Silvana McLean at Highland Print Studios

Seahouse Tangwick

 Silvana McLean, Artist and Printmaker from Moniave, has a new solo exhibition 'Diary of a Cold Spell' based on an artist's residency in March 2016 in Siglufjordur in northern Iceland, and on work made following visits to Shetland. I saw it on 16 September while it was at the Highland Print Studio (1-28 Sept). It's now showing at the Designs Gallery in Castle Douglas until 12 November.

The exhibition included etchings, monoprints and collagraphs, mainly landscape-based, in greys, browns and blues.

I am interested in the solar-plate etching /polymer photogravura technique, in which the plate is coated in a polymer.  This image, entitled 'Seahouse Tangwick', is photo intaglio and soft ground etching, which gives some wonderful texture and line. 

Product of Iceland

Like so many artists, McLean is inspired by Scotland and the north. I was particularly interested in this exhibition for its Iceland connection.  McLean says, 'The far north fires my imagination, the focus oscillating between Iceland and the Northern Isles of Scotland. Whether works are sea-based or on geological and glacial themes, the north remains a connecting factor.



Freya and Kai chose the pictures they liked best, including this etching 'Product of Iceland', a collagraph with text. The deep blues work well. I am also interested in the technique of sewing into prints, which McLean uses in some of the pieces.

Bourgeois and Inckle

Untitled: drypoint etching 1999

It's not often that Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) makes it north to the Inverness Museum and Art Gallery. This Hayward Touring exhibition (on show from 6 August to 10 September 2016 at the Main Gallery) featured two series of work - her Autobiographical Series (1994) capturing some of her earliest memories, and a set of 11 drypoints from 1999 which are more abstract. Although much of Bourgeois' work is associated with textiles and sculpture, between 1980s and her death she returned to printmaking. 

Freya liked the images of scissors 'giving birth' to small scissors - a wonderful image referring to Bourgeois' seamstress mother. The image which stayed with me was this one, of a tiny female figure balancing on the edges of what look like shards of glass, surrounded by darkness. It is powerful. I love the way Bourgeois is so present in her work, so vital, and seems to transform personal pain into something much more uplifting. 

Untitled: drypoint etching 1999

Alongside the Bourgeois exhibition in the Main Gallery were sculptures and prints by Caroline Inckle, a 2012 graduate of Moray College in Elgin. Her work explores a material relationship with the world, both through images and sculpture. These intriguing 'spears' of pared wood painted in ochre and blue attracted Freya and Kai. I did not feel such a close connection with the sculptural work as with some of the prints, in which landscape seemed to be imbued with the sense of geological time and the creative process.


 

Iceland in action!

In August fellow-Fine Art student Liz Crichton and I helped two Shetland-based artists Roxane Permar and Susan Timmins with their collaborative art project, Northern Exchange – Cold War Histories and Nuclear Futures. Roxane is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Shetland College UHI. Iceland was the latest stage of Roxane and Susan’s Northern Exchange project, which has swapped Cold War stories across the Arctic fringe, including Russia and Alaska.

The project gathered recollections of the Cold War from the communities living close to four Radar Domes at the four corners of Iceland. Since the US military left in 2006, Iceland’s four Radar stations have been run by the Icelandic coastguard for NATO. They remain shrouded in secrecy, tracking potential air, surface and sub-sea military activity. We started at Bolungervik in the Westfjords, and visited Keflavik in the southwest, Höfn in the southeast and Þórshavn/Langanes in the northeast. For the Westfjords stage we were joined by Asta and eight Icelandic trainee teachers, as well as by four Finnish students from the University of Lapland led by artists Elina Härkönen and Timo Jokela. 

It was a great experience. We brought from Scotland the wooden struts, bolts and polypropylene triangles for constructing a small Radar Dome of our own, onto which participants wrote or drew their memories and thoughts in UV-sensitive pen, visible only by the light of a ghostly purple torch. On our long journey we met so many interesting people - from those who as children had attended US base Christmas parties to women who had been 'branded' for being seen with American soldiers, to those who had secured permits for the soldiers to leave the boredom of life on the strictly segregated military bases for short home-stays. Historians and authors also took part.

