Art Oddments

It’s January, and that means it’s time to do the admin. To tidy up the loose ends of last year’s projects and start in on new ones for the coming year. To that end, I usually end up making my first post of the year on here, either a review of the previous year’s documentaries or of the art I saw at the end of the year and didn’t get a chance to write up. This year, as I was tidying away last year’s posts into their assigned folders and deleting drafts that were clearly never going to turn into actual posts – several documents containing only an enigmatic first sentence that I can no longer remember the context for – I found a couple of art exhibition reviews that I’d started but had clearly intended to pair with something else, except never had. Exhibitions I’d enjoyed but hadn’t had enough to say about for them to stand alone. It seemed a shame to leave them to moulder, as they reminded me how much I’d enjoyed their respective exhibits, so I’ve polished them up, and paired them up. Given that they’re both exhibitions I found both strange and lovely, I think they pair quite well together, despite taking place months apart in different parts of the country.

Slow Dans

I’m often quite hit and miss with video art, in fact for a long time I felt decidedly more miss than hit about it. So I was a bit hesitant when I popped into the GOMA and the current exhibition in Gallery one gave over that entire space to a video installation. Thankfully, I need not have worried.

This was a piece that took full advantage of both the medium and the space on hand to really sell it’s idea. For a start the projection screens were huge, taking up a good half of the length of the gallery, three differently shaped screens suspended from the ceiling, like a glimpse of where cinema might have evolved in a nearby alternate reality. (All too often I’m seen short films that have suffered from being projected on a full sized cinema screen, but rarely have I seen video art that would have been truly diminished by putting it on a smaller screen, each of these pieces felt the perfect size for the respective projection screen.) Each of the three short pieces took a fairly prosaic item and used it as a starting point to tell a story which was right on the cusp between ghost stories and science fiction fables. Apparently each piece (Kohl, Felt tip and The Teachers) represent a different time period – described as a fictional past, a parallel present and an imagined future – which wasn’t evident to me at the time of watching but does explain their connections rather better. I particularly enjoyed Felt Tip and the ties with their computer chip designs, the layering of references, right down to the connection between weaving and early computing was particularly enjoyable to me.

Unexpectedly the sound design on all three of the pieces was really interesting and well designed – too often video installations are spoiled for me by poor audio experiences – though it was, perhaps due to a miscalculation regarding the space, far too loud. Thankfully, the primary reason I was in Glasgow was for the Tectonics festival so I had my gig-ear plugs in my bag so could sit in the most acoustically interesting spot without giving myself a headache from the volume. Aside from that issue, the audio was a rich and delightful part of the whole experience. I know nothing about artist Elizabeth Price’s wider body of work, but I suspect if she hasn’t previous worked in audio drama herself, she’s a long time fan of the medium, as the storytelling owed a great deal to radio drama and did a lot of the narrative heavy lifting, allowing the visuals to be richer and more abstract without the audience loosing track of the plot.

An Inspired Scavenger

The subtitle of this exhibition of Leon Patchett’s work was ‘adventures in wood and (other) found objects’ and that is very much how the works in the exhibition felt. There was a determinedly playful undertone to many of the pieces in the exhibition, as though the artist had tuned into a kind of childish joy of exploring the world for inspiration and making something beautiful and strange out of the results. When so much contemporary art is terribly serious – and a bit joyless to be honest – it’s always a delight to see an artist seeming to have fun exploring a medium, seeing art as an adventure in it’s own right is both pleasing and refreshing to this particular viewer.

There’s a lot of pinecones in this exhibition, and I must admit I was surprised how many different textures and combinations they could be assembled into. In fact if there was any complaint I had about the exhibition it was that the sculptures looked so very interestingly textured that I longed to touch them and knew that I couldn’t. (Just because I completely understand why visitors aren’t allowed to touch sculptures of these kind doesn’t make me want to touch them any less. For this very reason I did give serious thought to buying one of the delightful maquettes that were on display and on sale in the foyer, but couldn’t justify it in the end.) There was something very folk art about some of the pieces in the exhibition as though the artist was tapping into something much older and stranger in his work. I was reminded oddly of the old burryman tradition from Queensferry, if I’d encountered an exhibition like this as a child, I’d definitely have felt as though I’d stumbled on a collection of some particularly well designed and artfully built Dr Who monsters.
There are lots of egg forms in this exhibition and however delightful I found it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were going to hatch into something even stranger.

Slow Dans ran at GOMA from 27th January to 14th May 2023, and An Inspired Scavenger ran at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery from 7th October until 25th November 2023.

Constructed Narratives @AbdnArtMuseums

This weekend I took the notion to get a change of scene and headed to Aberdeen for the day. Ever since I first discovered the joys of Aberdeen’s art gallery, stopping off there to check out whatever temporary or visiting exhibition they happen to have on has become an essential part of any visit to the city. I might not enjoy every exhibition I see there – though I don’t find their exhibitions as polarising as those at the GOMA or the CCA – but they’re always interesting.

The Constructed Narratives exhibition feels as much like an argument in favour of institutions such as the Aberdeen Art Gallery. Being largely compiled of the work of three local artists, and works from the museum’s collection – that inspired their own practice as artists. All three of them attended attended first Aberdeen Grammar School – where their art teacher Charles Hemingway took his students on regular trips to the Art Gallery – and then Grays School of Art, before going on to have careers as artists. I was initially surprised that such a major retrospective was free of charge – it’s in the special exhibitions space where those usually are – but as I wandered around the exhibition it became clear why it wasn’t and that to do so would undermine the whole subtextual point of the exhibition. It’s both a celebration of their individual success, and a testament to the ways in which having free access to that art shaped them and inspired them as artists.

