark style - they are nigh-on photorealistic, dense with finicky detail, pristine and precise. Each one contains reproductions of work by another artist, Franz Gertsch, known, too, for photorealism. Gertsch liked to cast himself as without responsibility for his work, making large-scale reproductions of chance moments caught with a point-and-shoot camera. Davis has a bit of a problem with this tactic, it seems. In the first of her drawings, a Gertsch is reproduced, trapped under the wheel of a car, as a trainer- clad foot scuffs gravel over it. In the rest, Gertsch’s pieces are submerged in scenes of Davis’s own devising, the boundaries between original and copy blurred. In one, a magazine is being read, while the reader tucks in to scrambled eggs on toast, in the next a Gertsch scene is glimpsed in water pooled in a kitchen sink, a bottle of pills and some loo roll beside it on the counter. Overlaid on these mergers of Davis’s everyday life and Gertsch’s impersonal practice is a line which reads, “I want everything I make to reflect my whole life”.

That quote is borrowed from the choreographer Yvonne Rainer, so for all that it might be a statement of intent on Davis’s part, she, an outsider like her audience, has taken it from someone else. The items inside the former plinth are, for the most part, impersonal, the kind of stuff everyone has piled up in an unused cupboard, and the glass frontage hints that, however much we might like to, we cannot enter into the life of another by examining the artefacts that surround them.

Davis is in her own drawings, but never fully - we glimpse a hand here, a foot there. As she strives to reconcile herself to the newly personal tack her work is taking, she has stepped outside herself, using her own past work as an art-historical reference point, just like those quotations from Gertsch and Rainer.

Hidden away in the gallery office is a final piece, a print of a note Davis has made in the run up to the show. It provides a sort of meta-manifesto, in which a shopping list and a reminder to book a hospital appointment are presented on the same level as prompts to “finish edge of sink in pencil” and “trace out Gertsch head on knees to reflect my drawing”.

There’s another hidden work, too, in the form of the press release for the show. Rather than provide the usual gobbet of gnomic artspeak padded out with a potted biography, Davis shares a personal letter to her gallerist, in which she ponders the shift in her practice since the last show, and gives voice to her hope that she will be able successfully to communicate her ideas.

It’s a tentative piece of writing, and, for all the confidence of her drawings, this is a tentative show. Davis is showing us that she is an artist feeling her way towards a new mode of practice, uncertain as to how she should proceed. The engagement with art history that characterised her past work is here in spades - the absorption of feminist forebears’ work centred on their own lives and bodies, the calculated undermining of Gertsch’s almost macho posture of artist as machine - and the new-found self-examination is set within those self-imposed academic constraints. But, once the idea that Davis has cast artist and audience alike as outsiders, looking in on a life, and the making of work about that life, it begins to look like we’re all in this together, participants again, not outsiders at all. This give-and-take, the setting up of ideas in order to knock them down, and the exposure of the working out behind the work all add up to a self-portrait of an artist on the cusp of something new. I can’t wait to see what Davis does next.

This review was first published in The Herald on 12th September, 2008.

The trouble with Tracey Emin is “Tracey Emin”. More than any artist in recent memory, Emin is a fully-fledged celebrity, her life, and her work, firmly lodged in the public imagination as a crude cartoon drawn by tabloid headline-writers.

This is not the same fame as that of those artists who have defined a public persona and woven it into their practice, such as Dali or Warhol. Nor is Emin’s fame a match for those artists whose private lives have ended up public property, such as Picasso with his promiscuity or Pollock and his boozing. No, Tracey Emin is different, because almost all of her work is about Tracey Emin. She has invited us, with a candour that is often alarming, to consider her life as she has lived it.

Now, though, Emin is inviting us to consider the work itself. The subtitle to her first major retrospective, 20 Years, has a proud feel to it. There’s a nod to Emin’s debut - titled My Major Retrospective and reproduced here, it consisted of tiny photographic reproductions of destroyed early pieces - and a strong hint that Emin is now out to show that she’s proven herself more than a flash in the Brit Art pan. Has she? Yes and no.

Any artist, when gathering two decades’ worth of work, will be forced to include a few dead-ends along with pieces that still resonate, but there’s an awful lot of weak stuff here.

Most of this lesser work is what you might call unfiltered: the straightforward confessional pieces are not a life transformed into art so much as a life lived and presented for examination. Wall-mounted vitrines collect autobiographical ephemera alongside framed texts that explain their significance.

May Dodge, My Nan gathers family snaps and a little collage made from a doily, Uncle Colin contains a cigarette packet salvaged from the car crash that killed Emin’s uncle, along with a newspaper report of the tragedy. These are moving, sure, and the spiky poetry of Emin’s writing is at times a joy to read. But they are ultimately slight, affecting in the moment but soon forgotten.

The same can’t be said of the superficially similar video works here. In Why I Never Became A Dancer, Emin narrates the tale of a gang of lads surrounding her at a disco competition to chant the word “slag”, then appears on screen, with a triumphant grin on her face, boogying to Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real). CV relates the artist’s history year by year, again with the emphasis on triumph over adversity, as the camera pans around a dingy flat, eventually alighting on Emin, naked on the floor in a foetal huddle. The Perfect Place To Grow, a ramshackle hut surrounded by plants, contains a brief film of Emin’s father presenting her with a flower - a manifestation of his ideal home. These works share a sense of transformation, a moulding of autobiographical material into something generous, inviting empathy, unlike the flatly presented revelations in those texts and vitrines.

This is also true of My Bed. This piece has come to define Emin’s work, even supplanting Carl Andre’s “pile of bricks” as emblem of the supposed con game of contemporary art. It stands up rather well. Now that the controversy surrounding this grubby mattress surrounded by manky tissues, crushed fag packets and stained knickers has faded, it begins to look like something more than a monument to Emin’s bed-bound depression, subverting the coolly presented Duchampian readymade to form an object that hasn’t been found, but lived.

