Visual Art
OUTSIDE THE FESTIVALS
‘WHAT I’M INTERESTED IN IS PURPOSELESS ACTIVITY’ Hitlist THE BEST EXHIBITIONS *
✽✽ Anthony Fry: Recent and New Work A large selection of new paintings inspired by foreign travels to warmer climes by the noted English artist. Cyril Gerber Fine Art, Glasgow, until Sat 11 Sep. ✽✽ Mandy Edwards: A Celebration Edwards’ documentary project includes portraits of local shop and business owners in Glasgow’s East End, exploring the development of the area ahead of the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Street Level Photo Works, Glasgow, until Thu 2 Sep. ✽✽ Simon Yuill: Fields, Factories and Workshops The Glasgow-based artist’s solo exhibition explores the relationships between communities and individuals to the land and the role of history in forming identity. CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 18 Sep. ✽✽ Recalling Lines: New Work by Robert Reddick New drawings created by Reddick since the establishment of the new artists’ centre at Trongate. See picture caption, page 125. Project Ability, Centre for the Developmental Arts, Trongate, Glasgow, until Sat 18 Sep. ✽✽ Eduardo Paolozzi Work by the celebrated Edinburgh- born sculptor and artist, including screenprints and etchings produced by Paolozzi at the Glasgow Print Studio in 1990. Glasgow Print Studio, until Sun 26 Sep. ✽✽ Similar Variance/The Floating World A pair of contrasting yet thematically linked shows at DCA. Sara Mackillop and Mary Redmond’s exhibitions were created through travel, everyday happenings and chance encounters with found materials. See preview, left. Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sat 21 Aug–Sun 10 Oct.
Artists of the floating world Two thematically similar exhibitions at Dundee Contemporary Arts have been created through travel and everyday experiences, as Neil Cooper discovers
It’s better to travel light during hard times. Whether backpacking in exotic climes or taking a walk round the block, you never know what you might find.
This is a notion that two very different but opaquely complementary shows at DCA understand implicitly. Where Sara Mackillop’s Similar Variance reconstitutes the mundane acoutrements of the filing cabinet and the charity shop to render them even more strikingly meaningless, The Floating World by Mary Redmond recreates the sights and sounds of Asia with a distinctly personal sculptural remoulding using textiles, corrugated iron and what she dubs ‘chunky wood’. Colour too is crucial to Redmond’s constructions, as well as a sense of place.
‘There’s a green I call Asia Green,’ she says, ‘because it’s as if someone’s taken this big pot of green paint and covered the place. I also use lots of textiles that I’ve dyed indigo, which was really popular in ancient Japan. It’s an ancient dye and it interests me that it’s used so widely and is a cheap and available material.’
The result of this is a bashed together and bent out of shape series of constructions capturing the essence of ancient Asia without ever being specifically defined. While Mackillop’s approach similarly recontextualises the familiar, her source materials are far closer to home. ‘I’m interested in the various differences in manufactutred objects,’ she says of her charity shop finds that include wallpaper offcuts that give off beige-tinged oh-so-slow op-art effects, unravelled receipt rolls, ten-inch vinyl records stuffed into 12-
124 THE LIST 19–26 Aug 2010
inch sleeves and artists’ books of envelopes. ‘It’s like with music formats. Things moved from eight-track cartridges and casettes to laser discs. Now with downloads there’s no physical object at all, so records become something sculptural. Jigsaws as well, if you turn them upside down they have a different quality, because you can see how they were cut.’ While Mackillop originally trained as a painter, Redmond is a graduate of Glasgow School of Art’s Environmental Art course. Both have exhibited widely, and while their DCA shows are housed in separate spaces, both capture a DIY aesthetic that chimes with the current age of austerity.
‘I suppose on the whole what I’m interested in is purposeless activity,’ says Mackillop. ‘So you might work in an office, then at lunchtime find yourself wandering into secondhand bookshops and record shops. Mine is a really distracted practice. There’s not a lot of pre-determination in what I do. I just become interested in things in daily life, and tend to notice things while I’m doing something else.’ For Redmond, the blurring of natural and more constructed elements she sees as ‘something ordinary made strange. It just solidifies my kind of language. A lot of it has an unrealness to it. I like finding objects, and making something with them that’s as if I’m working between the reality of things and the imagination.’
Sara Mackillop: Similar Variance / Mary Redmond: The Floating World, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sat 21 Aug–Sun 10 Oct.