Of the three artists at the heart of the exhibition, I found Arthur Watson’s work the most engaging, I loved the prints, particularly the mice in all their iterations, and their evolution into the masks. (Their earliest iteration is called Maus, and I couldn’t help but see the mice from the graphic novel of the same name, and all the anti-fascist political implications therein, only made me like them more.) There’s something playful about all his pieces in the exhibition, and the way they engage with the ideas around the boundary between art and craft and also with ideas around not only tacking inspiration from but directly engaging with the art of others. As though by taking the sources of inspiration seriously and unselfconsciously engaging with them, the work was able to bypass any kind of pretentiousness and instead find a bit of joy in the whole proceeding.

However, I feel as though I enjoyed the connections between Ian Howard’s works and the artworks that inspired his younger self, more than the others. Comparing and contrasting those works he selected from the collection with his own early career work, the through-line was clear and pleasurable to spot. (If you’re more into art history than I am, it may well be obvious the connections between the others and their chosen references but as an interested layperson they went over my head.) It probably helps that I had actually heard of Paul Nash before the exhibition, so once the exhibit had established the way Nash’s early work inspired Howard’s own, it was easy to look at his later work and spot the impact of surrealism more generally on him. Those large eccentric looking still-lives are pretty arresting in their own right, but I think their more interesting when you know what they’re riffing off of or in conversation with – they need the art-historical context I think.

Flow Photo Fest

It’s September, which means that it’s time for the Flow Photo festival here in the Highlands, where all sorts of art galleries, and assorted other public spaces – from theatre foyers to cafe walls – become temporary homes to exhibitions, big and small, of contemporary photography.

The first exhibition I saw was in the most conventional location, the art gallery upstairs in the Inverness Museum. This one held an exhibition of Norwegian nature photography called ‘Female Gaze’, which turned out to be an exploration of the relationship between nature and the Norwegian national identity by various female nature photographers. Norwegian landscape painting is an integral part of the romantic strand of nationalism – both in Norway and other places – and in the wider Romantic art movement, and a largely male dominated and highly masculinised aesthetic. Several of the photographers in the exhibit engage with these ideas explicitly or implicitly, and also with issues of climate change and environmental degradation – so you might have a photograph that seems to recreate a classic romantic vista, but on closer inspection reveals the mighty forest scarred by clear cutting or acid rain. Interestingly, one of the artists in the exhibition is engaging explicitly in the issue of ‘A.I.’ Or machine learning in art. Erika Herbert’s Nature Calling combines a photograph of a pre-Raphaelite inspired pose, overlaid with AI generated text, that looks like it was painted by a young child, but really represents the as-yet immature AI’s attempts to spell ‘nature calling’. It’s really quite fascinating to see artists engaging explicitly in the grey area of where the line between inspiration and theft lies in art, where a new piece of art ceases to be in dialogue with an older work and starts to be merely an impersonation of it. (Are we teaching AI’s like DallE and Midjourney, simply to be really talented forgers, rather artists in their own right?)

Next door in the smaller gallery were a small collection of really big prints by recent art school graduate Jake Gatehouse . On first inspection, the images that make up These Systems Are Not Static just appear to be – lovely, crisp – black and white prints of watery environments but on closer inspection the water contains ripples where – the accompanying blurb reveals – the photographer himself had moments earlier submerged himself beneath the water. The title of the collection comes from a statement by an ecologist (Craig D. Allen) about ecosystem preservation and restoration and the inherent contradictions of growth and change within that paradigm. Given that most of the pictures in the series feature bodies of water that have been shaped by human interaction, they foreground the complimentary issues of nature and artifice in them as works of art.

(I failed utterly to see the exhibit in the most unusual of locations, which was one in the Botanic Gardens – I was really intrigued to see how they handled it, but unfortunately, it wasn’t running the entirety of September and I managed to miss it.)

Next up we had the less standard but still fairly usual location of the balconies and waiting areas outside the theatres in Eden Court. These spaces quite often hold art exhibits more generally and Flow Fest ones in particular – I usually remember the festival is on because I come up the stairs looking for something else and spot their exhibit – but it’s still apparently a surprise to many visitors judging by the surprised reaction of theatre goers I’ve seen come across them unexpectedly over the years. They seemed to have more exhibitions than usual as part of this year’s Flow Fest. As well as the usual dedicated wall outside the One Touch – this year featuring a collection of photographs, Glow Up, made using the obscure uranotype process, to capture decaying Nuclear infrastructure – it spread out along the entirety of the 1st floor walls. A massive enigmatic canvas outside the Jim Love studio, by photographer and filmmaker Tristan Aitchison – better known to Inverness locals as one half of Xoko bakehouse. Across from there hang some highlights from two of photographer Matthew Arthur Williams’ current ongoing projects, In Guise of Land and Beaches – I’m not sure quite what I think about this exhibit, but I found myself drawn repeatedly back to the pairs of images labelled ‘assume the position’ landscapes with and without bodies in them. I particular enjoyed Alex Boyd’s The Point of Deliverance that takes us on around the Empire Theatre and along the Atlantic coast of Ireland and Scotland, with images made with a wooden field camera, the images developed in dark tents on remote hillsides, plate glass and silver nitrate like some Victorian alchemist. Last but not least, on the final wall, hang Szabolcs Ivan’s pictures of Romani Gypsies Gathering Wood for Survival, the images are beautiful but obscure. Details hidden by mist or intentional lack of focus, as though to shield the subjects from the inquisitive judging eyes of settled society.