 

After our three weeks of work our small Dome was symbolically erected at Höfði in Reykjavik, the site of the 1986 Gorbachev-Reagan summit that presaged the unravelling of the Iron Curtain.
Next it is to be part of an exhibition at the international Relate North conference for artists and creative engagement to be hosted in Shetland in November 2016. Its triangles hold the stories of so many participants, from such a diversity places and perspectives. Yet it is the rich yet intangible network of relationships woven with people and places, knowledge gleaned and awareness raised, that is the real and powerful outcome of this journey of creative engagement.

Glasgow International 2016

Glasgow feels more like the wild west than Edinburgh, a wee bit more chaotic, more homeless folk on Argyll Street and around the station, more 'real life' around the centre. A good place for 'real art' then? Art that is tapped in to all this unpredictable energy, the legacy of an industrial past? 

The Glasgow International 2016 is Sarah McCrory’s curated programme, this year loosely themed around the ‘legacy of industry and the relationship artists have to making, production and craft’. Fittingly the class met up at GoMA, that elegant neoclassical building from 1778, once the townhouse for one of the city's unscrupulous tobacco lords. 

I'd already popped into a couple of the venues on the GI 2016 map. At the Briggait down by the Clyde Jack Mooney's  'Who are you and what do you want?' used luridly coloured plastic models of cake, double-headed beasts and other food of religious ritual in his work about 'the various ways in which various cultures celebrate, memorialise and represent death.' Deliberately grotesque - not the best thing before breakfast.. Other early morning memorables were Mari Hokkanen's 'Set & Settings' at the Street Level Photoworks. Her photographs are brightly coloured staged self-portraits that also play with the grotesque and the tacky, but in a much more tongue-in-cheek way than Rachel MacLean. In the next room I was attracted by Catrine Val's very different staged self-portraits within landscapes, telling the stories of forgotten female philosophers and their works. Nicholas Parry's mezzotint and mural show at the Glasgow Print Studio was a highlight; his finely-crafted intimate prints zinged against walls painted with graffiti-like marks and shapes in greys and whites. I loved the interplay of serious  print art (mezzotint is hard work!) and fun. Parry was once a graffiti artist.

Unexpectedly, after all this, GoMA itself felt a little flat. I simply couldn't get Cosima von Bonin's white plastic blow up and massive shag pile toys on any level, and I couldn't connect them with 'Who's exploiting Who in the deep sea'. But Tessa Lynch's installation about a city commute was a good collection of visual fragments, including woven brick wall and pinkish pavement slabs, of what appeared to have been a rather dull train ride. For me it really evoked the boredom and mental disconnect of the daily commute. 

It was a mad dash around the city for the rest of the two days. There was so much going on! While there was the usual mix of super clever, surreal and just plain obscure, there were some real stand outs. Monika Sosnowska, a Polish artist growing up in the post-Communist era, and observing the destruction of Communist architectural edifices, had work at the Modern Institute. The main piece was a huge tangle of black metal - bedstead or barbed wire? - occupying much of a large white space. The distortions and bends in the metal were startlingly beautiful, reminiscent of liquid reflections, belying their true solidity. I was struck by the eloquence of the piece - there seemed to be so many layers of emotional content. 

At the CCA Pilvi Takala, a Finnish artist, had a review of her work to date, with 10 videos of different social art and performance projects. She 'works with video documenting experimental performances that challenge silently agreed rules within particular communities of people'.  Although these were all thought-provoking, I remember most clearly the work 'Lost Pigeons', hundreds of posters with individually drawn, subtly different lost pigeons based on information from pigeon fanciers in Ghent. The piece is meant to 'offer insight into the economy of the pigeon sport.', but for me, and for many, I'm sure, it was a poignant reminder of all those 'lost' human lives in the urban jungle - some of whom I'd had just seen begging by Queen Street station...

Nearby in the Reid Building Serena Korda et al. had an eclectic installation 'Hold Fast, Stand Sure, I Scream a Revolution', resulting from a residency with Glasgow and Mull that links the feminist history of Garnethill with 'thin places' between worlds on Mull, and the role of psychedelic mushrooms in accessing those thin places. As a centrepiece to the exhibition the artist has created a field of porcelain mushrooms that can be played as bell, and has collaborated with sound designer Martin Low to work with a range of local people to perform with the bells at the exhibition preview. There appeared to have have been a strong element of social engagement in this work, which was not, of course, fully documented in the gallery space. 