The blankets, which - after that bed, and the tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, which was destroyed in the Momart fire - are Emin’s best known works, reveal another subtle engagement with art history. Gathered here in the staid spaces of the National Gallery of Modern Art, these appliqued works take on a monumental air, adding another layer to Emin’s use of craft materials which don’t belong in the world of fine art, her adoption of the higgledy-piggledy aesthetic of “outsider” art, and the collaborative act of sewing them together with friends, sticking two fingers up at the idea of the artist as lone hero. Telling stories in slogans and clipped phrases, the best of them are incredibly dense. Automatic Orgasm (Come Unto Me) casts Emin as a latter-day St Teresa, experiencing a sort of secular, blasphemous ecstasy. Hotel International, the first blanket, offers what feels like a complete family history of Emin and her clan, marrying specific anecdotes to simple lists of names and dates.

There’s much more to see, too. Too much. There are so many scritchy, hurried monoprints that they begin to lose their impact, a shame, since the Abortion: How It Feels series is perhaps the strongest, most affecting of Emin’s revelatory works, and the Bird Drawings provide a surprising, funny counterpoint to the relentless confessions that surround them. It is as if, in a bid to demonstrate the real depth and breadth of her practice, Emin has opted for quantity over quality. The result is a feeling that there’s a very good show trapped inside this too-complete outpouring of work.

That said, this is a valuable exhibition. It reveals Emin to be oddly prescient, prefiguring the defining trope of 21st-century pop culture, that pact made between a public with an apparently inexhaustible appetite for voyeurism, and exhibitionists happy to expose themselves. But is Emin a creature of her time, or will a future retrospective - 40 Years, say - draw such a big crowd, and so much attention?

I reckon so, as long as the wheat is sorted from the chaff: Emin’s blankets, her video works, and even her bed look set to stand the test of time.

Tracey Emin: 20 Years is at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art until November 9th.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 8th August , 2008.

Lucy Skaer is on something of a roll at the moment. Her new Fruitmarket show, the first major solo outing in Scotland for the Cambridge-born, Glasgow-based artist, follows her selection to represent Scotland alongside five other young artists at last year’s Venice Biennale.

Add to that a nomination for the Beck’s Futures award back in 2003, and the fact that Charles Saatchi and Turner Prize-winner Mark Wallinger have both taken an interest in her work, and this early retrospective, gathering work from 2001 to the present, begins to look a little overdue.

The exhibition opens with a brand new installation, Room of Lines. In the middle of the room, Skaer has placed a grand old Georgian table, its top slathered in black ink. Up on the walls there are four prints, made by laying paper across the table - the surface of the first is thick with ink, a solid copy of the table’s shape, the next is slightly washed-out, and by the fourth, the heavy paper reveals the scratches and patches of the surface, now hidden beneath the black layer left by the printing process.

Dotted about the room are four sculptures, large in size but fragile in nature, made up of interlocking plaster wedges, some resting on the floor, others hugging the walls. These undulating forms are based on skeletal figures culled from representations of the danse macabre, the medieval allegory on death and its inevitability. You wouldn’t know it, though - Skaer has spun her skeletons on their axes, then split them, and there is little evidence of them in these white sarcophagi.

This is a fitting start. Skaer has long been engaged in a game of revelation and obfuscation, choosing images often loaded with political, historical and art-historical baggage and transforming them, camouflaging her sources, but edging close enough to representation that viewers can, after a good long look, identify them.

This tactic is to the fore in another new work, Three Possible Edges, which looms over the Fruitmarket’s stairwell. On three huge panels, Skaer has adopted three images - of a battleship, some police horses, and a whale skeleton - and enlarged them to life size, rendering them in densely worked, printed and drawn, pixel-like spiral motifs. The same little sworls, thousands of them, make up The Big Wave, an enlargement of Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic Edo period print The Great Wave at Kanagawa, spread across a series of panels draped like unfurled scrolls from the ceiling. In both works, the borrowed images move in and out of view, sometimes clear, sometimes hidden by Skaer’s painstaking process.

Upstairs, Leonora is an installation bearing another spiral drawing of another life-size whale skeleton, a small table resurfaced with mother- of-pearl hands and a film of surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, with her hands filling the frame. As with Room of Lines, these elements are loosely gathered, and apparently have little in common. But this lightness of touch works wonders, providing enough of a hint that Skaer is engaging with Carrington’s work and using her as the glue to bind her own works together.

Next come a set of small sculptures based on Rorschach inkblots, which, like the danse macabre skeletons, have been spun into three dimensions. They immediately call to mind Renato Giuseppe Bertelli’s bust, Continuous Profile - Head of Mussolini. Like Bertelli’s perpetually spinning commemoration of a dictator’s face, complete with fascistic sheen, Skaer’s transformation of the dubious two-dimensional tools of pseudo-scientific psychological testing into three-dimensional sculptures has a curious effect: hiding the represented form in plain sight, removing the familiar in a bid to make the viewer look again, and closer, considering both the reconfigured shapes and their history.

Perhaps the most striking work here is Flash in the Metropolitan, a brief 16mm film projected on to the wall of a small, dark and decidedly claustrophobic side-room. Shot in 2006 in collaboration with artist- film-maker Rosalind Nashashibi while the pair were on a Scottish Arts Council residency programme in New York, the film tours the city’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, tracking through the Near Eastern, African and Oceanic collections, offering fleeting glimpses of statues, bowls and historical artefacts.

These ancient, lasting objects are granted only a split second in the limelight, lit up by a flashing strobe, but the metronomic regularity of those flashes reverses the transitory nature of these brief glimpses, hinting in three short minutes at the vast, almost unimaginable stretches of time that separate the old objects. There’s a hint of ritual about the film and its making, too - it’s easy to imagine Skaer and Nashashibi ceremonially pacing the dark museum in near silence, aiming their lamp at a chosen relic, making up their own druidic rites.

Of course, the two artists are not high priestesses of some contemporary art sect and, for all we know, they spent their evening in the Met collapsing into giggles. But thanks to the solemn pacing and the deep black space in which it is shown, Flash in the Metropolitan shares something with the objects it illuminates, offering a taste of the quiet awe with which these artifacts might have been regarded in their own time.

It casts a shadow over the other work on show, too. Skaer’s act of patiently repeating tiny spirals takes on a ritual quality, the hands inlaid on the Leonora table call to mind a seance, and the enclosed skeletons in the Room of Lines and the appearance of animals throughout the show hint at a hidden, and rather spooky, symbolic system. Even the process of making those big imprints of a table’s surface takes on an alchemical quality.