Speaking of Inverness bakers, Xoko was also playing host to a Flow Fest exhibition of it’s own. Rachel McClure’s The Mavericks is currently adorning their walls. The deceptively simple images of back streets and side roads of Moray – I presume, as that’s where she’s based – with constructed street signs are somehow deeply, defiantly full of hope. There’s something about the juxtaposition of these semi-industrial spaces – industrial air conditioning vents and exhaust pipes, fire exits and those mysterious metal boxes that lurk behind or on top of industrial units – with the stencilled sentiments that you might expect to be superimposed on arty shots of beaches or glamorous city skylines. The artist’s specialism involves walking in and exploring built environments, and I definitely have a soft spot for art that makes a virtue of the mundanity of so much of the built environment, rather than only focusing on the more aesthetically pleasing parts of it.

Given that two of the major aim of the Flow Photofest are to increase public engagement with photography as an artform, and to make Northern Scotland a centre for the artform, I think this might actually count as it’s most successful year as it’s really felt like there were photography exhibits everywhere this month. So many that I couldn’t go to them all and not just the one up in Thurso or over in Lewis! It’s even spilled out of September into other months, it turns out I’ve seen other exhibitions – especially while drinking coffee in Xoko! – and not realised they were part of the festival, arty photography everywhere for everyone!

Tectonics 2023

This year marks the tenth anniversary edition of the Tectonics festival. Which prompted the realisation that the first edition of the festival that I attended was in fact the first time it ran. No wonder it was a very different beast back then, they were still trying to figure out what would or wouldn’t work for the festival. It also made me realise that even discounting it’s purely digital pandemic variants, I’ve attended more than half of the times it’s run. I guess that makes me a regular in a strange way. I feel like I should have something more sweeping and general to say about the arc of the festival, but I don’t really, just that I’m glad that it’s one of those interesting events that didn’t just happen once or twice but has become a fixture of the cultural calendar.

I definitely feel as though I spent a disproportionate amount of time over the weekend – on Saturday in particular – sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Old Fruitmarket listening to something unusual. An early highlight was Semay Wu, cellist and sound artist, whose set started small, cross legged on the floor, with oversized clothes pegs and empty tins, before building via interesting loops and effects peddles into something deeply strange but really quite wonderful. Definitely an act that made me want to dig out my own collection of oddities and makes something strange of my own, inspiration in the best way.

I was less enamoured with this years sound art installation than in previous years. I think the installation had some clever ideas – converting the sound energy of pure tones into electrical energy to run lights – but the execution didn’t really work for me. Largely because the range of tones in use were all sounds guaranteed to set my teeth on edge. One of the things that makes me good at being a sound recordist is that I can usually hear that light buzzing or piece of kit humming before I even turn on the recorder. This was a piece of sound work that seemed to emphasise and amplify the sounds of the every day that people tune out and stop hearing. (Attenuation my old friend!) But for me it was an exercise in going – speaker hum, line up tone, hearing aid feedback, flourescent tube, old fridge, the sound the electricity pylons make – and led to me sitting through the whole performance willing someone to make it stop. Which isn’t the best state of mind to appreciate someone’s skills and artistic ideas.

Lucrecia Dalt was the closing act of the Saturday night and while I often describe the festival’s acts as ranging from the sublime to the excessively avant garde, this one unreservedly blew my socks off. (There always seems to be one act over the weekend that I come away absolutely loving, that justify the ticket price – and all the very much not my jam stuff I’ve sat through over the years – all by themselves.) Dalt joked about the merch stall during the gig, but if they’d had one, I’d absolutely have bought a copy of her album. I was pretty much hooked from when she first appeared on stage, it was abundantly clear as she danced back and forth between her boxes of electronic tricks that we were in for something special. She’s currently touring with an excellent and highly eccentric drummer called Alex (last name unknown…) who deserves a mention in his own right as he was a delightful and compelling on-stage presence – using a high hat that was indeed up high – and together they made a slick and eccentric live band. A certain amount of the acts at this festival always seem slightly taken aback to be on stage in front of an enthusiastic audience but this felt like an actual touring band – they even played an encore!

Not that I object on principle to the more avant garde acts on the bill at this festival. Limpe Fuchs who opened the show on Sunday was thoroughly avant garde with her percussion rig of home made instruments. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the set until I realised she kept glancing off to the side at the audience – presumably the only part of the crowd whose expressions she could see from her position in the pool of light – as though accessing how far she could push us, what she could get away with, that gave the whole performance a sense of quiet mischievousness, that I enjoyed. It left me with a sneaky suspicion that the audience in general was taking her work far too seriously and that it was intended to be rather more lighthearted, and that she was just having fun with her fabulous new toy of an instrument.

I definitely enjoyed the Sunday night SSO concert more than the Saturday night one, largely because I felt that the composers for the pieces involved really used the orchestra to it’s full advantage. Sometimes the pieces feel only incidentally for orchestra, while these were all pieces that all the strengths of different parts of the orchestra and really had fun doing unusual things with them. I hadn’t thought about it until last night, but you don’t often get orchestral music in this genre that really exploits the oddities that the brass section are capable of – I was a trombonist at school, we messed around a lot with our instruments when bored backstage at concerts – as though they forget there are sections other than the strings that like to have fun. I’ve no way of knowing whether composer William Dougherty has first hand experience of panic attacks but nonetheless he managed to create a soundscape that sounded very much how the inside of my head feels when I’m having a panic attack – just, you know, scored for orchestra. Which was rather a moving, if deeply discombobulating experience. The piece is an exploration of nostalgia – it features a damaged wax cylinder recording of Home Sweet Home – and but I’m reminded forcibly that nostalgia used to be considered an ailment, a variety of melancholia. Actually, I think that all the pieces that formed this concert, could be said to evoke a mood or a moment in time, they all felt like scores for a film we weren’t seeing, that they should have been underscoring and enhancing emotions and actions projected ten feet tall. If these composers aren’t already working in the medium, then I definitely want to draw directors and editors attention to them, because based on these pieces they’d be great at it. A succession of successful attempt at walking the line of making something new and interesting, without being so challenging as to turn off their audience.

