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KATE DAVIS: NUDES NEVER WEAR GLASSES Margaret Tait winner’s solo exhibition ●●●●●
Nudes Never Wear Glasses includes the first gallery presentation of Kate Davis’ ‘Charity’ as well as earlier film ‘Weight’. Presented alongside photographs and collages, her films playfully reimagine domestic labour as a recognised profession. Combining an intimate first person narrative with
allegorical images of breast-feeding from art history, ‘Charity’ explores a mother’s relationship to her baby and the associated domestic labour. This is made palpable through oppressively close-up shots: tumbling around inside a washing machine mid-cycle, for example. Similarly, a section in which the camera is submerged in a washing-up bowl echoes the faux partition walls that break up the gallery space.
Though both films convey a sense of
claustrophobia, they are joyful in their celebration of the tactile experiences particular to women. ‘Weight’ presents photographs of domestic settings accompanied by an authoritative voiceover that adopts a formalist manner of speech. Though the collages displayed come across as
overly cerebral, the barbed wit of both films poetically acknowledges the creativity of domestic labour with unusually subtle humour. (Jessica Ramm) ■ Stills, until 8 Oct, free.
CHARLOTTE BARKER: FLOTILLA Tactile sculptures by the RCA graduate ●●●●●
Visiting the striking if well-hidden Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop in the rain feels somehow appropriate to the work of ceramic artist Charlotte Barker. Her works, as the title of her Edinburgh Art Festival show suggests, are like a fleet of dry-docked new vessels, kept pristine under cover as they wait to set sail. Perhaps the illumination could be better, however, for Barker has requested that the lights be kept off in the venue to allow the natural light from the gallery’s many windows to offer the best perspective on her work; a dull day doesn’t precisely capture this. Yet the textural precision of this Royal College of
Art ceramics graduate’s work is impossible to miss. The majority of her potteries stand atop thin-legged, smooth-surfaced tables which look as though they were carved from found lumps of slender branch and trunk, and varnished clean. None appear strong enough to carry the weighty objects which stand on top, funnel-like black and white pots whose surfaces speak of a tactileness, that kind of soft, mottled purity that a stone worn clean by the ocean possesses. Again, that’s another nautical resonance, although perhaps these aren’t new craft after all, but fragile shipwrecks worn down by the elements. (David Pollock) ■ Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, until 26 Aug, free.
JOSEF KOUDELKA: THE MAKING OF LANDSCAPE Extraordinary exhibition of work ●●●●●
Walking the full length of the Signet Library during this show of complementary photo essays by Czech-born but French-domiciled photographer Josef Koudelka, it initially feels as if you’re striding through an airport lounge, that vast and teeming thoroughfare of free movement en route to arrivals and departures. Two rows of glass-topped display cabinets that contain the two displays disrupt the space, acting as both barrier and gateway, each side in opposition and conjoined defiance. So it goes too for the contents of the cases, two monumental 20-metre-long concertina books with their black and white pages laid out to tell a story of landscapes modified, remodelled and ultimately defiled in the name of progress. The first, ‘Black Triangle’ (1994), charts how the Czech Republic's once heavily populated Ore mountain region was overwhelmed and gradually devastated by the coal mining industry. The second, ‘Wall’ (2013), follows the route of the ongoing atrocity of the wall dividing Israel and Palestine.
Not one person is in view in Koudelka’s images. Their mark is everywhere, however, in a fiercely emotive but exquisitely calm display. (Neil Cooper) ■ Signet Library, until 27 Aug, free.
STEPHEN SUTCLIFFE: SEX SYMBOLS IN SANDWICH SIGNS Vivid reclaiming of post-war outsiderdom ●●●●●
On the big screen in Talbot Rice’s downstairs gallery, a film shows two men at work and play on an imagined film set. One is a macho brute, who uses his physical prowess to torment the other, more effete, and hopelessly devoted object of his ire. A second film shows the same actors playing similar characters, but with a blunter, more melodramatic denouement. This is ‘Casting Through and Scenes from Radcliffe’, Stephen
Sutcliffe’s reimagining of a very northern English form of pop cultural iconoclasm that forms the core of his show. The first part is a re-enactment drawn from diary entries of director Lindsay Anderson while working with actor Richard Harris on his adaptation of David Storey’s novel, This Sporting Life. The second depicts scenes from Radcliffe, Storey’s Booker
Prize-nominated but critically panned 1963 novel. Storey’s tale of unrequited cross-class homosexual desire appeared the same year as Anderson’s film of This Sporting Life, with the Morrissey- esque title of the show taken from a damning review of the book.
Having actors Ali Craig and Paul Cunningham performing
Sutcliffe’s texts script-in-hand suggests an early rehearsal of a bigger, still unfinished staging. In execution, this is as meta as some of Anderson’s own work, both in his 1973 O Lucky Man!’ and his rendering of Alan Bennett’s TV play, The Old Crowd. Elsewhere are excerpts from the Lindsay Anderson Archive,
as well as books and videos from Sutcliffe’s own archive, and a showreel of short works. With ‘Casting Through and Scenes from Radcliffe’ at the show’s centre, Sutcliffe gives voice to a vivid reclaiming of post-Second World War outsiderdom in terms of class and sexuality. One yearns for it to burst through the screen, so that voice can be given living flesh as well. (Neil Cooper) ■ Talbot Rice Gallery, until 30 Sep, free.
10–17 Aug 2017 THE LIST FESTIVAL 103
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