Tramway Art

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art, art exhibits, art films

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

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art, art exhibits, lockdown 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

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art, art exhibits

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.

Art in 2020

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art, art exhibits, but is it art

Normally, at this point in January I would be writing about the previous year’s documentaries. However this year I find I have nothing to say about them. It’s not that I didn’t see any great documentaries this year – Free Solo, Three Identical Strangers, Honeyland, Scheme Birds and Ghost Fleet were all worthy of note – rather that no wider themes emerged this year, if they existed as part of a larger conversation within documentary making then I have no idea what it was saying. Perhaps I’m just looking for meaning where there is none, or perhaps I need to look in other directions for a while. To that end I’m going to focus my attention elsewhere on the blog this year.

A few years ago – nearly a decade ago now, and isn’t that a scary thought – I set myself the challenge of writing about ten art exhibitions here on the blog. It was a really fun challenge and made me see a lot more art than I would have otherwise. Then, as now, the biggest challenge was that I can’t write about every art exhibition I see, because it’s only when I really love or really dislike art that I feel moved to write about it. (For example, I saw some art – ‘Proximities’ by Rod Purcell – yesterday at Upstairs that made me smile and that I really quite enjoyed – more than enjoyed, if I’d had enough disposal cash in my budget I’d have been tempted to buy a print – but it wasn’t art that left me with lots to say for good or ill.) Perhaps that’s actually the correct term for it, moved, did it move me or not, if I’m going to write about art it’s less about personal preference or taste more that the work changed my perspective on something either positively or negatively. I can’t force the response, as a dozen half-written abandoned reviews of perfectly decent art exhibitions ruefully remind me, the best I can hope for in those circumstances is that the mediocrity might annoy me into verbosity.

(The art I hang on my own walls is mostly canvas prints of photos I’ve taken on my travels, collages of art postcards that friends and relatives have sent me, and in an odd exception, a favourite web comic creator’s take on an art deco classic. I’ve seen some amazing, inspiring art over the last decade that has moved and engaged me, changed my perspective and challenged my unconscious prejudices but most of it I wouldn’t give house space to, even if I could afford it.)

I’m generally of the opinion of that very few ‘artistic’ experiences are ever wasted. Beyond my love of ‘bad movies’ and how much I’ve learned from things that provoked the reaction of ‘that was brilliant and I never want to watch it again’, there’s something about the accretion of ideas over time that build up in your brain and provide context for the other art you consume. An exhibition that on it’s own I had nothing to say about, may prove later to contribute ideas or stand in contrast to something else I see later. Sometimes art exists in conversation with another piece of art – whether as explicitly as the Monarch exhibition a couple of years ago or more subtly/abstractly – or as part of a wider movement. I suppose that’s why I like to try to see art wherever I go, whether the grubby immediacy of street art and murals, the colloquial pleasures of an unexpected exhibition of watercolours or landscape photography in a rural library stairwell, or an attention grabbing installation by a big name artist.

All this is a long way round to say that I’ve set myself a target this month to do something ‘arty’ each month this year – whether seeing an art exhibition, some theatre, attending a concert or a dance performance – and writing about them, getting some perspective on, and hopefully finding some inspiration from, taking the long view on the arts here in the Highlands and beyond.

Performance & Participation: art @Tate Modern

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art, art exhibits, but is it art

I had plans for the blog this month. I was looking forward to writing some of my leftover prompts from Nablopomo. But life, as it does, intervened and among other things I found myself working in London for a week and didn’t get near a computer – unless you count using an iPad to wrestle a portable autocue into submission – all week. However, I did find myself with a couple of mornings free and with my colleague’s admonishment to ‘do something fun’ – I think he was more expecting me to hit Oxford Street – I headed out to see some art.

Last time I was in London I made my first trip to the Tate, so it seemed appropriate that this time I should head off to the Tate Modern. I can’t really talk about the Tate Modern without talking about the building that houses it. Much as the structure and nature of the Victorian era buildings that house Tate Britain and museums like it inform the nature of the experience, the collection and reveal the times in which they were built, the repurposing of the old Bankside power station speaks volumes about the times and priorities that shaped it’s creation and collection. The building itself seems to exist both as a work of art in it’s own right – modernist almost to the point of brutalism in architectural style – and in dialogue with the wider art world, a physical embodiment of the question of what should a museum be and look like, along with wider questions about what is art?

After all the controversy about the new viewing balcony spoiling the view/privacy for the surrounding luxury flats, I had no choice but to take the lift right to the top and see what all the fuss is about. (You can in fact see right into people’s living rooms, but the flats are equally overlooked but neighbouring blocks of flats, as quite frankly, are most high-rise flats in London.) The view in the other three directions, however, is quite stunning. The birds eye view gives you a sense of scale about the place that you don’t really get from ground level, demonstrating how vast the place is while at the same time how unexpectedly close to each other significant buildings really are.