The festival was, as ever, an experience, something strange and wonderful, to cleanse the musical palette and rearrange the listener’s expectations. Here’s to another ten years.

Aberdeen Art

It is with some small amount of embarrassment that I must admit that until last year, I didn’t actually realise that Aberdeen had an art gallery, let alone a substantial one. Logic dictated that there must be at least one, if only one like Inverness’, upstairs above the local museum or perhaps the major public library. However, I’d never really given it much thought as I’m mostly in the city to visit friends or officiate roller derby, or latterly for work purposes, so I’ve never really considered it as a tourist destination rather than a tourism departure point – I’ve flown from the airport and sailed from the ferry port. Last Summer when things were just opening up again, I took a day trip to Aberdeen just to get out of Inverness for a bit, and looking for something different to do ended up heading for the Art Gallery – I feared I might have difficulty finding it, but the signage is, distinctive and hard to miss! It was very much not the white box gallery space I was expecting and was considerably more substantial than could be properly explored in the limited time I’d assigned it that day. Clearly I needed to go back and do it properly. So, finding myself once again needing an excuse to get out of Inverness and do something cultural, I headed for Aberdeen and it’s art gallery once more.

One of my favourite things about the museum itself, is that it’s one of the few modern art museums that not only acknowledges that not all their visitors will already know a lot about art, and embraces that, not only with an overview of both how the collection has evolved and a potted history of modern art, but also with displays that let visitors interact with the art in tactile ways. (Almost as though, when the museum of refurbished in the mid 2010s they thought, a sizeable chunk of our visitors are children on school trips and actually talked to the council’s education department about what would be useful to teachers and students alike.) It’s only a couple of galleries out of the whole museum, but it speaks of a commitment to get new visitors through the doors, not just to look at the art but to think about it too.

Kenny Hunter – Sculpture Court

This exhibition was commissioned by the Aberdeen Art Gallery and as such it is both situated within the Sculpture Court as a space and existing in response to the sculptures that normally occupy that space.

These are all works of and about monumental art, both contributing to the genre and existing in conversation with it. Whether responding to specific pieces of art – Universal Monument is directly responding to Henry Moore’s bone sketches, while Elephant (Divided) is in dialogue with his own previous work – or more general tropes of monumental sculpture. Though speaking of that elephant while the piece is explicitly revealing the hidden details of a previously existing piece of monumental art – it’s the fibreglass form from which a bronze statue was cast – I was reminded of those cheap plastic toys you so often find in Christmas crackers, the kind that still show the little tags and dimples where they were vacuum formed or popped out of little sheets of identical toys, like the parts in model making kits that no-one has bothered to file down, and I was all the more charmed with the piece for that association. I found it interesting how some of the works were in explicit conversation with other pieces of art – What the Thunder Said is boiling down the themes of The Wasteland into it’s most condensed form – while others are more abstract – I challenge anyone to look at Father of Dread and it’s hollow, fractured structure and not be reminded of Ozymandias’ shattered visage with all Shelley’s romanticism stripped away.

The whole exhibit felt pleasingly postmodern, but without either the ironic detachment or po-faced sense of taking it all too seriously, rather a refreshing sense of the artist responding sincerely to some ideas he found interesting while still retaining a little bit of whimsy in their execution.

The Galloway Hoard

Up on the top floor of the Art Gallery a travelling exhibition from the National Museum of Scotland had taken up residence over the summer and into the autumn, on the recently unearthed hoard of Viking silver from Galloway. Though it turns out that called it a Viking treasure hoard is a bit of a misnomer, it was likely hoarded by Viking people but many of the silver items were Anglo Saxon while much of the intact silver coinage came from the Mediterranean and even Central Asia.

This exhibition included the best use of QR Codes to provide extra info about exhibits that I’ve encountered so far. As part of the conservation process, 3D scans were made of a lot of the items, especially the ones that need to be kept in climate controlled conditions, so beside the glass cases holding these precious tiny items, there would be a QR Code that linked to a 3D model of one of them, that you could virtually manipulate, turning it around, over and over, zooming into all the little details and adornments. Too often I’ve found QR Code based extras either so basic that there’s no point to them or too complicated so they don’t really work properly. This however was the ideal use for it: straight forward added value that satisfied that longing so many of us have to see what’s underneath an object. Relatedly, one of the central discoveries of the hoard was a pot that contained a great many treasures, but was also wrapped in several layers of different fabrics to protect it. All kinds of interesting details have been revealed by means of CT scans, but my favourite by far was that they’d used the scans to create a model that allowed them to make a 3D print of the pot which allowed visitors to inspect it up close and see what it looked like under it’s wrappings.

Pavlovka Pinhole Photography Festival

Pavlovka Pinhole Photography Festival normally runs annually in Kyiv – based in the art gallery of the same name – and brings together photo artists from around the world to share their take on the oldest photographic tradition, the pinhole camera. It’s displaced to Aberdeen, originally for a retrospective exhibition at the Maritime Museum and now to the Art Gallery for one that combines highlights from that retrospective along with images from this year’s festival.

