Cut and Paste exhibition at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art , Edinburgh

This was the first ever survey exhibition of collage. It gave a comprehensive review of collage in all its forms, including cut, glued, stitched and stapled paper, photography, stickers, scrapbooks, botanical specimens, patchwork, Cubist and Surrealist artworks, films and more. The exhibition started with books published in the 1500s with flaps stuck into them and ended with digital photographs made a few months ago.

Kurt Schwitters
Mz 229:Hot Water, 1921

Hannah Hoch

Untitled, 1924

Hannah Hoch

Astronomie, 1922

Jacques Villegle

The Jazz Men, 1961

Peter Blake

Museum of the Colour White 2, 2001

I left the exhibition with a real desire to do some cutting and sticking! It seems that technological developments have had a major impact on the history of collage and the direction that it is going. It seems there has been a move away from the more traditional means of collage (cut and stick) in the artists using collage in the present day, instead preferring to use photoshop or digital means of creating layers. I believe there is still a need for the more physical and tactile collage, and so I have been encouraged to carry on with the collages that I am creating. 

David Batchelor - My Own Private Bauhaus at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

There are a selection of artists who produce work that always manages to delight me and fill me with joy. David Batchelor is one of them. No matter how bad a day I have been having, seeing his work makes me smile, cheers me up and makes me feel more positive. Simplicity is underrated. An enjoyment of colour, form, shape and surface is what I get from looking at the work. I cannot help but feel an urge to go to the studio and make work. Thank you David Batchelor - you are a star! May my own work move people and bring happiness to others in the way that your work does for me.

'My Own Private Bauhaus’ is an exhibition that marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus by Walter Gropius in 1919.  It is, in Batchelor’s words ‘a phrase that has been hanging around the studio for a few years’ and pays tribute to the movement through Batchelor’s personal appreciation of the square, circle and triangle.

Since he began working with colour, over 25 years ago, Batchelor’s installations, sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs have been characterised by simple shapes and regular forms. But, unlike the pure geometry of the Bauhaus, Batchelor’s forms are, he says ‘often damaged, bent or broken; and the colours, while vivid, are neither pure nor primary.’ Batchelor’s work pays tribute to the geometric abstraction of the 1920s, but is also characterised by improvisation, informality, humour and what Batchelor describes as ‘a distrust of formal ordering systems and regulated theories of colour’.

My Own Private Bauhaus is the artist’s collective title for a wide variety of small sculptures, paintings and drawings that sit together on long, shallow, wall-mounted aluminium shelves. Made from plastic offcuts, shards of glass, found objects, metal mesh, tin tops, timber, concrete, gloss paint, spray paint and adhesive tape – individual works are arranged in irregular rows. Together they represent the diverse output of Batchelor’s practise and the interconnected nature of his colour-based work, whether it is two- or three-dimensional. 

The exhibition also includes a number of large paintings made using poured commercial paint on aluminium panels. These Colour Chart paintings become virtual sculptures with precariously colourful, off-circular forms balanced atop schematic, plinth-like bases. In turn; several smaller sculptures in the exhibition, made from the discarded tops of the tin cans from which the paint was poured, refer back to the paintings.'

https://www.inglebygallery.com/exhibitions/7132-david-batchelor-my-own-private-bauhaus/overview/

Patterns and places of inspiration

On my walk back to the train station yesterday I came across a number of little shops that I could not resist popping into. I can get lots of inspiration from looking at patterns, designs, colours, forms, surfaces, fabrics and objects, and I also learn lots from shops in terms of ideas for ways to display things.

Here are a few photos of things and names of places that caught my eye

lifestory

https://www.lifestoryshop.com/

Concrete Wardrobe

Curiouser and Curiouser

https://curiouserandcuriouser.com/

Emma Hart: BANGER at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

The Fruitmarket Gallery is one of my favourite galleries. I rarely leave disappointed, whether that be due to the reliably top class exhibitions or the excellent range of art and culture publications available in the shop. Located right next to Edinburgh Waverley train station, it is often my first point of call on any trip up to the Scottish capital. My recent visit was no exception. 

