Tag: contemporary art

Funny Weather by Olivia Laing

For someone who writes about art, I will sheepishly admit that I haven’t read much art criticism. There were lots of academic papers while I was at university, but actual art magazines always seemed unattainable to me: sitting in rows at the entrance of the library, shiny pages, heavy and untouched by anyone, looking rich and intimidating. I used to wonder who those pristine publications were for, as I walked past them to go and bury my head in a battered old catalogue, full of black and white photo reproductions and not too much text.

I’d heard of Olivia Laing through friends. One gave me a copy of Crudo, her first work of fiction, a couple of years ago, while another mentioned I might like The Lonely City. Then last summer a copy of Funny Weather, a collection of her essays, landed in my lap through work. When I finally started it, what struck me most was that this writing was both easy to read, and somehow had an air of poetic stillness to it. The force of the voice, the strength of the writing, would be enough to carry you through, even if you weren’t that into art. Take her description of wandering through the Wallace Collection, for example, an experience which I also wrote about last year.

The Wallace Collection was almost empty. I drifted through the violet and empire-green rooms, with their washed-silk walls… The Fragonard girl still hung on her swing, suspended in thick air; a goose lay perpetually unplucked on a kitchen table. Nothing beats paint for stopping time cold.

From ‘Dance to the Music’, December 2017
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing, 1767

Many of these essays started life as columns for Frieze magazine, but this didn’t feel like reading art criticism. Laing’s observations felt more like the notes in the margins from some recent but only half-recognisable memory, observing life, love, intimacy, rage, humanity, shame, identity. Her subjects are broad. One essay can take in Patti Smith, killer whales, abortion rights, as well as a performance at the Barbican, and she manages to connect them all cohesively. I learned more about later 20th century American art than I had ever bothered to before. Biographies of artists and writers mix with recollections of her own experiences, and every now and then you get a glistening nugget of a sentence which you just have to let soak in.

“It was a very bright day. The sun was so low that every grain of sand cast a shadow.”

From ‘Between the Acts’, November 2018

There are many fascinating things about reading these essays, and one is that they allow you to time-travel into what, since the juggernaut of the coronavirus pandemic, seems like distant history. They are dispatches from the recent past, and the unfolding events (the refugee crisis, Trump’s election, Brexit, Nigel Farage’s “breaking point” poster) are examined with unflinching insight and a healthy dose of terror. Funny Weather places art solidly in its political context. It shows us that news ages quickly, but reminds us that many of these threats still exist: they remain there to call out, and fight against, during and after the pandemic. The way visual signs and symbols are used in the political landscape will always be a fruitful trove for artists and art observers to analyse. I would love to get Laing’s take on all the union jacks we keep seeing in politicians’ homes. Deeply sinister, would be my guess.

That the essays have been compiled into book form is a joy, because the book itself is a very beautiful object. Its pale pink, candyfloss-coloured cloth cover contrasts shockingly with the photograph: a close-cropped image of David Wojnarowicz’s partially-buried face, gritted teeth, covered in dirt and dust, called Untitled (Face in Dirt), 1992-93.

With such a strong cover, the book’s complete lack of images inside was a disappointment. Reading one article or essay online, it is easy to search for the images on my phone simultaneously. With a book, all that research is far too time consuming and disrupts to the act of reading. Asking people to read about art without including the visual reference point is a swing and a miss. It assumes a certain level of knowledge or awareness of the artists’ work, which I definitely didn’t have for every piece or even every artist discussed (I hadn’t heard of Sargy Mann at all, but now I’m glad I have). I wish they’d at least inserted a few pages of images. Or, how about a link to an online index, where we could browse all the works mentioned, side by side? That would be an amazing insight into Laing’s critical eye. That way, we could see what she is most drawn to, at a glance.

That’s a strong book cover

The major take-home for me was that Laing’s writing shines brightest when describing the work and lives of queer artists. Her essay on Derek Jarman, ‘Sparks through Stubble’ (2018) completely charmed me, partly because it lets us in to her own life too. Her mother was gay, and she grew up in ‘a village near Portsmouth where all the cul-de-sacs were named after the fields they’d destroyed’. I later discovered that this essay was written as an introduction to a recent edition of Jarman’s Modern Nature, which I added straight to my TBR list.