This odd sensation - that there is something systematic to be grasped beneath the surface of Skaer’s work beyond the act of teasing out the images she obscures, like the random blobs of a Rorschach test, and that there are ambiguous undercurrents linking seemingly separate works - is undermined by the weaker pieces on show. To be fair to Skaer, most of these weak links are earlier works, like the dayglo-hued, forced symmetry of Venn Diagram (Snow), or the overly explicit, almost glib overlays of Venn Diagram (Rorshach/Corn).

If the show is a little patchy, it does the best work little harm, and the earlier, faltering steps offer a valuable chance to see an artist in progress, refining her practice, mulling over the same concerns but always improving, arriving in 2008 with a subtle, taut and engrossing body of new work.

This review was first published in The Herald on May 23rd, 2008.

This is the first of two traveling exhibits granting the public access to the Royal Collection’s stash of Italian works. The Baroque show arrives next year, but first we are treated to a look at the Queen’s Renaissance paintings and drawings, the majority gathered by Charles I, a keen collector, and Charles II.

The room devoted to painting is rather flat. There are good works here, sure, but few that are great, and, interestingly, it is the unfinished and unconventional pieces, many by lesser-known artists, that really draw the eye, with the more plodding portraits and religious scenes fading into the background.

Giulio Romano’s Portrait of Margherita Paleologo is the first of them. Ms. Paleologo was not, it seems fair to say, much of a looker, and made up for it with her frocks. Here she is wearing a loopy confection of an overdress, its interlocking ‘knot-fantasies’ riddled with gold thread, half-hiding a crimson gown. Romano, a pupil of Raphael, is not content with his masterly handling of these folds of fabric, adding a narrative element to the dimly lit scene: two less fashionably dressed women and a nun are peering through the doorway. One can’t help but imagine that the three have come for an audience with the dress, not the lady inside it.

Dosso Dossi’s The Holy Family is something of a revelation. The work is downright odd, with a feverish, almost hallucinatory quality, as if painted from a symbol-laden vision. Mary, rendered, unusually, as a decidedly plain young woman, bears a searing white corona - her mum, dad and boyfriend have to make do with dowdy metallic discs for their halos - and adopts a stylised pose, pointing, rather superfluously, at her son. The baby is clutching a cockerel like a favourite security blanket - preternaturally drawn to the bird as a symbol of the new dawn he’s set to usher in. The sky above the group sees a rather glum grouping of cherubim conjuring themselves into the grey clouds, parting them to light up a jeweled city on the plains behind. Then, up in the dim upper left corner of the painting, we see St. Jerome. He’s ignoring the cryptic business that surrounds him, and Dossi has captured a disarmingly real display of grandfatherly pride.

This unexpected flash of the ordinary in an extraordinary painting ties Dossi’s work to other decidedly domestic religious scenes on show. Across the room, Andrea del Sarto’s The Virgin And Child sees Mary checking Jesus’ mouth for signs of his first milk teeth - fully finished, the scene might end up on the wrong side of kitsch to modern eyes, but the chubby Christ is roughly sketched, retaining a tender quality. Falling between Dossi and del Sarto is another Virgin And Child, this one attributed to Pontormo, with Joseph, pausing on his way out the door to snack on a cherry offered by a boy, probably St. John the Baptist: domesticity and symbolism combined.

Titian tackles takes on the Virgin and Child, too. Or, rather, his workshop does. The Virgin and Child with Tobias and the Angel is clearly the work of many hands, and bears none of the compositional verve of the Venetian. Titian may have had a hand in it - the familiar deep pink and lapus lazuli blue are present and correct - but it doesn’t feel like a Titian. Nor does Boy With A Pipe, this time only attributed to Titian. The one work undoubtedly by Titian is a disappointment, too. The portrait of the humanist poet Jacapo Sannazarro is a staid little thing, one of many works executed early in the painters career, and only serves as a reminder of later, greater works. There are none of those here, sadly, only echoes in the work of followers like Vecchio and Bassano.

Thank goodness, then, for the second section of the show, devoted to drawings. It opens with a remarkable, scrappy little preparatory sketch by da Vinci, one of 600-odd in Charles II’s collection. Neptune sees da Vinci, with palpable frustration, drawing and redrawing the legs of rearing horses, until they look, of all things, like Muybridge’s photographic sequences. There are many such glimpses of the creative process, and almost all are more satisfying than the finished works next door. Some, like da Vinci’s, are quick, with loose markings made to set down a fleeting idea. Del Sarto’s The Head of St. Sebastian deftly captures motion, Polidoro da Caravaggio somehow manages, with a few concise strokes, to evoke the wonder in St. Thomas’ eyes as his doubt vanish before Christ’s wounds. Others are precise. A cartoon in metalpoint by Raphael showing The Conversion of the Proconsul - that odd episode in Acts where Paul blinds a man to convince him to convince his boss of Jesus’ power - is rich with both architectural detail and a lavish attention on every face in the crowded scene.

The most striking work here, though, is A Children’s Bacchanal by Michaelangleo. A delightfully perverse piece in red chalk, the level of finish is absolutely breath-taking, every inch of the paper a masterwork in miniature. And these kids are not the little angels of our post-Victorian imagination, but horrid, base creatures, devoid of reason. At the centre of the scene a gang of loutish toddlers lug a dead horse towards a cauldron. In the upper right corner, one lad appears to be vomiting into a wine butt, ignoring his pal, who is pissing into a drinking bowl, while down and to the left, a third suckles at the withered breast of a female satyr. That all this unpleasantness is rendered so perfectly, makes for a work that is little short of sublime.

This wonderful work flags up the fact that this is a rather patchy show, rescued by the gallery of drawings. Without them, it would be distinctly underwhelming, but their presence - and the presence of Michaelangelo’s little masterpiece alone - makes it a must-see.

This review was first published in The Herald on April 25th, 2008

Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: The Renaissance is at the Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh until 26 October.