The festival at it’s heart celebrates photographs created without a lens, and the contributing artists have made works with a variety of apparatuses, from commercial box cameras, to handmade contraptions, with some being single images and others being digital collages of dozens of pinhole camera images. My personal favourites were some inverted colour images which brought to mind old glass negative plates. The exhibition also includes a delightful display of various kinds of pinhole cameras – presumably from the wider local museum collection.

The exhibition runs until February 2023 and a festival retrospective zine publication is available to help support it’s home gallery to continue running the festival into a future that seems all too uncertain at the moment.

Tramway Art

For some reason I always think that The Tramway is further out into the suburbs than it actually is, when really it’s literally beside the first stop out of Glasgow Central on that line. It’s probably something to do with my having a complete mental block on which station is which on the East/West/Pollockshields/Pollockshaws vector and in fact, the ticket machine made a spirited attempt to sell me the wrong ticket, repeatedly selecting Pollockshaws East instead of Pollockshields East! Nothing like getting off at the wrong station – or realising too late that the train stops at the wrong option – and having to walk back, to confuse your sense of distance. Regardless of the reasons why, I always feel the need to be seeing several things to make the trip worthwhile and so it was on this trip.

Bring Me To Heal

This is a really compelling piece of art – from Anglo-Scottish/Ghanaian artist Amartey Golding – two companion piece films, one with storytellers/crafters around a fire, the other a visual reclamation of space and objects from a notoriously colonial museum, the V&A in London. The first film features the shared task of braiding the costume together, and also of sharing a fable between the three men around the fire. Both the fable – The Horse and the Goose – and the costume were constructed specifically for the film, but they have clearly been crafted with particularly care and skill, because they come together in such a way that they feel both organic and ancient, as though the artist has called up something old and forgotten.

The accompanying still images are deeply compelling in their own right, though I think they gained a great deal from being viewed after their moving counterparts. They were displayed in a really clever way, I’m not sure how they did the lighting, but it was done in such a way that the pictures seemed to glow from within – I initially thought they were on light-boxes but I don’t think that’s how it was done – despite being in a room that was otherwise in almost complete darkness. Speaking of meanings being transformed by context, the hair suit that the artist’s brother wears in the film, is also on display in the exhibit and on it’s own, without the context of the film, I found it quite creepy in a folk horror sort of way – I was reminded of seeing the Burryman costume as a child – and it was all I could do to not beat a hasty retreat without watching the film. I’m glad I didn’t though, as contextualised by the film, it’s a beautiful piece of art and craftsmanship.

Calling for Rain

Based on a Cambodian mythological poem Reamar – the Cambodian equivalent of the Ramayana – the film tells an environmental parable for children. It uses various animal spirits – embodied by dancers wearing woven vine animal heads – to represent the different actors in what becomes a parable of climate change. (Looking at the heads out of context they also have potential to be considered foreboding, but having seen them initially on the heads of the dancers they seem charming instead.) Artist Khvay Samnang makes highly site specific art, in sites of potential or ongoing environmental degradation/polluting so the landscape in which the piece is performed is as much a part of the work of art as the dancers themselves. So as much as I generally prefer to see dance works performed live, I can see that it would have lost something in translation if it had, even before we take into account the practicalities of this pandemic world.

As messy as it undoubtedly was, I approved of the decision to have rain baths on either side of the exhibit space, there’s something about the water actually falling from the ceiling of the space that really added to the atmosphere and immersiveness of the piece. The piece is essentially an extended rain dance, and what is a rain dance if it doesn’t call forth actual rain. I also enjoyed the choice – that I suspect Tramway made as it was present in both exhibits – to include a nest of cushions on the floor so that young visitors – or for that matter those of us who like to sit on the floor in the middle of installations – could fully embrace the experience and get comfortable with the art.

(From a purely technical point of view, I do love it when audiovisual art works are beautifully made. I understand intellectually why the kind of artist that specialises in ‘confessional’ art likes to do the shooting themselves regardless of technical aptitude or experience – that quest for authenticity. I guess my grounding being in film, a necessarily team effort, I don’t see collaboration or even just hiring a specialist to do what you can’t, dilutes or compromises the ‘artistic integrity’ of an work. But I digress, these artists were clearly unencumbered by such issues and their works were stronger for it. Perhaps that has something to do with their wider artistic working practices being more suited to collaboration.)

Bring Me To Heal ran at the Tramway, Glasgow from 4th December until the 6th of March, Calling for Rain is running at the Tramway, Glasgow until the 27th of March.

Autumnal Art

As part of my Nablopomo writing, I’d planned to write an overview of some of the art exhibitions that had been running over the Autumn locally. I ran out of time before I could get round to writing them up but that’s no reason not to finish it off and share it even if it no longer counts towards the challenge. 