One of my favourite exhibitions was the Living Cities gallery, in particular Kada Attia’s rendering of the ancient city of Ghardaïa in cooked couscous of all mediums and Naoya Hatakeyama’s light-box depictions of Tokyo’s night lights.

All the exhibits that I saw seemed to take on an element of foregrounding the relationship between viewer and artist. However, in Perfomer and Participant, this theme was made explicit. I particularly enjoyed the Krasinski room, less for the art itself – which is fairly simple – but because you could still interact with it, the each viewer’s experience was entirely unique and I took great pleasure on my return wander through, in watching how other visitors interacted with it. Whereas Lala Rukh’s Rupak was a strangely compelling, almost to the point of hypnotic experience a rare example of video art that completely captured me and held me hostage for the duration.

I feel that I would have got greater pleasure from the works of both Paul Neagu and Lygia Clark & Hélio Oiticica if I could have interacted with their works as originally intended. There was something decidedly odd about looking at art in glass boxes that was explicitly created to be interacted with, being at once told that the point of it was to interact with it, while at the same time being prevented from doing so. It makes sense, why you’re not allowed to touch these objects anymore, as they’re projects that the artist has finished and is no longer replacing/repairing or in some cases the artist has died and this is what remains of their work. Nonetheless it felt somewhat that the audience was being teased with the ghost of a time when this art had somehow more and less value at once.

I feel like I’ve been hearing about the Turbine Hall for the entirety of my adult life, and some quick research shows me that I’m entirely correct, as Tate Modern opened in 2000, the year I turned sixteen. When I was there, it was housing Kara Walker’s Hyundai Commission work, which I must say the pictures do not begin to do justice to the sheer scale of it. It is definitely a piece of art that takes advantage of the space available to it. (The first time I saw Kara Walker’s work was in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the best part of a decade ago, her stark silhouettes sprang to mind the moment I saw this fountain, her style remains so distinctive.) There was something slightly surreal to see the fountain surrounded by parents with buggies and toddlers carefully balancing their way along the parapet of it, but as that appears to have been part of the point of the work of art, that it exists in conversation with public fountains such as the Victoria Memorial, and should be interacted with in the same way.

Accross Land and Sea @CircusArtspace

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art, art exhibits, nablopomo

In order to talk about this exhibit, I need to first talk about the space it took place in. CiRCus_Artspace is an artist collective based in the WASP studios within the Inverness Creative Academy. (Or, if you’re a certain age, the old Midmills College building.) Their stated purpose is to make contemporary art available to a wide Highland audience while also supporting recent graduate artists from the area. I’ve been in the space a few times now – and I’m always taken by the light in the space, both natural and artificial – but this was the first time I’d actually seen it with art on display. Being a largely crowd-funded endeavour, the exhibitions tend to have fairly short durations and necessarily limited opening hours – this is in fact the third exhibition that they’ve held in the space, and it was the first I’ve made it along to see. (I was particularly disappointed to miss the soundscape on the preview evening.)

The exhibition itself was a coming together of three artists from across the Highlands and Islands who share an interest in traditional crafts and craft materials and are inspired by their surrounding landscapes and communities.

I was particularly taken by Vivian Ross-Smith’s work, which felt very much like a conversation between the contrasting ephemerality and practicality of traditional crafts and artistic practice. There’s definitely something about the work ‘Network’, made from preserved haddock skins and Shetland wool that has lots to say about both the bonds and fragility of rural communities – particularly island communities such as the one Ross-Smith grew up in on Fair Isle.

I was also somewhat charmed by Patricia Shone’s time-based pieces that dominated the space and seemed to both compel and confuse visitors to the exhibition. In this case, time-based means that they were dried clay pieces that were either filled with water so that they would collapse over time or designed to dry out and self-destruct in the opposite direction.

Across Land and Sea ran at Inverness Creative Academy from October 11th – 20th 2019.

Natural Selection @InvMAG

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art, art exhibits

Natural Selection is an utterly charming exhibition exploring nest building and egg collecting. It’s the result of a five-year collaboration between artist Andy Holden and his father, ornithologist and broadcaster Peter Holden. (One of those forgotten faces from the Children’s television of my own childhood, whose re-appearance gave me a definite case of the warm and fuzzies.)

The first part of the exhibition that I encountered was a piece I didn’t initially realise was part of the exhibit, some particularly lovely examples of woodturning. This turned out to be a piece called Silent Spring – presumably after Rachael Carson’s landmark book that kicked off so much of the modern environmental movement – in which sonograms of various birds calls had been rendered into turned wood objects. Like waveforms made three dimensional, they’re somehow both intensely familiar yet utterly alien. Which is a good starting point for describing so much of this exhibition and about our encounters with birds in general.