Try To Do Things We Can All Understand, London-based artist EJ Major’s first solo exhibit, takes its title from the first work on show, a wall of monitors showing stills from 29 films accompanied by matching lines of dialogue, each displayed at random.

At first, it is hard not to treat the piece as a sort of quick-fire film quiz, racking one’s brains to identify a given still or quote, but as images and texts fade into one another the fragments begin to form a loose narrative.

A glimpse of Bette Davis sitting in the back of a car, her eyes downcast, calls up the breakdown of the Hollywood star system and Davis’ fiery feud with Joan Crawford. Robert Redford, looking especially craggy beside a roaring camp fire, points to the double standard that allows male actors to play romantic leads into their 70s while their female counterparts struggle to find a part, a thought reinforced by the appearance of exceptions to the rule, Meryl Streep or Sigourney Weaver. When Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette pop up, silently mouthing Tarantino’s clever-clever bon mots from True Romance, Hans Zimmer’s tinkly reworking of Carl Orff’s Musica Poetica seems to fill the gallery. More generically, passionate kisses and violent tempers, steely gazes and weeping women, hove into view, flagging up cinematic clichés and stock shots, the trite tactics directors fall back on to elicit an almost conditioned response in their audience.

These commonplaces aside, each viewer will bring their own set of memories and associations, reading these fleeting, randomised images to write their own, personal story, just as Major’s reasons for choosing these particular scenes from these particular films are unknown, rooted in her own private associations.

The snippets of dialogue work in parallel to the images, and, with the odd exception - Marylin Monroe’s memorable cry of ‘You’re three dear sweet dead men!’ in John Huston’s The Misfits - are hard to place. Free of specific associations, these brief, often prosaic texts allow a more specific, though inevitably fractured, narrative to reveal itself, with a question, ‘Why are you doing this?’, answered cryptically, ‘She looks very small.’

Taken together, the gobbets of dialogue and freeze-framed images form a densely woven work, concerned with the viewer’s response, that unavoidable urge to impose an ordered narrative on this disordered presentation of Major’s filmic autobiography, a taught essay on the tension between text and image in the language of cinema, and a meditation on the power of shared symbolism.

Autobiography, text and image underpin the most recent work on show, From A Distance, too. This time, the text is William Faulkner’s stream of consciousness novel As I Lay Dying, which Major read and annotated at 17, an age at which she periodically lost the ability to speak, while the images are culled from the pages of Brownie annuals, and other sources less suitable for children. Major matches her teenage underlinings, many of which reflect her personal, traumatic, relationship with language at the time, to the sanitised vision of girlhood provided by the comic strips. The result is a rather discomforting, if sometimes hilarious, psychosexual drama. The single word ‘steer’ is accompanied by a collaged image of a Girl Guide riding a flying penis, repeated instances of the word ‘laughing’ on a page are accompanied by line drawings of a lonely girl, sitting apart from he peers, and the phrase ‘it talks’ is illustrated with an exasperated mother and glum daughter. Some of these juxtapositions are, I think, made with a wink, but the public, adult revising of private, juvenile preoccupations, the remaking of a text already remade in the earlier act of annotation, and the implied critique of the gender roles reinforced in children’s literature combine to form a work that, like Try To Do Things We All Can Understand, offers a layered examination of language, shared elements of popular culture and the divide between the public and the private.

This divide is explored more explicitly still in Marie Claire RIP. Twelve self-portraits show Major, first as a fresh-faced, peppy teen, ending up hollow-cheeked, battered, bruised and wearing filthy clothes. The series is based on an article in the titular magazine which featured mug-shots of an anonymous woman, taken over a fourteen-year period, to illustrate the effects of heroin addiction. This is powerful stuff, and, once again, Major uses relatively simple tactics to expose a broad range of concerns. The series is at once a memorial to the unknown woman and a coruscating attack, on both the assumption that her deteriorating appearance is the most important aspect of this woman’s addiction, and the magazine’s intrusive use of the images, using the mug-shots to turn a private life into public property. It is, too, a nuanced look at the nature of photography, questioning assumptions of documentary truth, and blurring the boundaries between the portrait and the self-portrait.

After this, the mail art project Love is… comes as something of a relief. In 2004, Major took screenshots of every second of Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris, printed postcards of each image and distributed all 7,000 of them, accompanied by a note asking recipients to return the card along with their thoughts on the concept of love. The volume and range of responses is remarkable. A five year old girl defined love as ‘Mum and Dad’, an elderly lady returned the card unused, a polite note explaining that, at 85, she had no use for Major’s services. Predictably, there are several exasperated requests that Major ‘get a life’ (from people who nonetheless took the trouble to post the card), musings trite enough to grace a greetings card, and a slew of popular song lyrics.

This is an assured show, then, one that, across our distinct bodies of work deftly marries together musings on the consumption and disruption of popular culture, gender and identity by making the private public.

This review was first published in The Herald in April 2008.

You never quite know what to expect from the Jerwood Drawing Prize show. One year, the changing committee of judges will stick hard and fast to artists who make drawings in the usual sense - marks on paper, that sort of thing - the next year, the show will be overwhelmed with work that, however far you widen the definition of the drawn, falls into other categories, from sculpture to new media and all points in-between.

This time, the selection panel, faced with the unenviable task of whittling down nigh on 3,000 anonymously submitted entries into the shortlist of eighty-seven pieces that make up this show, have managed to strike a balance between the two extremes, including artists that push hard at the boundaries of the form, and work that lies firmly within the drawing tradition. The judges - Paul Bonaventura of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, art historian Catherine de Zegher and artist Avis Newman - have also quietly teased out themes in contemporary drawing practice, placing like artists with like, with the result that the exhibit takes on the feel of a conversation about the state of drawing today between the artists who practice it.

The first striking piece on show comes from two artists who have put down their pencils and picked up a computer, Sean O’Keefe and Steve Bullock. How to Draw a Cowboy, is a pseudo-scientific, vaguely retro digital display that sees points, labelled ‘gun’ or ‘spur’ track, leaving coloured trails, until the just-recognisable cowboy dissolves away. It’s a game attempt to draw the passage of time. The best of the animators took prizes. Student Prize-winner Daisy Richardson’s Sublime Climes is a delightfully amateurish stop-motion collage, that transforms images torn from magazines into a concise geological history of an imagined world. Melanie Jackson’s A Global Positioning System, which won First Prize, has a similar ecologically-aware edge. It opens with a man ordering a GPS unit from a down-market gadget mag, then tracks the product from assembly line to delivery by courier. Wittily political, and rendered in a light, naive cartoon style, Jackson’s piece is good, but visitors could be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at a digital animation scooping the top honours.