NOTICE

Over the Summer Circus Artspace ran a project where three artists were assigned to work with three different local organisations to make a piece of art together that would be displayed on billboards throughout Inverness during October. The billboard that loomed largest in my imagination of this exhibition was the collaboration between Frieda Ford and Highland Pride, partly because it was sited on the lawn at Eden Court so I saw it several times a week, whenever I went to see a film, or grab a coffee, or if I took a short cut through their ground on the way home from work. But also because I had a wider sense of it as part of the collaborating organisation’s wider engagement work – there were consultations and surveys flying about on social media, and they had a big in person awareness event to mark the billboard’s launch. (Which makes sense, while the other organisations deal with a fixed and circumscribed community, an organisation like Highland Pride are going to particularly want to engage with the members of the community that they don’t know about for this kind of project.) Even the medium of digital collage feels particularly suited to a collaborative project. The billboard I saw the next most regularly was the one I had the least context for, the collaboration between ¡P/HONK and SNAP (Special Needs Action Project), which I wondered about every time I passed it as walked up or down the Market Brae steps. Their page on the Circus website says that they specialise in getting their audience out of their shells and creating an environment for other people to be themselves and have fun, which seems an ideal outlook for working with young people with additional needs – their billboard feels very much like a facilitation project, of being a conduit for the kids’ artistic expression. My favourite was always going to be Jacqueline Briggs collaboration with HiMRA (Highland Migrant and Refugee Action), which seems unfair to the other artists as I already love her work. For an artist as young as she is, she only graduated from art school in 2016, she already has a quite distinct art style of her own, that I find both really lovely and arresting. So of course that was the one I had to go out of my way to make sure I saw, despite being in arguably the most prominent position just outside the WASP Academy building at Midmills in Crown. This billboard was a product of workshops with the Syrian community in Dingwall – about culture and food and architecture – and it feels very much like a product of translation and interpretation. 

I find the whole concept of using billboards as an art sharing platform particularly interesting, using a medium of commerce and mass media to disseminate public art to an audience that might otherwise never engage with it. (I like the idea of using the now ubiquitous nature of QR code to provide context for those whose curiosity has been piqued, though I’d be interested in seeing what the engagement levels were for the different billboards.) I do think though that whatever the individual artist strengths of the three billboards, they work more effectively seen together, comparing and contrasting their approaches and methods of collaboration. 

Highland Threads

I stumbled across this online exhibition completely by chance – ironically when checking the opening hours for the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery – and clicked through expecting a small exhibition. However this was clearly not a quick and dirty, ‘let’s put something together quickly during lockdown so we can say we did something online’ effort.  

Apparently this launched back in April, which makes sense, it’s a lovely companion piece to the actual museums, a tempting teaser to lure visitors back out to museums once they open again. It feels as though someone had an in person exhibition all planned out and then put real care and effort into how they could go about making it an online exhibition, and more than that have it really benefit from being online rather than in person.

The exhibition features fourteen objects, one each from fourteen different Highland museums, each one acting as a flag ship for it’s home museum. Each item’s homepage features a short but informative description of the item and it’s historical and geographical context, along with a slide show of still images, some archive audio recordings and a little film of the item of clothing, displayed in it’s best light. The films in particular are worth a watch in fullscreen, for although they’re really just a catwalk spin of the items of clothing in question, they allow for a close up examination of all the little details and embellishments of the item. A close up that you could never get of an item in a glass case or pinned to a display board. For example the Ullapool museum’s item is a yachting jumper, it’s navy blue with an obscure combination of letters embroidered neatly on the chest. It looks like a thousand other sturdy, mass machine knitted jumpers of its era worn by thousands of men of my parent’s and grandparents generation in jobs requiring manual labour. (The predecessor of the now ubiquitous polyester sweatshirt.) I’d likely have walked right past it in a physical exhibit, but here, it’s given a real chance to shine, placed in it’s historical context, with fascinating photographs, interviews and other historical documents that tell the intriguing role played by the men of Lochbroom in crewing the racing yachts of the interwar period. Up close and lovingly lit to it’s best advantage, the apparently plain navy reveals itself to have waves woven into the pattern, a little detail like the names of the yachts embroidered on them, that indicates that this was work wear that the crew could be proud to wear. The unassuming jumper reveals an insight into the importance of this work to the local economy and to the racing yacht culture. Allowing it to hold it’s own among the rather fancier items on display from other museums. 

The Printed Line

This is the current exhibition at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, it’s a selection of printed line art works from the Arts Council Collection from across the 20th Century that’s been on a somewhat extended tour of the UK – I was amused that it had just two stops in Scotland one in the museum closest to me, and the other in the local museum of my childhood – as coronavirus caused a bunch of it’s expected displays to be cancelled or rescheduled. The exhibition looks at how various artists have used varying printing techniques to exploit the potential of the printed line. 

There are some lovely examples of how just a few straight lines, carefully chosen and positioned, can become really effective studies in perspective, that sometimes seem to change with the position of the viewer. However, my favourite part was the accompanying video from the Arts Council illustrating the various techniques used to produce the different works on show, wood cuts, etching, dry point, screen printing, lithography. (There’s an artist I follow on social media whose working videos of her linocut technique I find very soothing, but I’d never really linked it in my head to ‘wood cuts’ that people talked about in old books, that they might exist on a ) It was particularly interesting to see how the different techniques impacted on the styles of the artists using them – the way lithography opened up the opportunity to artists who normally worked in charcoal or wax crayons to make multiple identical copies of their work without having to give up their preferred artistic medium. 

The screen printing demonstration stirred up fond memories of designing and printing t-shirts with a silk screen in second year art. I’d all but forgotten the unit until I saw the video, paging through books of fonts and magazines, cutting and tracing until I had a template that I was satisfied with and then printing a two colour t-shirt. It was such a fun project, since then I’ve preferred collage and stencils to freehand drawing, finding it easier to get what I see in my mind’s eye down on paper that way. Perhaps that’s why I prefer sound design – with all it’s assembling, cutting and amending of found or collected elements – to composition which feels much more as if it needs to come from whole cloth.

Meet, Make, Collaborate @InvMAG

I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me that the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery would be open again – it re-opened with Level 3 so is comfortably in the swing of things now we’re in Level 2 – but it wasn’t until I saw them tweet apologetically that they weren’t accepting bookings from Moray and Glasgow postcodes that it dawned on me that I could in fact go and spend my afternoon looking at new art. I went with no expectations, having intentionally not looked up what exhibition they had on before going, to avoid either building up hope and being disappointed, or putting myself off. There was an art exhibition on, that I could go to in person, that alone was worth it. I would be pleased to see even mediocre art at this point. Handily I need not have worried, it was definitely not an afternoon of mediocre art.