The human-sized recreation of a Bowerbird’s bower dominates the entire space, a stunning and compelling construction. I empathised greatly with the small children who were also visiting at the same as I was, and had to be repeatedly restrained from venturing onto the surrounding woodchips. I also wished to run through the tunnel of the bower, or at least sit under its canopy and look up in admiration at its construction.

It was the section on nest building; in particular the parts focusing on Bower Birds and their bowers, that most caught my attention. There are very few species other than humans that build structures for purposes other than shelter – and even fewer of those could be said to have a purely aesthetic purpose. In fact, there is some evidence that Bower Birds have some concept of art in the way that humans would recognise it. They appear to have a particular affinity for the colour blue and there’s something both stunning and sad about the examples of elegantly constructed bowers, decorated with exquisite care with bright blue bottle caps and straws. A painful juxtaposition with the information that it’s thought that Bower Birds evolved this propensity for such complex courtship rituals – for art itself – due to living on isolated islands where food was plentiful and predators scarce.

The use of the tri-screen video presentation somehow draws together all the elements of the exhibition, from the gorgeous porcelain replica egg collection, to the 19th century naturalist drawings, through the human-sized bower, to the experimental video art. Combining the old-fashioned – with both its charms and its horrors – and the modern technological tricks that make the whole thing possible.

The combination of our father and son team gives the whole procedure a feel of the kind of slightly experimental science and nature programmes you sometimes stumbled upon accidentally, late in the evening on BBC 2 in the 90s. The kind of thing you probably wouldn’t tune in for on purpose based on the listing, but if you stumbled across it you’d find yourself utterly compelled by, and end up learning a bunch of interesting facts you’d enthuse about to anyone else you met for months afterwards.

Natural Selection is at Inverness Museum and Art Gallery until 11th January 2020.

Art in Inverness

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art, art exhibits

One of the best things about many Scottish urban spaces, is the way the surrounding landscape forces its way into the urban skyline at unexpected moments. There are few more breath-taking moments for me in autumn, than rounding a corner, as the light is fading and being surprised by some gap in the skyline revealing the play of light shade on a distant hill. Even in the centre of a city as densely populated and built up as Glasgow, you can still walk down Buchanan Street on a clear day and look up at the right moment to find you can see all the way to the Cathkin Braes. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Highlands, where the lines between urban and rural are so blurred that it is easy to lose track of where they lie. Indeed, a fair amount of the art I’ve seen since living up here – at least from locally based artists – has explored that mutability to a greater or lesser extent and effect.

Art is everywhere here. When I first moved up to Inverness, despite favourable first impressions, I did wonder how much art – let alone interesting art – I was likely to find on anything like a regular basis. Most of the really interesting art I’d seen in over a decade of living in and around Stirling had been stuff that I’d stumbled on, mostly by accident. And almost all the art that I’d gone actively looking for in that time had been in Glasgow or Edinburgh, cities I already knew to a certain extent. Indeed, at first I only really saw art in the galleries upstairs in the local museum and the local arts centre, but as time passed, I’ve learned to sniff out the clues. It turns out that once you know what to look for, art can be found all over the place here, bursting out all over.

The on-going grind of the recession has left Inverness, like almost every other town in Scotland, with its share of mournful looking empty retail units. However, over at the Victorian Market, they seem to have come up with an idea that feels like it ought to have been an obvious idea. They’re using one of the empty units as an exhibition space. It’s currently displaying art from UHI students, which I hope continues, given that while the college itself is rather a charming piece of architecture, it’s apparently rather lacking in spaces in which to make and display art. We can only hope that this results in rather more innovative and experimental takes on producing and displaying art from the resident art students. In the interim, I’ve certainly been enjoying finding odd bits of art and craft-based sculpture in unexpected corners of the market and in unlikely shop windows.

Social media has been a great boon in my search for new art. I’ve spent a fair amount of time, working on identifying a collection of good local sources that promote art locally and nationally. But its definitely one of those situations where the more you find out, the more you find there is to find. Or often in my case, the more I find I’ve just missed.

Something that I often narrowly miss, are the exhibitions at Upstairs. Between 2pm and 4pm on week day afternoons, an architecture firm on Academy Street opens their doors to art lovers. Small exhibitions by local artists are the order of the day and there’s something delightfully transgressive about the whole experience. Although the gallery has managed the rare trick of being open at precisely the time-frame when I’m least likely to be free to enjoy some art, on those occasions that I’ve managed to make it along to see the art, I’ve both greatly enjoyed the art – the current exhibition of constructed photography by Michael Gallacher is well worth a visit – and the feeling that I’ve snuck in somewhere I’m not supposed to be.