Still within the fold of drawing, but adopting innovative approaches, are the artists who have turned to new processes. Second Prize-winner Brighid Lowe has filled a large sheet of paper with dense horizontal lines for Rain Drawing (1) before, as the title suggests, letting a downpour finish her piece with damp dots and spots. Tim Knowles made his Tree Drawing by affixing a pen to the branch of Scots Pine, abdicating artistic responsibility to the wind, which made a series of finicky marks.

There seems, too, to be something of a fad for infographics. Sophie Horton’s Studio Environment is an embroidered chart, with coloured threads tracking the noises the artist heard in her studio, while Susie Parfitt crafts a complex, incomprehensible graph of decisions taken according to unnamed ‘policy options’. John Holden provides a minimal counterpoint, his Grid 2 a precise set of vertical lines and nodes, a soft suggestion of ordered information.

On the sculptural front, Luke Drodz has drilled through a Pelican Books paperback, Art In England, stuffing the off-cut discs into a frame beside the desecrated text. More subtly, Mitsuko Hoshino’s Air (Lotus Pond) has leaves sketched on folded paper, simulating ripples in water.

Last but not least: the drawings. Minho Kwon stands out with My Brand New Camera Phone, in which a giant cherub enclosed in a neoclassical aircraft topped with coffee-cup chimneys prods at sprites buffeted by smoke from an oil well fire, and the Student Prize-winning Koreas_Mansoodea Shopping Centre, a strange hint of the Korean peninsula unified by commerce, brand names plastered over the architectural plans for the South side of the mall, a Dear Leader dominating the North.

Her technical drawing style is matched by Patrick Gilmartin, whose pencil work on mylar seems to be the plans for a product of unknown purpose. Ross Jones’ Refuge, meanwhile, sees an encampment of tents set in a tundra of white paper, each one different to the next, making for a truly engrossing work. Tone Holmen provides another imagined world in Coastlines, with coastal features haphazardly overlaid to form an impossible fjord-filled geography. And then there’s Paul Westcombe. His display of used coffee cups, their exteriors covered completely in tiny murals, at first look like idle doodles, but lean closer, and you’re faced with a beautifully drawn, deeply perverse world in microcosm, full of fevered psycho-sexual imaginings, some that will shock even the most jaded gallery-goer.

There is some chaff in amongst all this wheat, sure, but overall, this is a valuable survey of current drawing practice, and a show that not only presents the best of contemporary drawing, but questions the nature of the art form.

This review was first published in The Herald on December 14th, 2007.

As soon as you enter the CCA’s foyer, the promised ‘sensory overload’ of Feral Kingdom begins, thanks to a great big mural by E*Rock and Zeloot. It is - and this is putting it as kindly as possible - not very good. Face after face is piled up in day-glo orange and biro blue, from freckled and fresh-faced schoolboys to gummy aliens and most points in-between. The style is probably best described as tweenage exercise book doodle meets cack-handed graffiti, but this isn’t some exploration or appropriation of juvenile folk art, it is simply poor drawing, hoping desperately to raise its game through overwhelming repetition.

Next comes a flurry of work by Zeloot and Jelle Crama. Crama is based in Antwerp, Zeloot in The Hague, and going by the selection of silkscreen posters and record sleeves tacked to a pillar here, both are designers of choice for their respective cities’ cooler gig promoters and labels. Both lean heavily on 1960s, San Francisco-centred countercultural psychedelia of the sort defined by American illustrators and artists like Rick Griffin and Stanley “Mouse” Miller, with nods to the underground comics movement. Their adoption of the old acid drenched standards - wavy female figures, vaguely scatological imagery - is tempered by a contemporary illustration style that will doubtless mark out the first decade of the 21st Century for future audiences as immediately as the groovy hippie look works as a visual shorthand for the late ’60s, complete with angled geometric lettering that, being hastily hand-drawn, is granted a rather louche looseness. The pair have obviously done their homework, fully absorbing the style of their psychedelic forbears, but the hip new twist feels forced, unlike, interestingly, some of the wigged-out noise groups their poster works promote.

On to CCA 2, which houses work by Dr. Lakra, an artist and tattooist based in Xoaxaca, Mexico. He presents a huge mural, spanning the length of the gallery wall, and, like Zeloot and Jelle Crama, wears his influences on his sleeve. Cartoonists the Hernandez Bros. loom large, and there are shades of Daniel Clowes, too, with a dash of Japanese Manga thrown in for good measure. Unlike his co-exhibitors, Dr. Lakra’s work isn’t so much informed by other artists, instead he simply apes their style. The content, meanwhile, is a witless litany of supposedly shocking schlock imagery - orgasmic porn actresses brush up against glowering super-villains, and bewigged 18th Century judges chow down on a cooked human corpse, overlooked by an Eastern god. Of course, this might all be underpinned by a raised eyebrow, but if Dr. Lakra’s joke is to present ham-fisted renderings of glib subject matter, it isn’t particularly funny. Nor are his drawings, which see him take images of dolly birds and pin-up girls from dubious magazines, adding incongruous tattoos. It’s a step up from idly doodling glasses and moustaches on magazine covers, I suppose, but only just. Other works return to the tired shock tactics and derivative drawing of the wall piece, with more pin-ups, drooling African artefacts, and tattoo-style pieces combining in a yawn of hoped-for controversy.

After that, the mediocre work in CCA 3 comes as a relief. Baldvin Ringstead’s installation features a working Theremin surrounded by paintings, mostly religious, in which every detail has been excised except for the figure’s hands. Do you see? Ringstead is matching an instrument that produces ethereal, other-worldly sounds when you wave your hands over it to images of ghostly hands suspended in the ether. Very clever. DJ and style mag fashion photographer Mathew Stone fares better in his collaboration with performance artist The-O. On a large screen a male figure is projected reclining on the floor naked, in a vaguely Christ-like pose, and covered with glitter. After a time, the glitter slowly rushes upward, a downfall in reverse. It’s a lyrical, rather beautiful image, unencumbered by much in the way of meaning.

