Festival Visual Art
Not set in STONE Talitha Kotzé explores the nature and appeal of sculpture, a major strand running through this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival
Contemporary sculpture generally produces less studio work than public display, which is why the Fruitmarket is questioning the very nature of sculpture in its showcase of Eva Hesse’s S t u d i o w o r k. The artist’s studio pieces, made of latex, wax, cheesecloth and plaster, provide a microcosm of her bigger completed works, but since
reductive method of film – a subtractive editing process similar to stone carving where everything that is touched is taken away and what is untouched remains. In Kubrick’s archive there are plentiful images of yard sticks in different settings, used for his preparatory research. ‘The yard stick tradition – used to describe set design in order to reconstruct architectural details – is no longer used today, but it provides clues to represent the human scale without actually featuring people,’ says Jane Wilson who likes to photograph empty spaces to uncover the atmosphere rather than the actual location. The Wilsons have chosen to reinterpret this idea in a bronze sculpture to be exhibited with the original archival material as if reaching into the past and making real what never happened.
‘THE BIGGEST SURPRISE FOR ME WAS THAT MY FINGERTIPS WERE MORE SENSITIVE THAN MY EYESIGHT’
A n unofficial but recurring thread in this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival programme is sculpture. That is not to say traditionally moulded, but sculpture in its broadest sense. It ranges from new work by the Wilson sisters to a big sculpture group show at Edinburgh College of Art, a retrospective of work by the late Eva Hesse at the Fruitmarket Gallery and newly commissioned installations by Andrew Ranville at the Corn Exchange.
The nature of contemporary sculpture is elastic and expanding, and its definition remains elusive. Why are artists (and audiences) increasingly drawn to sculpture and in what ways are they pushing the boundaries of the form now the materials available to them have changed? Where stone used to be the medium most readily to hand, now sculptors have access to more disposable raw materials thanks to our high-tech culture.
Sculpture can be defined as art that casts a shadow and makes a clear distinction between the second and third dimensions. Whether the process of creation is reductive, expansive or re-assembling, the outcome is something real and tangible and voluminous.
These principles can be used as aesthetic approaches to other creative practices. Jane and Louise Wilson will showcase their new film ‘Unfolding the Aryan Papers’ at the Talbot Rice Gallery. Taking its inspiration from an unmade Stanley Kubrick film about the Holocaust, featuring the actress Johanna ter Steege, their 17-minute film was put together through extensive investigation in the Kubrick archives. It is as much a moving portrait of the actor and the time the film was nearly made, as it is about Kubrick’s meticulous research. The artists will place mirrors in the gallery to reflect the film into infinity and let viewers engage with something more than a flat screen.
‘We are intrigued by repetition and reflection,’ says Jane Wilson. ‘The unfolding of the image in this architectural setting mirrors what the archive felt like and what we were doing in it.’ The Turner Prize-nominated Wilson twins have an interest in describing the psychology of space. Juxtaposing archival material with contemporary re-enactment, they employ the
68 THE LIST FESTIVAL MAGAZINE 6–13 Aug 2009