Through exploring the world of Jarman, Laing writes about the Aids crisis with such empathy. Her essay on David Wojnarowicz, who died aged 37 of Aids-related complications, is a plea for compassion, and re-opened my own eyes to the very recent reality of the gay community living every day in fear, their very existence politicised: ‘What does it mean if what you desire is illegal? Fear, frustration, fury, yes, but also kind of a political awakening, a fertile paranoia.’ Wojnarowicz was completely unfamiliar to me, but Laing’s writing about him illuminated connections to a young artist called Graham Martin whose work I was familiar with through Instagram. Martin’s depictions of empty, dilapidated warehouses, with naked male bodies barely distinguishable in the shadows, brought Laing’s essay to life for me. Making this conceptual link between Laing, Wojnarowicz, and Martin, I could feel the synapses in my brain lighting up. It all made sense.

Since starting this blog, a few people have asked me: if I want to learn about art, where should I start? What should I read? How does it work? I haven’t always known how to respond. If you want to read what other people have to say about art, if you find it helpful or illuminating, that’s great (thank you for getting so far with this review!) But reading Funny Weather has also made me understand that while great art writing like Laing’s can stand up by itself, the best way to engage with art is looking at it first, reading about it second.

Embracing art across the UK

It started with the news that the Titian exhibition, which united all six of his poesie paintings, commissioned in 1551 by Prince Philip Spain, would not be travelling to Scotland. I was completely gutted. I had been looking forward to this exhibition since I first heard of the plans hatching, while I still worked at the National Gallery in London. The very idea of bringing these huge masterpieces of myth together seemed magical to me. An idea that somehow turned back time, reconstructed a historical moment, and recognised paintings as objects with lives of their own (over the centuries they travel, are put in different frames, owned by different people, and end up in different museums across the world). To have these paintings brought together once more, we would be able to see them as a series, to see them as Philip II of Spain saw them. I think I might have been mildly obsessed with the idea. I certainly saw myself as personally attached to two of these paintings, Diana and Callisto and Diana and Actaeon, which are co-owned by the National Gallery in London and the National Galleries of Scotland. When I moved to Edinburgh from London, I didn’t have a job and only knew about four people. So, I spent time in the Galleries, and seeing these paintings in their Scottish setting made me feel like I was reunited with old friends.

‘Diana and Callisto’ by Titian, (1556-9), situated in the Scottish National Gallery

The circumstances of its cancellation were understandable. The pandemic had disrupted the schedule completely (the show was supposed to go to London, Edinburgh, Spain and Boston – it still will go to the latter two locations). Even if the pandemic had been contained, the lack of festivals in Edinburgh in the summer meant the usual glut of tourists would not be in circulation, so presumably there would not be enough people paying to see these artworks and buying overpriced cakes in the shops to offset the huge costs of putting on exhibitions like this one. Travel for pleasure became a thing of the past and we were forced, by necessity, to embrace what the local could offer.

For years, uncertainty about funding has changed the way galleries operate, pushing them further down a path of supposed self-sufficiency. This is survival by embracing corporate opportunities such as venue hire, event experiences, cafes, shops, big-name exhibitions that can sell more pricey tickets (and on the more sinister side, outsourcing huge swathes of security staff and cutting specialist teams). The gallery-as-business was hit hard by the pandemic: by taking away the consumers, the model no longer worked. What is going to emerge from the wreckage of the pandemic and Brexit remains to be seen, but what’s for sure is our urgent need to recognise that art isn’t just about blockbuster exhibitions, much though we love them. Not all galleries will, or have ever, been able to afford to put on those shows. We must safeguard these places. We have to acknowledge the role of the local, the small-scale, the community-driven in art, and its capacity to provide inspiration.

To state the obvious, not everyone’s local is the same, which is why two articles that appeared in the Guardian and the Scotsman towards the end of last year made me angry (I’ve been stewing on this a while). Firstly, the Guardian’s review of the year featured the top 10 in the visual arts and literally everything, except one show in Oxford, one virtual tour, and one podcast, EVERYTHING was in London. I am not London-bashing here. I love London and its galleries, but as art writing, this is lazy. It’s likely that the writer lives in London, and wasn’t able to travel as much to explore other places in the UK, but I wish they’d acknowledged that, or simply call the article “The Top 10 Art Exhibitions in London”. Or maybe – crazy idea – the paper could have commissioned writers around the country to talk about what art was happening in their towns and cities? Yes, 9 million people live in London, but there are a further 58 million people in the rest of the UK. I could have just googled “big exhibitions London” and the same results would have come up. The article held no real reference to the pandemic, to the flourishing of artwork at home and online that it has engendered, to the incredible innovation by recent art graduates as they reinvented their degree shows, or to the turmoil it had thrown galleries around the country into.