In the end it was the Tramway south of the river that was the centrepiece of GI 2016. In a darkened space a beautifully-shot film by Amie Siegal, 'Provenance', charted the life of pieces of 'vintage' modernist furniture from the Indian city of Chandigarh, with its gradually eroding Le Corbusier architecture. The use of light, space, natural and human sound (and silence) throughout the piece, created for me something that was bigger and more expressive than its immediate socially-charged subject matter.

Martin Boyce had designed the space in the main gallery to accommodate the work of four artists. Laurence Lek's video installation QE3, using 'digital fabrication to construct a reimagining of the final voyage of the QE2…as it is converted by an anonymous Glaswegian artist into a new home for the Glasgow School of Art', was fun and clever in its technical mastery, but perhaps a slightly literal interpretation of the brief. Mika Rottenburg's deliberately dark and repulsive films about the inequities of world manufacture and trade explored the cultured pearl-making process through a female character whose nose grows, similar to the pearls, as the result of an induced an allergic reaction (Nonoseknows). 'Squeeze' about global outsourcing, includes a memorable image of a fat woman being squeezed in the same way that the blubbery white latex in a Kerala rubber plant is being processed. I couldn't watch too long as I was feart of being put off my lunch!

Sheila Hicks, the veteran textile artist (b.1934), had a monumental piece 'Mighty Mathilde and her Consort', composed of bags of brightly coloured textile fibres, recalling Glasgow's textile history and trade with the far East. That was eye-catching and truly physical. The textile piece I was most drawn to was Trolley I and Trolley II by Alexandra Bircken. These two frames of scaffolding on tramway wheels held woven pieces, recalling Glasgow's maritime industrial past. I loved the way the pieces worked in the space - solid and translucent, tough and fragile, creating textures and perspectives...  All in all, a really rewarding visit to the GI 2016.

A good day in Edinburgh Galleries!

Saturday 19 March was a beautiful spring day in Edinburgh - a great day for a second visit to the British Art Show 8, this time at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Talbot Rice, and a look at the Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries. Quite an ambitious schedule!

The quality and range of work at SNGMA was good - textiles, printmaking, sculpture and installations. The press had highlighted Rachel MacLean's new film 'Feed Me', a slick Grimm's fairytale-like satire on the insatiability of consumerism, scripted and played by MacLean in roles from small girl to talent show host to creepy granny. What was disturbing was not so much its blackness as the sense of sleezy, seedy, moral decrepitude. Certainly not child viewing! I thought it was perhaps a little too slick and obvious in its messaging, but hard-hitting, and left a nasty taste in the mouth nonetheless.

Some work I felt was a little bit thin. Daniel Sinsel's abstract watercolours, which, according to the statement were on similar theme of Hansel, gingerbread and consumerist gratification, did not seem to say much. At least Linder's massive tactile many-eyed spiral rug snake 'Diagrams of Love, Marriage of Eyes' was more or less self-explanatory. Margali Reus's work entitled 'Leaves', which featured five large metal 'locks' each about 40cm across protruding from the wall at head height, seemed to be less his gentle description of 'encrypted enigmatic forms' or an 'invitation to unravel, unpick or uncode' than about the intimidating implicit violence of 'big-brother' culture in which information is power. Perhaps that's what happens when you put heavy lumps of metal where viewers might concuss themselves on them... Alexandre da Cunha's woven mops, (Kentucky, 2010), referencing both labour and trade, were quirky, as were Ciara Phillips' large-scale prints created as a result of collaborative workshops. Both these exhibits, and the Andrea Buttner's densely symbolic posters of Kantian philosophy were somewhat lost by being hung in the corridor area. Mikhail Karakis's video 'Children of the Unquiet' involved children in a work interpreting a disused geothermal power station. This piece was well-received critically, but I thought it felt a little scripted. Having studied Russian for years and read Solzhenytsin's work, I was interested in Imogen Stidworthy's video installation inspired by the writer's time in a Soviet labour camp. I particularly struck by the work's aesthetic beauty - seen in a morsel of bread viewed microscopically, and the corresponding poetry in the writer's spoken Russian prose - One-nil to the creative imagination - thank goodness. 

There were two highlights that I found both thought-provoking and transformative. The first was Yuri Pattison's film 'The Ideal', exploring the contrast between our perception of 'clean' virtual technology and the poor, dirty, energy-intensive, debris-covered reality of the location in Tibet where the Bitcoin servers are run. There was no didacticism, just a real-time silent film of a few workers going about their daily tasks, mending equipment and their own clothes, tramping about in the dirt and dust. Once you knew the context the work spoke for itself, and movingly.