Meet, Make, Collaborate is the touring exhibition that resulted from Applied Arts Scotland’s international exchange programme, and involves collaborations between artists from Canada, Mexico, Scotland and Thailand. The first part of the exchange took place pre-COVID so the artists were able to meet and collaborate in person, and continued in the virtual space throughout the intervening plague year.

First up, I should say that all the pieces were gorgeous, skilfully made objects, I’ve picked my favourites to talk about, but only really because otherwise this review would be 3000 words long. There wasn’t a rubbish piece amongst them, even the pieces that didn’t speak to me personally were skilfully executed and dealt with interesting ideas.

In the ante-room to the main Art Gallery space there’s a silent short film playing that would be easy to walk past, but it is definitely worth waiting for it to start again and watching it through. In passing it all seems a bit abstract, but when viewed from the start it provides a charming insight into the collaborative process of the artists that, for me, added much needed context and set me up to be look positively on the works in the main exhibition.

Mengnan Qu and Susan O’Brien’s collaboration ‘New Silk Road Medal’ is a series of small but perfectly formed pieces that are lovely in and of themselves even before you know about the layers of symbolism that have been worked into them. Much like the Silk Road from which the piece takes it’s name, the medals represent the clash and melding of very different cultures and art practices and the sharing of technology/techniques. Collaboration and exchange, but hopefully with less cultural imperialism in either direction.

My favourite piece was another Canadian/Scottish collaboration, this time between Carol Sinclair (left wing) and Rebecca Hannon (right wing), called Birds of Passage. With each feather being made of different materials from or representing the artists respective locations, chosen and processed with sustainability in mind. (It probably helps that I was primed to like this one by the introductory film, having seen the artists’ delight in each other’s creations as they held up ‘feathers’ to show each other on a video call.) It feels like a joyful collaboration, as though the artists had found a shared vision and had a great deal of fun realising it together, even if they couldn’t be in the same place.

As a sound person I was delighted by the renderings of recordings of Zapotec – an indigenous language from Oaxaca, Mexico – into woven banners. At a casual glance they look like traditional craft work, every day and over looked, but when you read the plaque and look again much more embedded information and meaning is revealed. The transformation of the analogue elements of a child’s voice, bird songs or the sounds of the weaving machines themselves into digital recordings back into the ‘analogue’ art of weaving – especially given the important role of weaving patterns in the evolution of computer programming – really made the piece stand out for me. I was reminded of the sonographs that were included in the Natural Selection exhibition from 2019. Or perhaps those little visualisation screens that graphic equalisers had in the 90s. Like so many pieces in the exhibition, the close you looked, the more layers of meaning were revealed.

Cocooned from the Elements is a collaboration between Lynne Hocking-Mennie (from North East Scotland) and Prach Niyomkar (from North East Thailand), due to their in person collaboration period coinciding with Storm Ciara their work is heavy influenced by ideas of sustainability – the dyes were created from indigo and storm-scavenged lichen – and the impact of climate change. The use of a parasol and an umbrella as the base for each of their pieces makes an effective analogue for the predicted move to the extremes of weather – the very hot and the very wet. While the idea of a cocoon as a place of both safety and transformation is both hopeful and ominous.

Meet Make Collaborate is running at the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery until the 19th of June.

Waterscape @CircusArtspace

I started writing this art exhibition review, the weekend after I saw it, when the official advice was to avoid pubs, clubs and concerts, anywhere with more than 500 people or that was confined and busy. (The Highlands had yet to have it’s first confirmed case of coronavirus.) An art exhibition, mid-week and off the beaten track seemed an ideal way to spend the afternoon on my day off – there was in fact, just me and the exhibition invigilator for my whole visit. By the Monday everything had changed and it felt weird writing this article. The exhibition itself had been wrapped up early. But part of why I went in the first place was because it might be a while before I could see another art installation and I was correct about that. This exhibition was definitely worth seeing and though circumstances cut it’s already short run down even further, it’s worth remembering.

For obvious reasons, I have fairly high standards when it comes to sound art installations. I get to see them so rarely and the subsequently high expectations mean that I’m all the more disappointed when the art turns out to be disappointing. For a while, a few years back, the best I could often hope for would be that the installation would be so rubbish that I would be so annoyed that I’d be inspired to make my own sound art in grumpy response.

Sometimes though, I come across a sound installation that is so good it inspires me for the opposite reason. Nicola Gear’s contribution to the Waterscape exhibition is definitely in the latter category. It’s an installation in the two parts. The first one Weather is around sixteen minutes long, broken into five movements (glacial melt, storm, shore, garden and pub) played over speakers in the exhibition space. The second part was installed on little portable MP3 players, with headphones so that you could listen just to it or to both pieces at once. The two pieces run in tandem to each other, you can stop and start the one on the player whenever you like and really play around with how the two of them interact with each other, moving yourself around the room, standing up or sitting down – I was alone in the space so I even tried lying on the floor, pretending I was in one of Marco Dessado’s boats on a loch somewhere – to really get the most out of the experience. If all art is changed by it’s interaction with the viewer, then it was true of this exhibit more than most.