The same lack of imagination was played out again in the Scotsman article picking highlights in visual art for 2021. Literally all suggestions bar one were in Edinburgh. As an art blogger based here, that’s a great list for me, but what about the rest of Scotland? For a start, everyone knows that Glasgow is the hub of exciting contemporary artistic development in Scotland. Beyond the central belt – what about Dundee’s thriving scene, or the two arts organisations in Scotland, Deveron Projects in Huntley, Aberdeenshire, and Inverness’ Eden Court, whose civic role in their local communities during the pandemic has earned them a place on the shortlist of a £100,000 prize from the Calouste Gulbenkian foundation?

I’m sorry to say it, but it’s likely that international travel will be off the menu for much of this year. But hopefully, just maybe, we’ll be able to visit places beyond our own homes. I’m therefore going to finish this post (this rant, sorry) with a highly personalised list of where and what I would like to visit once it is safe to do so, and with a personal commitment to push my writing, and not solely rely on reviewing big shows and exhibitions in capital cities. Art critics need to take a leaf out of the Ru Paul’s Drag Race UK’s book and start to celebrate diversity in a joyful way.

If you’d like to explore what’s out there, I’d recommend looking at the Art Fund map, an interactive tool that highlights interesting places you can see art across the UK. The National Trust and the National Trust for Scotland look after some brilliant art collections, sculpture trails and new contemporary art commissions in the UK too. Instagram can be a great way of finding out about art that is happening near you and online. If the pandemic has proven anything, it is that the local, the everyday, can still provide inspiration and wonder. Of course, we still want to see blockbusters, but there’s so much more out there to explore and to value.

Prospect Cottage, Dungeness

My list: much is in Scotland and near-ish my parents’ house in Sussex, because I’m realistic that I might not be able to get to do a full UK tour this year. I’ll update as the year evolves.

Prospect Cottage, Dungeness

Those of you who follow me on Instagram know I’ve been reading Funny Weather by Olivia Laing, and I’m planning to post a review of that here soon. In this collection of essays, the one that shines through is ‘Sparks through stubble’, originally written as an introduction to a new edition of Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature. Laing’s talk of his special home, a fisherman’s hut on Dungeness beach where he ‘set about conjuring an unlikely oasis’, has bumped Prospect Cottage right to the top of my list for as soon as I can get there.

Deveron Projects, Huntly

Mentioned above and shortlisted for the Calouste Gulbenkian prize, I have known about Deveron Projects for a while, but when I started reading properly about it yesterday, I couldn’t stop. An innovative, place-driven project that uses a 50/50 principle to balance art/community, global/local, experimental/traditional in its ethos, it’s right up my street. I can’t wait to visit, and I hope to meet the inspiring people who run it. Until then, they are hosting a series of online talks/chats on Friday lunchtimes which I’m hoping to tune into, next week’s guest is Amanda Catto talking about Creative Scotland’s visual arts strategy.

Charleston

Ah Charleston. I have been meaning to go for years and then when it had to go into survival mode during the pandemic, I worried I would never get to see inside. Thankfully, the campaign to #ReopenCharleston was successful, and a further discovery of erotic drawings by Duncan Grant, gifted to the institution, has ensured it will continue to tell the incredible stories of the lives, loves and the art of the Bloomsbury Group in Sussex for a long time to come.

Self Portrait by Duncan Grant, (about 1920),
in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Newhailes House and Gardens

This is a Palladian Mansion looked after by the National Trust for Scotland, situated down the road from Edinburgh, in Musselburgh. Apparently it has amazing rococo interiors including 18th-century trompe l’oeil decoration. The house is undergoing some restoration and hopefully will open in the spring. Book me up for a guided tour please!

Joan Eardley 100, Various venues

The work of Joan Eardley has been a revelation to me since moving to Scotland, and on 18 May 2021 it will be 100 years since her birth. This year several organisations are collaborating to form a series of retrospectives of her work, in a project led by Scottish Women and the Arts Research Network. There will be shows at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, Paisley Museum, Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries, a Heritage Trail on Arran, an exhibition at the National Galleries in Edinburgh along with more not yet announced. Follow #Eardley100 on social media for updates.

The BALTIC, Gateshead

I am ashamed to say I’ve never been to Gateshead or Newcastle. I can’t quite believe I’m confessing to that. I have no excuse, especially since moving to Edinburgh, it’s not a long train journey. The BALTIC has long been on my list of galleries to visit, so when I can, I’m booking a trip. We all know Newcastle is famous for its nightlife too, so I might try and hold out for when the pubs are open again, for this one.