Lastly, there’s Lolly Batty, whose sculptural work is peppered throughout the gallery. Her inclusion here is a bit of a mystery, lacking as it does the cod-psychedelic or vaguely underground sheen of the rest. Her pieces are also, surprisingly in this context, really rather good. Each is a pristinely symmetrical form with a pristine white surface, and look like the physical manifestations of arcane mathematical formulae, which, though they are laboriously hand-crafted from polystyrene blocks, might have been made for an unknown purpose in some gleaming hi-tech factory.

That might sound like admiration for a ‘real’ artist in the midst of disdain for designers, illustrators and tattooists, but the problem with this exhibit is not the wide net it casts across artforms, the problem is the dismal quality of most of the work. In the end, it is puzzling how the show came to be. Did no one notice that the work being gathered together was so poor? Perhaps it is intended as a sort of insurance policy for the CCA: however flawed a future show might be, visitors will at least be able to say, ‘At least this isn’t as bad as Feral Kingdom’.

This review was first published in The Herald on October 8th, 2007.

This twinned pair of exhibitions attempt to side-step the difficulty, if not impossibility, of surveying Picasso’s long and prolific career by restricting their focus to ceramics and works on paper.

Unfortunately, Picasso: Fired With Passion at the National Museum is not a success. The show centres the artist’s time at Vallauris in the South of France, when Picasso devoted himself to ceramics. It also attempts, through timelines, information panels, collected ephemera and a smattering of paintings, drawings and posters, to offer insight into Picasso’s wider practice, and his famously tumultuous private life. The result is an odd admixture of wooly generalities - Picasso was fond of the ladies, invented Cubism, was rather upset by the bombardment of Guernica - and a studied focus, that, misleadingly, takes it as a given that Picasso’s ceramic work is on a par with his wider practice. Sure, there are moments of wit, as in Mains au Poisson, a plate which shows two matte black hands crushing the life out of a shiny, slippery fish, and fine pieces, too - the vase from 1950 that opens the show is decorated with gloriously kinetic classical figures. But, given the choice between endless iterations of still lives on plates and the work that lines the walls, from simple linocut exhibition posters to a print like The Banderilles, which captures the tense elegance of a bullfight in full flow, there is no contest - the pots and plates are undeniably lesser works.

In this respect, Fired With Passion is best seen as an appetiser for Picasso On Paper, inspiring a desire to see more posters, prints and drawings.

And, thankfully, the Dean Gallery offering doesn’t disappoint, offering 120 works, from a pastel piece made when Picasso was still in his teens to an ink drawing made in 1971, two years before his death.

In contrast to the heavy-handed interventions at the National Museum, the Dean show offers loose groupings and informative, but never didactic notes, quietly hinting that Picasso, perhaps more than any other artist, resists conventional curation. His restless experimentation makes a nonsense of even simple chronological ordering. Group of Female Nudes, a classically-inspired pastel from 1921 might suggest that Picasso’s sudden volte face in 1914, when he sought to distance himself from Cubism, inspired a line of realistic work. But on the wall opposite are prints that confuse and combine styles, as if, for all that Picasso’s work is divided into periods - the Blue and the Rose, the various modes of Cubism, the neoclassical works and near-Surrealist - he saw these movements, once conceived, as modes to be layered, choices to be made.

In Faun Unveiling a Sleeping Woman, Picasso plays with the possibilities. The creature is drawn in a distinctly classical style, the object of its desire is sketched out in a few hasty lines. Given Picasso’s constant presentation of dualities - the artist and his model, the bull and the horse - it is hard to resist reading the work as a piece of concise autobiography and self-criticism, with Picasso the faun, his gaze drawn, as always, to a woman, but also to his work itself, at once out of time and out of place, but within a tradition.

A series of eleven lithographs, each titled The Bull, show a similar urge to slip free of the constraints of genre. The first print is painterly, representative, the third sees fluid washes replaced with finicky detail. Next comes a marking out of shapes, like a diagram of butcher’s cuts. The final image is a set of economical lines that emphasise the bull’s bulk, its huge body supporting the tiny horned circle of its head, and call to mind the powerful economy of the prehistoric cave paintings found near the artist’s birthplace at Málaga.

The rest of the exhibition offers shock upon shock, as Picasso flits between modes and essays new techniques. There is the bawdy cartooning of Dreams And Lies Of Franco, which both lampoons the General, depicted as a sort of priapic vegetable, and condemns him with silently screaming heads. By way of contrast, Minotauromachie offers an unreadable iconography of a mythic creature, candle-bearing girl and wounded horse. Picasso, never short on ego, stands up to the Old Masters, reworking Cranach the Younger and borrowing from Rembrandt. Naive, simple portraits - including Paloma and Claude, Vallauris, daubed in haste with a fingertip - are followed by intellectual exercises, like the hinting arrangement of shapes in the papiers collés developed with George Braque on the eve of the First War. Early, precise works like The Frugal Meal display the dismal themes of Blue Period paintings, but also hint at the repeated divisions of the most recent, in which impotent homunculi leer at voluptuous, fecund women.

This is a show to set the pulse racing, then, a comprehensive survey of work by an endlessly inventive artist whose twists and turns are little short of alarming. By the end of it, the disappointments of its sister show at the National Museum are forgotten, and faith in Picasso is restored.

This review was first published in The Herald on July 13th, 2007.

A visit to the Changing Room always feels like a special treat.

This might be down its setting - the gallery is tucked away in a shopping arcade, rather than huddled together with other spaces in an artsy ghetto, or standing aloof on a grubby side-street awaiting impending gentrification - or the layout, which has visitors clamber up a dimly-lit stairwell before entering the bright, light-filled exhibition hall. More than these accidents of geography and design, though, it is the Changing Room’s consistent and unerring knack over the last decade for mounting thought-provoking group shows that prompts such a sense of anticipation.