If you get the chance, I highly recommend sitting on the floor between the two boats that make up the main part of Marco Dessado’s part of the exhibition, and listening to the headphones on one ear and the speakers with the other ear. The two parts of Gear’s installation interact in new and different ways on each loop. In the low slanting winter light, with the boats hanging close by at head height, you begin to feel almost underwater. Just lovely.

Waterscape ran at Circus Artspace @ Inverness Creative Academy from March 11th to March 18th – it continues, partially, online.

Waterscape Exhibition

Quarantine Culture

I must confess that I haven’t really partaken in most of the ‘quarantine culture’ events that have been thrown up in recent months. As I largely work in news these days, I found myself designated a key worker and in many ways life continued as normal, just with fewer colleagues, more remote working and some adventurous technical work arounds. (And lots and lots of hand gel and anti-viral wipes…) So unlike many people I wasn’t stuck indoors all day, needing innovative media to shake me from the malaise or distract from the same four walls. I spent all day trying to create some kind of normality for the listeners at home, so when I came home what i wanted was comfort viewing of my own. Which mostly looked like vintage cooking programmes, classic concerts, and hours and hours of Radio 3.

I’ve read and heard about all the dramas and comedies filmed in lock down, admired the innovation and resourcefulness of the makers and gradually come to accept that much like the hours of plays and Shakespeare that were also available, they just weren’t going to be part of my lockdown experience. That was until I discovered a range of short ‘culture in quarantine’ programming, from interpretive dance, to virtual art exhibitions to author talks. Perfect for short attention spans and dipping in and out of as the mood takes you.

Dance

Having been a dancer as a child, I’ve retained a deep love of dance and instinctively approve of it, however abstract or ‘interpretative’ it turns out to be. I do however have to be in the mood for it – unless it’s tap dancing, high quality tap dancing is always a drop everything and watch situation. I came to watching ballet in my late 20s so I gravitate to stories I know, as I struggle to follow the narrative – honestly I want to be down the front with the ten year olds watching the dancers feet. It seems that dance on the small screen shouldn’t work but the iPlayer has a selection of very different pieces with very different styles that really appealed.

There’s an amazing piece called Sofa Dance where a collection of acrobats turn their own frustrations at being cooped up into a delightful kinetic performance that makes a virtue of the confined space of the sofa to really explore the limits and possibilities of the form. Playful and entertaining it was the perfect duration to leave the viewer wanting more without getting repetitive. Another favourite was the Swan Lake Bath Ballet which should have been ridiculous but was actually sublime. Dancers from ballet companies around the world had come together to make something fun – and they were clearly having fun – that sounded like something from a comedy sketch, yet they brought such grace to it and took the work so seriously that it felt joyous rather than being silly.

Virtual Art Exhibitions

Over the last few years cinemas have increasingly tried to diversify their revenue streams by showing other kinds of art, with live theatre from the National or live ballet from Covent Garden. One thing I never quite got the point of were exhibition previews. Essentially an hour or so of wandering around an exhibition at someone else’s pace with someone else’s opinions. (There is perhaps a reason that I generally prefer to use an audio guide that I can stop and start at will, to a live tour when visiting a historic building.) Which may seem an odd perspective from someone whose first ‘steady’ job in this industry was with a company that made audio visual displays for museums, but those were designed to either enhance the wider exhibition or as a distinct element of the exhibition itself. They weren’t supposed to replace the exhibition itself. If they were going to appear on line they were either as essentially a trailer to encourage people to visit or to create a record of a temporary exhibition for the benefit of later researchers or academics. Preserving something ephemeral for posterity.

(But then, in terms of increasing the accessibility of art in general I prefer projects that bring art to audiences in rural/remote or disadvantaged communities than those that seek to bring people to the art.)

These virtual exhibitions on the other hand feel much more in line with the tradition of good audio visual displays, highlighting details and providing supplementary materials, such as interviews and film clips, while also making good use of a personable narrator to provide background information and tie all the threads together in a welcoming and accessible fashion. Successfully walking the line between tempting the viewer who may later get a chance to go in person to still attend, yet leaving those who can’t attend satisfied that you’ve had a good flavour of the exhibition.

Scenes for Survival

These were a collaboration between BBC Scotland and various theatre companies around Scotland (mostly via NTS) to create a collection of short theatre pieces, between 5 and 15 minutes long. The format is mostly monologues, but there are a couple of duologues thrown in for variety, and as such they’re quite intense experiences. The actors vary from famous faces to lesser known stage stalwarts to new faces that seem destined for great things, while the writers and directors are a similar mix of safe pairs of hands and new voices trying new things. They cover a wide range of topics and styles – I particularly enjoyed Babe Rainbow – so you can pick and choose as the mood takes you or let yourself ride the emotional rollercoaster by treating them as individual parts of a much greater whole. They’re releasing a few new ones each week – there will be 40 in total and currently there are 32 up, I think – so even if you’ve checked them out before, it’s worth checking back to see what else they have to offer.

Opera, in Scots

Of course it’s not just the BBC producing and showcasing great lockdown art. In June Scottish Opera released a short opera – just thirteen minutes long – called The Narcissistic Fish with a libretto in Scots. It’s a small but perfectly formed short film, with gorgeous music and visuals, cracking performances (both singing and acting) and fabulous sound design. It packs all the essential elements of a good opera – tragedy, comedy, death, love, secrets, betrayal and jealousy – into the hothouse of a restaurant kitchen, where tensions are high and the knives – both metaphorical and literal – are sharp. The use of Scots language helps add to the immediacy of the story, making it feel even more of this current moment than it would otherwise. It feels like an excellent entry point for young audiences who might not think that opera could be for them, and I highly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in giving opera a try but are reluctant to face a whole evening of historical drama in Italian to find out.