Artes Mundi, Cardiff

The Artes Mundi prize is probably going online this year, but if there’s a chance to see it in person, I would love to take it. The prize was on Will Gompertz’s list of 2021 art to hope for (the list also featured places in Scotland and Northern Ireland. We ❤ the Beeb). Previous winners include Theaster Gates and Teresa Margolles, and this year’s winner will be announced on 11 February.

Towner Gallery, Eastbourne

The Towner got my attention recently because of its commitment to anti-racism action and pledges following up on statements made in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. I like that they’re following up with action, not just words stopping at words. It makes me respect them as an institution and want to go there and support their work in Eastbourne.

CAMPLE LINE, Thornhill

Located in the countryside close to Lockerbie, CAMPLE LINE is an independent arts organisation for contemporary art and film. I’ve been waiting for restrictions to ease so I can see Sara Barker’s Undo the Knot exhibition, which looks like it hovers between sculpture and painting in a very satisfying way. Also, I’ve never really been to south west Scotland and I’d like to remedy that soon.

Dalmeny House

Cycling out to South Queensferry has been one of my favourite ways to alleviate the cabin fever of lockdown. Dalmeny Estate is on the way out there, and their art collection is usually open to visitors in the summer months. I have heard great things, fingers crossed they will open up again this year.

What’s on your list? What should I write about? I would love to hear from you! Leave a comment, click the contact page or you can DM me on Instagram or Twitter.

The Forth Rail Bridge from South Queensferry, reached by bike via Dalmeny Estate

Maggi Hambling’s Wollstonecraft statue

I’m currently locked down in London, so what better activity than to go to Newington Green and look at what the Guardian yesterday called ‘one of 2020’s most polarising artworks’. It is Maggi Hambling’s A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft. If you missed out on the social media furore about this sculpture, the main issue was that people were very, very angry that what was supposedly honouring and commemorating one of the founders of feminism had a naked woman at the top of it. In principle I agreed and plus, visually it didn’t seem that interesting. More figurative art? Still?

As I trudged up, I hoped that I might see some protest performance going on (it has been covered up at various points), but there was nothing except a LOT of mud on and around the plinth, which reads “For Mary Wollstonecraft”, i.e. it’s for her, not of her, which is important to remember.

The statue on a muddy Newington Green

Firstly though, some perspective. The figurine that caused such a stir is TINY. She appears at the top of a much bigger silver blob, and though I was standing right up close, the height of the sculpture means she’s far away. On twitter and in the media, all the photos I’d seen were deceptive: closely cropped and zoomed in on the female figure, emphasising the defined abs, perky boobs and a full, rather prominent bush. Some were cross that the female body had been idealised in this way, but in the context of the full sculpture, that critique strikes me as odd. For me, this muscular figure brought to mind soviet-era sculptures, in particular, Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman. Made in stainless steel, 24 metres high and created for the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, it is one of the most badass monuments ever. The diminutive size of the figure in Hambling’s sculpture works against this reading, but it still is a visual connection I find helpful when trying to place the work.

Vera Mukhina, ‘Worker and Kolkhoz Woman’, 1937

To me the figure does not read as sexual in any way. But, maybe, because of our understanding of the nude, it’s not possible to see a naked woman without this idea being drawn into this debate. As Heather Parry explained on twitter at the time:

Yep.

The woman emerges from a swirling mass, which calls to mind another transformation, Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, the marble sculpture in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, made in 1622-25. It is based on the tale in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Apollo has been struck by Cupid’s arrow, and is lusting after Daphne, chasing her. Daphne cries out for her beauty to be destroyed, or for her body to be changed to save her from the impending rape, and is transformed into a tree. Bernini’s sculpture captures the exact moment when flesh begins to become bark. Her outstretched fingers transform into leaves, she is swallowed up as the natural form encases her living body.

Bernini, ‘Apollo and Daphne’, 1622-25

It feels strange to compare those works, because the Bernini is one of my favourite sculptures of all time, and the Hambling is certainly not. But perhaps we can see the Hambling sculpture as this metamorphosis process in reverse. Here, rather than being engulfed, the female figure emerges from the shapeless forms and looks powerful. The aesthetic of the shiny silvered bronze also acts as a reversal of the natural elements in Ovid’a tale. The sheer artificiality makes it look futuristic and alien and that is my favourite thing about it.

In its almost mirror state, it jars pleasingly with the muted, natural winter browns and greens of the mud and bark in its surrounding park. There’s no missing this sculpture, it is a beacon that demands attention and has definitely received it. Wollstonecraft has too, and that’s not a bad thing.