And, with Tender Scene, they have done it again, presenting works by Fiona Jardine, Alex Pollard, Clare Stephenson and Gregor Wright that fizz with unexpected connections.

Pollard - who as well as exhibiting curated the show, billed as a ‘collaborative installation’ - dominates the proceedings. Building on Black Marks, his recent solo show at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice gallery, Pollard continues to mine a rich seam of thematic concerns, centring on the seedy glamour the New Romantic movement, with nods to the Pierrot clown of the Commedia dell’Arte, and to jesters, clowns and fools in general. While Black Marks was a rather overwhelming installation, with a batch of three foot wide bronze medallions and a huge wall drawing looming over the huge number of paintings on show, the trio of new works here have a quieter, more meditative air about them, as if, freed from the pressures of a major solo outing, Pollard has relaxed into this still-new strand of his practice.

These works, like all Pollard’s recent output, are monochrome, with a deliberately limited palette ranging from deep black to dark grey. Comet shows a tangle of snapped lipsticks, wonky eyebrow pencils and heavily distorted lines and numbers, only just recognisable as bar codes, with an overlapping set of forms that might be the trail of the titular heavenly body, or the hairspray-stiff fringe of a New Romantic. Jester is a faceless entertainer making himself up with the gooey contents of a make-up bag, while Grey Argot is Pollard in self-referential mode, presenting an amorphous blob of a cartoon speech balloon made of more sticky lippy that might almost serve as a painted manifesto for his current work.

Fiona Jardine’s contribution, They Became What They Beheld, runs alongside Pollard’s fascination with masks and make-up. A pair of photographs show a figure seated on a plinth, his two-piece suit protected by a paper boiler suit. In both images, the face is obscured by a bulbous spherical helmet, bearing a triangle in one photograph, a star in the other, a sinister update to the sock and buskin masks of classical theatre.

Clare Stephenson is concerned with theatre, artifice and disguise too. Miss Verily-Existant and Miss Quite-Transcendant are, a note informs us, a pair of ‘existential drag queens’. They star in two drawings, both clad in ruched metallic robes based on repeated forms borrowed from medieval church sculptures, both with sinister porcelain doll faces and awkwardly animated limbs, both performing beside mysterious wooden structures of unguessable purpose.

And then there’s Gregor Wright, who knocks the whole show off-balance, like a past-tipsy gatecrasher stumbling uninvited into a private party. An untitled work shows what appears to be a thermos flask rendered in disconcertingly fleshy pink. Every Extend Extra sees a set of cubic forms piled up like refugees from a game of Tetris gone rotten, while Caffeine is a cartoon portrait of a grinning little chap, steam billowing from his head. In the centre of the room sits Metamorph, an awkward, lumpy construction jury-rigged together from off-cuts of Styrofoam and wood panels, a low-rent Transformer robot caught in the act of shifting from man to machine.

Wright is a peculiar proposition at the best of times. His unfinished aesthetic and deliberately slapdash methods are hugely attractive, not to mention good fun, and the studied incompleteness of his work offers a winking challenge to the viewer, who is invited to finish off what Wright has started. Here, surrounded as he is by a trio of artists who are, if not party members, then at least fellow travellers, bound together further by subtle alterations to the gallery space - the floor is striped like an Everton mint, and patches of wall are covered in dazzle ship-like camoflague patterns - he sticks out like a sore thumb.

And yet these blowsy works fit with the quieter, more considered pieces around them, acting as grist to the mill, or sand in the Vaseline. Without Wright, Tender Scene might have been a rather ordinary group outing, a decent-but-uninspiring look at a group of artistic allies. With him, the lines connecting Jardine, Pollard and Stephenson are drawn all the more clearly.

This review was first published in The Herald in July, 2007.

No Fixed Points is a curious exhibition.

First, John Cage and Merce Cunningham are not well known as visual artists, but as the preeminent composer and choreographer of their generation.

Second, this is not quite an exhibition in the usual sense, but a shifting series of shows, flowing from one dominated by Cage, to one dominated by Cunningham.

As the show progresses, Cage’s paintings will be replaced by Cunningham’s drawings, the timing and sequence of replacement determined by chance - Cunningham rolled dice in response to questions put to him by the staff of Inverleith House, with the numbers rolled corresponding to different works.

This is an eloquent curatorial gambit, one that effectively turns the exhibition into a work in and of itself, and, too, an essay on the closely linked practices of the two artists.

The show’s title is taken from Albert Einstein’s maxim that ‘there are no fixed points in space’, a phrase which inspired Cunningham to revolutionise his practice as a choreographer, first developing a number of dance phrases, then using tossed coins and cast dice to determine their ordering, the number of repetitions and the placement of dancers on the stage. The technique was refined over time in collaboration with Cage, whose own compositional methods rested on his adaptation of the I Ching, the hugely complex ancient Chinese text that seeks to find order in chance events, offering a set of predictions arranged in a matrix of sixty-four groupings of six horizontal lines, divined by casting sticks or tossing coins.

It is, too a problematic approach to displaying work. For one thing, Cunningham is no match for Cage as a visual artist - as he would no doubt admit - so that visitors in late June might find themselves disappointed. For another, the appealing conceptual underpinnings of the exhibit threaten to overwhelm the work it contains, forcing interpretations on works that might not stand elsewhere.

And what of that work? At the time of writing Cage is firmly to the fore, with just two pieces by Cunningham present in the galleries.

Like much of his music, the two sets of paintings by Cage on show were made according to chance outcomes guided by the I Ching applied to a set of predetermined choices - the colours, the composition, the brushes used. Further removing himself as an artist from the act of creation, Cage also prepared his paper with smoke, and used river rocks as a guide for his brushes. The results, while recognisably variations on a theme, are not the cold, automated, repetitive paintings one might expect. River Rocks and Smoke No. 13 is adorned with just two shapes, a yellow square-ish form and a dull brown half circle, placed low, almost apologetically, on the paper. New River Watercolour Series I, No. 3 sees a great horizontal swathe of purple reminiscent of a stave, which looks to have been applied with a housepainters brush barely troubled with paint, overlayed with a confusion of dull red circles. A trio of paintings from New River Watercolour, Series III - perhaps the best works on show - share a vertiginous downward plummet of dry strokes interrupted by circular forms, in one dead centre, in two escaping at the papers’ edge. To borrow from the etymology of the characters than form the I Ching’s title, these are works that balance simplicity, variability and persistency. They are, too, inherently musical, both visually reminiscent of a graphic score and taut with an internal rhythm.