The building itself is a bit of a hidden gem, with a lovely tiled entranceway, and nicely understated glasswork on the stairwell windows. And the advantage of the gallery space being in an Architecture firm, if you’re me anyway, is that even if the art turns out to not be your taste, they’ve got some fascinating little architectural models of their own on display that you can enjoy while you’re there.

This month, even the more conventional location of Inverness Museum and Art Gallery’s upstairs art gallery had rather an eccentric exhibition. A Curious Turn is a visiting exhibition from The Craft Council, on the history and resurgence of automata as both a craft and art form. It’s very rare that I see art exhibitions that feel like they’ve been carefully crafted into a work of art themselves. The exhibition is full of delightful details from the hand-cranked exhibition sign, to the little mule that draws himself, to the odd assortment of cogs, cranks and accoutrements that let younger visitors build their very own automata. (When I visited someone had put together the kind of macabre assemblage that only small children and art students are capable of creating.) My own favourite part of the exhibition was that almost all the automata on display were operable, if their handles were too small and fiddly for general use, they’d been wired up so that you could make them run in their glass cases with a push of a button.

Monarch of the Glen & #RealLifeMonarch @InvMAG

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art, art exhibits, but is it art, edwin landseer, ross sinclair

The art gallery portion of Inverness Museum and Art Gallery is currently playing host to the National Galleries of Scotland’s travelling exhibition of both Edwin Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen and Ross Sinclair’s specially commissioned response to it After, After, After…The Monarch of the Glen – Real Life is Dead. Two more different pieces of artwork it would be hard to imagine.

The thing that sticks with me, perhaps the most important thing to take away from the exhibition is that the two pieces have one important thing in common other than the obvious. Both pieces of art are much better in person than, they have a particular presence that causes them to lose something in photographs. The Landseer painting is such a familiar image that its become an almost ubiquitous image of picturesque ‘scotch-ness’, and as such should really have no power at all over anyone who isn’t invested in all the things it has come to represent. Yet, stand in front of it – better yet, stand a little off to the right of it – and there’s something curiously three dimensional about the painting. In the half-lit gallery space, the light and shade of the painting are enhanced and for a moment it seems as if the stag might actually step out of the painting. Away from the bright glare of the usual art gallery setting or the advertising billboard, it becomes just a painting once more, something that it seems possible to project your own meaning onto.

Likewise, Sinclair’s response is a very different beast to stand in front of. Where in photographs, it seems a messy garish sprawl, standing with it in situ, it has a raw and strangely elegant presence. It’s a literal deconstruction of the kind of ‘scotch-ness’ that the Landseer has come to embody. Like a strangely articulate howl of rage and grief or stumbling unexpectedly across some pointedly political graffiti where you’d least expect it. It manages to be both haunting and confrontational, at once questioning and illuminating – both figuratively and literally – the piece that it responds to. Both a demand for remembrance and a indictment of nostalgia. At once both a joy and cringe indeed.

Both pieces will be on display at Inverness Museum and Gallery until 18th November when they will continue on their tour of Scotland.

Mini City/Land of Giants Exhibit @EdenCourt

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architecture, art, art exhibits

Another chunk of the festival of architecture has arrived in Inverness, this time in the form of the Mini City/Land of the Giants exhibition. I stumbled over it by accident at Eden Court the other day, they often have exhibitions tucked away upstairs and I spotted it by chance glancing down into another half-hidden gallery from half-way up the stairs. (One of my favourite things about Eden Court is all the fabulous little nooks and crannies that it has, it’s great fun to go for an exploratory wander and find somewhere to curl up with a book and a cup of tea, but its also really easy to miss something really interesting for approximately the same reasons.) Tucked away in the gallery next to the Bishops House part of Eden Court is a fascinating little exhibition.

The exhibition itself features scale models of buildings, campuses, sites and homes, both built and un-built, most of them local but all of them created by local architects and model makers. (For the purpose of this exhibition ‘local’ means ‘North of Scotland’ which appears to cover, the Highlands, Islands – Hebridean, Northern & Western – Moray, Aberdeenshire – in fact quite far south given the inclusion of Perth Concert Hall.) They were mostly created in the process of designing the buildings and some of those that have made it into full-sized three dimensional space, are accompanied by photos of the finished buildings in situ which adds a pleasing symmetry to the process.

They’re almost all mounted on piles of wooden pallets, which you’d think would look really messy, but actually really enhances the feeling of constructed reality and impermanence of the models themselves. The models – with a few notable exceptions – were created as part of a design process, to demonstrate a design in 3D space, to show a more realistic view of how its features will interact with the wider landscape. Mostly, they were never meant to be seen by more than a handful of people – in some cases, just a few architects and the client. There’s something secret and special about seeing these artefacts, ghosts of buildings as they might have been or might yet be. It feels like a peak behind the curtain of the architectural design process, a drawing back of the veil that enhances rather than undermines the magic.