The take home for me is that artworks may be polarising, but art is not Marmite. You can simultaneously love and hate different things about it, you can sit with it and feel differently about it on different days. It’s a reminder that especially at the moment, when we’re consuming art on a screen and from afar, context is everything. It’s good to know if we’re getting a detail or the whole picture.

The Clearing by Samantha Clark

I am a visual person. I work at a book festival. These two things marry in a particular way which means that I frequently judge books by their covers. It’s impossible not to, and the more you learn about the bookselling industry, the more you realise how important the cover is. Different visual tropes are used depending on the genre (think big, clunky font and capital letters for crime writing). I think most experienced booksellers and librarians would be able to shelve a book based on seeing the cover from 20 metres away. 

Naturally then, when I saw The Clearing by Samantha Clark, a blurry landscape speckled with flecks of gold, I was drawn to it, as I have been drawn to her art ever since. If you aren’t following her on Instagram I firmly suggest you amend that now. Her work is delicate, intricate, pleasingly detailed and you will also be treated to snapshots of her surroundings (she lives on Orkney so they happen to be sparsely beautiful).

The cover of ‘The Clearing’ by Samantha Clark

The book broadly follows the process of Clark clearing her parents’ house of a lifetime worth of belongings after their deaths. The clearing is twofold of course, because it’s also about memory, and in Clark’s case, dealing with the legacy and repercussions of her mother’s mental illness. As she wrote in a Instagram post on World Mental Health Day, ‘this is something that doesn’t just affect those who are ill, but everyone who loves and relies on them too’. It’s a memoir about some of the tough aspects of emotional life, but it’s not brutal or grim in the way you might fear a book about this could be. It is actually hopeful and there’s a calm quality to it that makes it easy to read and digest.

Reading the acknowledgements – I start with the acknowledgements, because I’m desperately nosey and I want to know about the writer whose world I’m about to immerse myself in – it was interesting to find out that the book didn’t start as a memoir. It was meant to primarily be about ‘the spaces between things’, meditations on philosophy and science that are part of Clark’s art practice.

The writings on art take a backseat to reflections on life and family, but the style is undoubtedly formed and informed by the piercingly observant eyes of an artist, one deeply connected to place and sensitive to the meaning of everyday things: ‘Memory is not just in the mind. It lives in actual places, in actual things. It sits in empty chairs and in worn carpets and smudged walls and light switches. I stand close to the wall and rest my own fingertips against the mark my father’s touch had left, a final intimacy, the closest I will ever get to his physical presence again.’

Clark writes about a worn mark near the light switch in her father’s workroom with precision and poignancy. This writing, this deep attention paid to surroundings, reminds me again how glad I am that artists and writers do all this observing, capturing, distilling. That they share it with me, the reader-observer, so I can be led to notice more, so I can get more out of the ‘stuff of life’, is why I love art. It makes me feel so privileged that I can be on the receiving end of all this work.

When I come to the end of a book, I tend to go back and write down the parts that resonate in my notebook. I read The Clearing back in January, in those pre-pandemic days, but looking in my notebook now, so much remains so utterly relevant to the present. Clark’s reflections on noticing the details, particularly of city life, have stuck with me. This passage helped remind and reassure me of a presence of hope, and I want it to do the same for you.

‘Perhaps every age feels like the end times. May be there is nothing new in this feeling that reality is full of pain and suffering, injustice and degradation, gathering pace, so much, too much to feel it all, so we make ourselves numb. But reality is also and at the same time full of startling beauty. The spinning feather catching the sunlight above the rush hour traffic. The starling on the rooftop signing a song of car alarms and squealing bus brakes. It feels like a small and necessary act of resistance, to pause to listen to the the urban starling’s city song, to attend to the careful washing of a cabbage leaf, to the uncountable blades of grass in my local park, each slender blade performing its own Indian rope trick as it lifts itself miraculously towards the spring sunlight.’

Page 164, The Clearing

These small and necessary acts of resistance are how we will get through this winter. Thank you, Samantha Clark, for reminding us.

‘Florilegium: A Gathering of Flowers’ at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh

There’s a new, free exhibition in town, at the Botanics. Ever a beautiful place to relieve your Covid-19 cabin fever, to feel the peace of looking at plants and be made to feel small by impossibly tall trees, now you can supplement it with a visit to Florilegium: A Gathering of Flowers. The first exhibition since the RBGE started its Climate House initiative, the exhibition marries what seem to be two very different ways of looking at flowers. 