I had no prior knowledge of the work of Emma Hart, and this made for an excellent treat. I was immediately attracted visually to the sculptural installation that greeted me in the downstairs gallery. 

"The exhibition presents two bodies of work that represent the most recent developments in her artistic practice: Mamma Mia! (2017), a major installation made following a residency in Italy awarded as part of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women that Hart won in 2016; and a group of new sculptures collectively titled BANGER (2018) made since Mamma Mia! and in response both to it and to the space of The Fruitmarket Gallery.

Mamma Mia! (2017), consists of ten large ceramic objects which hang from the ceiling, while an eleventh lies sidelong on the floor. The objects simultaneously resemble heads, upturned measuring jugs and lamps. They are glossy and monochrome, and project large speech bubbles onto the floor, some of them periodically sliced through by the shadows of ceiling fans made of oversized cutlery. As you move around and under the forms you become aware that the interior of each is a riot of intensely coloured, highly inventive pattern. The patterns used, ranging from the violent to the humorous, suggest the cyclical nature of anxieties and addictions, as well as the habitual repetitions of everyday life.

  

Upstairs in BANGER, viewers are faced with Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t After You. Headlights in a rear-view mirror, the work has you projecting forward and looking back, thinking about what’s behind you before you turn left into the rest of the space. And when you do turn, you find yourself face to face with the first in a series of four double-sided sculptures, car windscreens that stand, like road signs, around the gallery. On one side – the outside – you see into the inside of a car. On the other – the inside – you look out to the outside. The sculptures are made from handmade ceramic tiles, closely tessellated in such a way that the same shapes make different images on each side.



The four major sculptures, Green Light, Give Way, Wipe Out and X, are joined by others that direct and affect how you navigate the space – peering at and under the car bonnet of Fix Up; standing square onto the steering wheels of Race You to the Bottom; moving past Gatecrasher, both a safety barrier and a drawing of a car that seems to have crashed into the gallery wall; and tracking the movement of the woman of Wind Down as she winds herself face first down into the gutter and receives a splash in the face.

Throughout the gallery, visual and verbal puns bring things together and apart, both simplifying and complicating your looking as you ’get’ – or maybe struggle to get – the idea. Multiple ways of looking at each sculpture emerge the more you look. This shift in viewpoints plays out in the dual meaning of words like viewpoint and perspective, which are both about actual processes of looking and also about one’s worldview."

I was fascinated to discover that Mamma Mia! is the result of a residency in Italy in which she had "access to lessons about the Milan Systems Approach, a systemic and constructivist method of family therapy at the Scuola Mara Selvini Palazzoli which involves physical re-enactments and the study of repeated actions. The body of work is the culmination of an investigation into pattern, from visual patterns to patterns of psychological behaviour. The work also looks at the design and rupture of pattern and the ruminations in between."

http://www.emmahart.info/HartBanger2018.html

http://www.emmahart.info/

https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/about/press/max-mara-art-prize-women-emma-hart/

Jacqueline Donachie - Right here among them at The Fruitmarket Gallery

I fondly remember the artist talk that Jackie Donachie delivered to the Environmental Art students at Glasgow School of Art. I was in the second year of my undergraduate degree, and was really taken by the social aspect of Jackie's work and the way in which she goes about making work.

I specifically recall her telling us about how she struggled to make work immediately after graduating. She explained that after going to Art School, she needed to earn some money and so worked in a bar. It was while working at the bar that she created Advice Bar (1995), "a makeshift bar manned by the artist, who gave out drinks in exchange for problems, for which she would offer advice." It has since existed in many versions. For the Fruitmarket exhibition the gallery has been developed into Advice Bar (Expanded for the Times) (2017), a long concrete bar which cuts intrusively through the lower gallery. I enjoy the way that Donachie adapts the work according to the context. It seems particularly relevant that we have an opportunity and space to discuss problems given the current political and social state of the world. 

Also in the downstairs gallery, Temple of Jackie (2011), is another work that I was familiar with in a previous iteration. The adapted camping trailer was used to serve soup and drinks at the opening of the Glasgow Sculpture Studios when they relocated to Kelvinhaugh Street. I was working at Glasgow Sculpture Studios at the time, and so was involved in the set-up of this installation. The trailer has also been used "to screen films, as a DJ booth (as here), as part of the impromptu, socially engaged part of her practice. The Temple will be used for several events throughout the course of the exhibition."