Cunningham’s main contribution at this point in the show’s ebb and flow is Blue Studio: Five Segments. At points, it underlines the relationship between painting composer and drawing choreographer - in one segment, Cunningham dances a duet with his own outline, in another he performs against a blue screen which slowly fills with shifting white noise, a match for the horizontal washes in Cage’s watercolours, in a third, a set of precise hand gestures call to mind a conductor coralling his orchestra.

The single Cunningham drawing present on the day of my visit, Tiger, 5/3/97, is a vibrant little thing - the titular animal has a thick leering tongue and winking eyes, its fur and whiskers a flurry of scratchy marks. And, once again, it is impossible to avoid seeking out traces of the artist’s primary practice in his drawings, seeing in those hasty marks traces of Cunningham’s choreography, of the flickering fingers glimpsed in Blue Studio.

This, then, is a show that is greater than the sum of its parts, one that, arguably, works better as a conceptual piece in its own right than as an exhibition of works. It is too, at the risk of sounding sentimental, a moving experience - Cage and Cunningham’s long creative association and long partnership continues here, even after the former’s death in 1992. In the end, No Fixed Points is an intriguing glimpse at the parallel artistic endeavours of two great artists in other media, and a tribute to the pair’s wider, interlocking practice.

This review was first published in The Herald on May 25th, 2007.

Jamie Shovlin is as much an archivist as he is an artist. The show that brought his work to widespread attention was an exhibit of drawings by a teenager, Naomi V. Jelish, presented alongside mementoes and newspaper cuttings detailing the mysterious disappearance of the girl and her family. The work that earned him a nomination for the Beck’s Futures award was a eulogy to the cult post-punk German group Lust/Faust, gathering fan letters, advertisements and excerpts of unreleased songs.

The fact that both Jelish and Lust/Faust are figments of Shovlin’s imagination has earned him a reputation as a hoaxer, but his meticulously crafted invented histories are not simply elaborate gags, they are meditations on objective and subjective truth, subtly investigating the way in which the collection, presentation and categorisation of information impacts on its status.

Aggregate, as the title hints, sees Shovlin turning his archivist’s eye on himself, gathering four independent but deeply linked sets of work together.

The first of the four, Origin of Species, consists of multiple copies of Darwin’s great work. Two museum-like vitrines dominate the dimly-lit lower gallery of the Talbot Rice in a temporal echo of sorts: when Darwin abandoned his medical studies at the University of Edinburgh, he turned to this room, then part of the institution’s Natural History Museum. In the first vitrine, four copies of On The Origin Of Species lie open, each annotated by past readers, one bearing a solicitor’s compliments slip as a bookmark. In the next, more editions of the book are laid out, ranging from battered 1970s paperbacks to dusty tomes from the turn of the last century. On the walls around the two cabinets, Shovlin has mounted pages from the books, each brutally edited, so that all that remains are passages readers have underlined, highlighted or annotated, the rest redacted with a black marker. This new version of On The Origin Of Species is written by readers. Some are skeptical - a note reads ‘evidence of the creator??’ - others approach the text with a narrow focus, underlining the names of particular organisms. In the simple act of hiding words, Shovlin reveals a set of questions about the nature of his chosen text, any text, and the space between facts and their interpretation.

The Birds In Her Garden is the first of two works inspired by Shovlin’s mother, who, we are told, spent much of her free time completing jigsaws while observing the natural aviary outside her window. This is another museological display, with a stuffed bird in its case, a bookshelf, and multiple ornithological drawings ringed with cuttings from bird-watching guides and handwritten notes. The drawings carry rather unscientific captions - here is Mr. Blackie The Blackbird, there is Evil Bastard The Magpie - but the cuttings are meticulously ordered, each cross-referenced with its source text on the shelf, which are in turn ordered, not by subject, author or date, but, arbitrarily, by size. Where Origin of Species is a dry look at the subjective interpretation of fact by laymen, The Birds In Her Garden cheekily elevates amateur botany to the status of Darwin’s investigations and again underlines the value of personal taxonomies.

Upstairs, after slides and video from Mrs. Shovlin’s back garden, comes a trio of works dubbed In Search Of Perfect Harmony. First, a dazzlingly complex diagram, which explains the concept of complimentary colours, matching 12 wax crayons into four coloured tetrads which each correspond to elements of the next work, three batches of rubbings taken from jigsaws. The perfect harmony in question is a uniform grey that, in theory, should result in the combinations of colour used to make each jigsaw frottage. This is an obsessional, failed attempt to bring order to the chaos of an unfinished jigsaw, and, frankly, a jaw-droppingly pointless exercise, applying the rigours of the scientific method to an absurd experiment. Then, in a small photographic portrait, we see what at first appears to be Shovlin’s moving tribute to his mother, the woman who, through her twin hobbies, inspired his love of categorisation and ordering.

But - hang on a minute - this is Jamie Shovlin, arch fibber, and teller of exquisite lies. Is this woman the artist’s mother, or no more real than his anagrammatic avatar, Naomi V. Jelish, and Lust/Faust, the band so hip they never existed? This is the question around which Aggregate revolves, and ultimately, Shovlin’s point seems to be that the answer is as irrelevant or relevant as Darwin’s readers’ reduction of the text before them to a series of subjectively chosen gobbets. Facts are judged not by their truth or falsity, but by the way in which they are presented, and the manner in which they are categorised.

After this, Landrangers forms a fitting coda. The work is collection of maps, each with a detailed catalogue card, accompanied by a map of maps, dividing the British Isles into the arbitrary squares chosen by cartographers. It is a simple representation of a set of categories, but one that elicits a personal response, to the euphony of place names and the memories they inspire. On my visit, a retired couple stood before the Landrangers on the wall, and, like Darwin’s readers and Shovlin’s mother, reordered the collection, according to past holidays and country walks.

This review was first published in The Herald on February 2nd, 2007.