The first is factual, scientific, research-based. Packed into the first room are depictions of flowers from the Garden’s collections, submitted by botanical illustrators from around the world. I love their precision, the sense that these drawings have been set to view in HD. Glancing at these densely stacked images, their uniform wooden frames fitting perfectly with the olive green of the wall, I’m convinced there would be enough detail here alone to make an entire exhibition. Enhanced by the ikebana style floral displays, it’s what visitors might expect, might hope to see. It’s beautiful, classy, and it’s about flowers. Tick.

Florilegium: a gathering of flowers, installation view. Photo by Tom Nolan

Up the stairs, we’re taken into a somewhat different realm by four contemporary artists, Wendy McMurdo, Lee Mingwei, Annalee Davis and Lyndsay Mann. While the immensely skilled botanical illustrators are concerned with depicting the flower exactly, and in some cases, the pollinators too, the artists upstairs are more concerned with what we cannot see. The emotions and meanings we as humans attach to plants, their embroilment in our colonial past, and the metaphor of life and death a flower provides so effortlessly, are all explored here.

Wendy McMurdo’s photographs from the Indeterminate Objects series from 2019 use gaming software to collapse the blooming/withering lifecycle of a single flower in one vase, an eye-catching narrative that makes you look twice. Her Night Garden series (2020), reflects on how her mother’s ill health and recent death was combined and synchronised with blossoming of a large, mystery, tropical-looking plant in her suburban garden. I loved the uncanny photo of seeds resting in the palm of her hand, which looked to me like the hand itself was punctured, decaying: a wound between the states of hurt and healing.

Wendy McMurdo, ‘Night Garden’, 2020, installation view, photo by Tom Nolan

There’s a pleasant chiming here with the work 100 Days with Lily by Lee Mingwei, which documents a performance created back in 1995. His grandmother died, and in mourning he lived with this plant for 100 days, carrying it everywhere. He projects his own grief on to lifecycle of this plant, but the presence of the banal activities of daily life (Eating with Lily, Sleeping with Lily, Shitting with Lily) overwrite and undermine this strange, solemn ritual. For Florilegium, Mingwei has planned a new work called Invitation for Dawn, where opera singers will perform directly to the recipient via live video call. It sounds weird, experimental and intimate, but in a great way. You can participate between 16 November and 11 December, email creativeprogrammes@rbge.co.uk for more details on how to get your ‘gift of song’.

Lee Mingwei, 100 Days With Lily, installation view (photo by Tom Nolan)

The work of both Annalee Davis and Lyndsay Mann anchors the exhibition in something deeper, bringing the role of the Botanic Garden, the collection of plants, the colonial ecosystem at the heart of RBGE’s existence, into view. Annalee Davis is a Barbadian artist whose studio is situated on what used to be a sugar plantation. Her practice investigates the history of that land, examining the power structures that have been tilled into the soil. Here, her series As If the Entanglements of Our Lives Did Not Matter (2019-20), is casually pinned up on the wall, unframed, unglazed. It immediately felt visceral and direct, denying the formality, poise and stiffness of Inverleith House. Pink, flesh-like depictions of messy clumps of roots are daubed over old payment ledgers from the plantation, which are intriguing, loaded documents in their own right. In a haunting portrait, she places two of her ancestors side by side, who though blood relatives, would have never lived together in reality, separated as they are by race and class. 

Annalee Davis, ‘As if the Entanglements of Our Lives Did Not Matter’ (2019-20), detail

Davis’ art works in dialogue with Lyndsay Mann’s A Desire for Organic Order (2016), a mesmerising film of 55 minutes which explores the RBGE’s Herbarium, where species of preserved plants are kept for study and research. Although most visitors won’t have time watch the film from start to finish, it’s a fascinating piece, which shines a light on the strangeness of it all: the meticulously categorised, catalogued, classified plants, sitting in row upon row of filing cabinets and box files, the collection expanding over the centuries as new species are found and brought to the RBGE, their final resting place. 

The violence surrounding these collections is examined at a distance, with the narrator’s voice dispassionately implying but never quite explaining what we know now, that far more care was given to these foreign plants than to the humans who lived alongside them. If you do have the chance to sit here a while, I’m sure it will make you see the exhibition, and the whole RBGE endeavour, in a slightly different light. You may not think you need this part of your world to be challenged, that you just want to enjoy the Botanics and not think too much about the difficult history and context. But it’s the ability of artists to show things you thought you knew in a new way, that is what makes them so vital to how we think about our past, present and future. That’s why we need the upper floor of the exhibition. We can’t just have a “gathering of flowers”, we need someone to tell us what they mean.