Upstairs, the work took a slightly different slant. Through my knowledge of Donachie's work, I was aware that she has being investigating myotonic dystrophy, an inherited muscular degenerative disorder that affects several members of Donachie’s family, but not the artist herself. "In the video, Pose Work for Sisters (2016), shown upstairs, Donachie and her sister, Susan, pose before the camera in homage to Bruce McLean’s Pose Work for Plinths (1971). The sisters interact with the props in different ways, striking complementary poses that require various amounts of flexibility, balance and strength. Though the family resemblance can be seen, a disparity in the physical capabilities of the women becomes apparent."

The monitor showing Pose Work for Sisters (2016) is placed upon In the End Times (2017), a steel ramped platform that has been powder-coated dark grey. This non-slip surface is often used for stairs, walkways and ramps, and for the floors of trucks, trailers and ferries.

 
In the End Times (2017) has the appearance of an item of 'urban furniture', as do other works such as Walk With Me (2017), a green line of aluminium tubing that cuts through the gallery and acts as a drawing in space. 

The large drawings of lampposts and CCTV cameras on poles belong to Glimmer (2013–), an ongoing series. In the context of the other work, I became aware of the fragility of the structures, how they lean and can take on quite human-like stances.

 

It was fascinating to see such a range of new and old work made by Donachie. I enjoyed the more sculptural, material-focused aspects of her work alongside the more socially engaged event-based part of her practice. At the root of all the work there is an underlying interest in how individuals exist in the world, things that unite us, and things that distance us from others. There is a sense of trying to find a way of existing within society.

John Akomfrah - Vertigo Sea at The Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

The Talbot Rice Gallery is currently exhibiting two video installations by John Akomfrah, namely ‘At the Graveside of Tarkovsky’ (2012) and ‘Vertigo Sea’ (2015). Both installations "elegise the sea and use it as a metaphor for those lost to both recent and historic memory." 

The Georgian Gallery has been filled with pebbles reminiscent of being at the coast. Audience members have to walk over the pebbles in order to be able to view the work well. Having felt the smooth pebbles on the balls of my feet, and heard the sound of pebbles knocking together as people walk through the exhibition, I felt like I had been transported to the scene. I felt much more immersed ‘At The Graveside’ as a consequence.



"Created with long-time collaborator Trevor Mathison, the work builds upon extracts from various Andrei Tarkovsky films to create a tapestry of sound memories from the islands of Skye (in the Hebrides) and Maui (in Hawaii). A meditation on disappearance, memory and death, the work is at once a personal lament – Akomfrah suffering loss at this time of his first visits to the islands – and an ode to the great Russian director who inspired Akomfrah as a young filmmaker."

‘Vertigo Sea’ (2015) is a three-screen installation that highlights the beauty and danger of the sea.



"Weaving together narratives of slavery, whaling and the current refugee crisis it is comprised of new footage, archival footage – with breath-taking selections from the BBC Natural History Unit – and literary sources, including Heathcote Williams’ ‘Whale Nation’ (1988) and Herman Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’ (1851). Initially prompted by a radio interview with a group of young Nigerian migrants, who had survived an illegal crossing of the Mediterranean, it expresses the feeling of what it is like to be at the mercy of something vast. Overwhelming, ever changing, and with unfathomable depths, the film represents both the physical and intellectual sense of ‘vertigo’ embodied by the sea."



John Akomfrah Vertigo Sea Trailer from Arnolfini on Vimeo.

This is spectacular. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to watch the footage in its entirity (it's around 50 minutes long), but it is definately something I would like to go back and see. The footage is stunning, both beautiful and haunting. The three screens are edited to correspond with each other at times, the outer two may mirror each other but on the other hand, they may operate seemingly separately, focusing on different scenes. The pace of the different types of footage on the screens is well balanced. There is footage of the whaling process which viewers could find very distressing. Despite being pretty squeemish, I was able to continue to look as it was as though the whale meat was being treated as a sculptural material, and I almost forgot that I was looking at flesh.