Flower displays at ‘Florilegium: a gathering of flowers’

‘Janet’ by Caroline Walker at Ingleby Gallery

Yesterday I went to see Janet, an exhibition of paintings by Caroline Walker. This was my first Edinburgh gallery visit since March, and it felt great to be back.

Caroline Walker, (born Dunfermline, Scotland), has created a series of works focusing on her mother, Janet, based entirely in her home. They document her mother moving from room to room, like the evidence of a childhood game. Caroline seemingly goes unnoticed, she spies on her mother, following her as she carries out chores: cleaning, gardening, cooking, dusting. We too, the viewers, spy, follow and peer in unnoticed, and it’s almost surprising when on one canvas, Janet looks straight back at us.

From left to right: ‘Bathroom Sink Cleaning, Mid Morning, March’, (2019), ‘Sizing Pillowcases‘, (2020) and ‘Dusting Pictures, Late Morning, March’, (2019)

These domestic activities are elevated, not dismissed, by the artist. The images are snapshots which combine immediacy of photography with the grandiose detachment of oil paintings. These daily moments are purposeful, meaningful, considered, deliberate.

‘Changing Pillowcases, Mid Morning, March’, (2020)

Yet they are also intimate. They capture the feeling of when you’re walking past houses in the winter when it’s dark outside, when you’re thrilled and somehow comforted by the warm glow within, even though you’re outside of that warmth. That feeling is especially captured by the jewel-like light in Making Fishcakes, Late Afternoon, December (2019), and Tucking In, Late Evening, March (2020). I loved looking in, indulging my curiosity. You can tell a lot about someone by what they surround themselves with. Janet likes animals. Janet seemingly also collects egg flips.

‘Making Fishcakes, Late Afternoon, December‘, (2019)

At Ingleby Gallery, the main exhibition space is on the ground floor, but upstairs in the Feast Room there are works by other artists the gallery represents. It’s like a special extra helping of art you didn’t know you were going to get, and was here where I found my favourite work by Walker, Hemming Pyjamas, Late Morning, December (2020). The darker palette of the room around the painting, the fact that the room itself is more domestic (with sofas and a dining table, albeit very grand), the placement of seeing it from afar as you come up the stairs makes it so utterly convincing and beautiful. Even though Walker paints on linen, which gives an overall matte effect, the warm light shines from the room, reflecting off the chest of drawers, beckoning you in.

‘Hemming Pyjamas, Late Morning, December’, (2020)

This is a wonderful show about light, home, warmth, the intimacy of people doing normal things. It’s what we want our homes to be, there’s a serenity about these paintings, a peace I’d like to carry with me into the next few months of winter at home.

Janet by Caroline Walker is on at Ingleby Gallery until 19th December, they are open Wednesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm. The exhibition is free but you need to book a timed slot via the website.

Among the Trees review

What does it mean to come to a place like the Hayward Gallery, the most concrete of concrete buildings in the heart of the UK’s largest city, to immerse oneself in images of trees? This isn’t a museum, a science hub, or a university, so it’s not a place dedicated to learning about trees, but for looking at them. It’s impossible not to hear strains of Big Yellow Taxi as you see the hoardings around the Hayward Gallery: “They took all the trees, put them in a tree museum/ and charged the people a dollar and a half just to see em”. The irony was particularly present for me, as I headed straight to a dark exhibition space to look at nature, having just arrived from the actual countryside (full of actual trees).

The outside view

In the first room, I began by wondering whether this was going to be a contemporary echoing of Romanticism. There were seemingly no signs of human life, except for the artists of course. The ghostly, delicate Untitled (2008) by Toba Khedoori, and Robert Longo’s Untitled (Sleepy Hollow) (2014) exposed what we forget in the height of summer, the intricacies of tangled branches. I wondered then whether the show was going to be boiled down to a central message: escapism through beauty. With Covid-19, Brexit, government incompetency, economic collapse and the US election for context, we crave escape more than ever, and nature can seem to offer some sort of way out of it all. That’s also what the Romantics thought too: the fewer humans in their landscapes, the better! But we know that’s not a true representation of landscapes. They are, and now always will be, shaped by humans – for better and for worse. In that context, what does it mean to imagine landscapes without humans? Is it eco-fascism, or just an overly simplistic, narrative of nature = good, humans = bad? The artists and artworks in Among the Trees put this idea under a microscope, reminding us that art can do both – be visually pleasing and profound.

Remember the iconic Simpsons episode where Lisa has her fortune told? It’s full of painfully ironic, insightful vignettes of how the near future might pan out. In a college campus quad, a plaque reads “In memory of a real tree”, but the tree is flickering like a static TV screen. An electrical malfunction exposes this simulacrum for what it is – until a passer-by boots it back into functionality, into looking natural again. That’s the image I couldn’t get out of my mind while at this exhibition. I was looking at a monument to something we are knowingly destroying; the monument was artificial.

Yet the highly effective use of artifice in conjuring the natural is what I found most interesting about Among the Trees. One of the first spaces is dominated by a huge video projection across the back wall, the work that is on all the posters. This is Horizontal – Vaakasuora (2011) by Eija-Liisa Ahtila, depicting a huge native Finnish spruce in five video panels, each slightly out of sync. It’s mesmerising. We hear the wind in the branches, bird song, and watch the spindly, yet strong and flexible, living tree, dancing, creaking and swaying in on itself. There’s a kind of discombobulation that comes from seeing something this tall lying on its side. You’re not supposed to see the tops of these trees close up. There’s a feeling of privilege in looking without having to crane your neck, but also a foreboding in the position. Trees lie this way when they are felled.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila, ‘Horizontal – Vaakasuora’, 2011

The other large-scale video work is Jennifer Steinkamp’s Blind Eye 1 (2018). It is wholly artificial, using animated computer technology to show a fake birch tree forest move through the cycle of all four seasons in a cool 2 minutes 47 seconds. I’ve always loved the visual effect of technology speeding up the forces of nature in a way that reveals how utterly miraculous they already are – time-lapse videos of plants growing impossibly quickly, sprouting leaves, buds, flowers, seeds and withering and dying all in a few moments. It’s all so heart-wrenching and magical.

Jennifer Steinkamp, ‘Blind Eye 1’, 2018

Revealing what is already there is at the heart of Giuseppe Penone’s work with trees. His Tree of 12 Metres (1980-82) is the most ‘natural’ of all works in the first room: a very tall tree has seemingly been divided in two, stuck into plinths and carted into an art gallery, it’s warm earthy tones juxtaposing with the smooth, cold concrete staircase behind. But this tree is actually a sculpture, fashioned from an industrially planed piece of timber that Penone painstakingly scraped away, in a reverse Frankenstein fashion, following the knots, lines and ridges in the wood, unlocking how the tree would have looked long before it was felled. He takes it back in time, back to nature, back to life.

Giuseppe Penone, ‘Tree of 12 Metres’, 1980

Death and life are here in abundance. Because trees can span many human lifetimes, they are presented as witnesses, as memento mori. Ugo Rondinone’s cold moon (2011) is a cast of an ancient olive tree in southern Italy, its hulking, twisted, wizened form reminiscent of the White Tree of Gondor, as well as calling to mind the Ancient Mariner, an old man sitting in a corner of a dark city pub, a man who has *seen things*. Steve McQueen’s Lynching Tree documents where countless African-American bodies were lynched, a site encountered while filming 12 Years A Slave. It is a tree that has, in its very shape, borne witness to and memorialised the worst of us.

Steve McQueen, ‘Lynching Tree’, 2013

Alongside this, you can see Plastic Tree B, created this year by Pascale Marthine Tayou, where plastic bags have become the bright, somehow beautiful blossoms of an Instagram-worthy sculptural tree. Simplistic idea perhaps, but still visually striking, and reminding us of how damn precious it all is, and how much it is slipping through our fingers because we are, by and large, terrible custodians. You can’t even walk down a street without seeing hundreds of disposed plastic masks on the ground, like scattered flags of surrender to the coronavirus age. The show could probably have pressed more on the climate crisis message. But I was reminded in a talk by Olivia Laing recently, that in the face of politics, art won’t make the change itself, but it’s a way of “galvanising, and grouping a response”. In other words, art can’t do the work for us.

Pascale Marthine Tayou, ‘Plastic Tree B’, 2020

The woodland I was walking in just hours before my trip to London is full of signs of human life. On a nearby bench, “Trump Out” is scratched into the surface, reminding us that our human politics infiltrate every part of our world, no matter how much we might wish to escape them. We have to acknowledge that, and not lose ourselves in the mesmerising beauty of nature and of art. That is appreciation, and it might give us space to become mindful, but that is only the first step. A moment of escapism is acceptable, but only if we emerge from it refreshed to re-engage, to take meaningful steps to do some damage limitation, to avoid the climate crisis that is unfolding before our very eyes. Otherwise we might find ourselves, in forty years, frustrated that our tree memorial isn’t convincing enough, wishing we had acted before it was too late.

Ugo Rondinone, ‘cold moon’, 2011