Dodo by Broomberg & Chanarin

Broomberg and Chanarin's 2014 installation 'Dodo', was a multi-sensorial experience. The artists place it very much in their usual context of conflict and paradox; according to them it is 'about' the destruction of a pristine coastline at San Carlos in Mexico as a result of the 1970 filming of 'Catch-22'. The film showing on a huge screen, accompanied by the quiet swish and shadows of an aeroplane propeller, and fragmented artefacts from a disinterred B-25 bomber, was created from previously unseen off-cuts of the 1970 film. The overwhelming impression for me was not of devastation but one of calm, and of the inexorable ability of nature to heal itself. I'm not sure that was the intention, but the strong emotional response evoked by the work made it one of the exhibition highlights for me.

There was time for a quick visit to the Talbot Rice Gallery, but there was nothing quite comparable there. On the way back to the station we had time to look in on the RSA New Contemporaries, the outputs of final year students selected from the top 5 Scottish art schools. There was quite a range of quality and maturity there, and quite a few pieces where concept and execution didn't quite match up.  Highlights for me were works were Corey Reid's prints and Iona Roberts strong oil paintings. 

So, a good full day out, and good coffee at the SNGMA!

Will MacLean Veering Westerly

To mark his 70th year, Will MacLean has a new retrospective, Veering Westerly. Starting at An Lanntair, then Kingussie and Wick, it is in IMAG Inverness until 26 March before moving on to Mull.

Having been unable to attend the artist's talk, I arranged to meet up with Kirsten Body, Exhibitions Co-ordinator at IMAG on 14 March, a day the museum is normally shut to the public, for a tour around the exhibition. She also showed me some of the books and catalogues collected to accompany the show.

The exhibition features works ranging more than forty years, from the 1970s to 2014, selected by MacLean for this retrospective. The show was curated and hung by Kirsten Body, and the main first floor gallery space at IMAG provides a spacious yet suitably intimate setting. At first glance the works seem eclectic - the familiar box constructions and layered panels hang alongside sculptural installations, prints, poems, mixed media collage and watercolours. The title Veering Westerly makes the accustomed reference to the sea; this exhibition, as all his work, is united by this central theme.

In MacLean's work found objects, seafaring stories, poems become the concrete starting points for narratives about imagination, culture, identity, time and place. For his detractors, MacLean is perhaps too founded in gaelic/Scottish culture, too much about the act of making, the materials. Although he has had exhibitions in the USA and Canada, is represented in London, and has various academic and other accolades, his choice of subject matter can be seen to bind him too closely to a Scottish or North Atlantic tradition. His proponents, however, among them well-known art critic and Emeritus Professor Duncan MacMillan, place MacLean's assemblages in a Surrealist tradition alongside William Johnstone and Magritte, with the artist, shaman-like, as 'an intermediary between worlds'. Sorley MacLean wrote of his art as, 'social realism transmuted with immanent and religious and surrealist images...to make a metaphor or another image as a symbol, and to do that unobtrusively or, as it were, unconsciously, is to my mind the mark of great natural power in any art.' (Foreword to Duncan MacMillan The Art of Will MacLean: Symbols of Survival, London 2002). There is a sense that MacLean's work does translate local into universal. Writing of 'Veering West', art critic Georgina Coburn comments that, 'the skills of an artist, visual poet, engineer and mariner are finely honed...his assemblages of objects cast ashore on eternal tides of human history feel strangely comforting...it's this transcendental quality of the specifically local and deeply personal, expanded to the universal, which distinguishes and elevates MacLean's work' (http://georginacoburnarts.co.uk/category/will-maclean/). What MacLean himself says is that he reacted against the solipcism of contemporary art, preferring to start from a grounding in real place and culture, and, like the Surrealists, working with the 'autonomous world of the imagination.'

All of these responses are in my mind as I spend time in the gallery. As I look around I quickly see why Andrew Patrizio, ECA's Professor of Scottish Visual Culture, characterises MacLean's work as revealing 'three particular kinds of time that merge together' - 'historic time', 'craft time' and 'mineral time.' (Essay for exhibition Gleaned and Gathered, Art First, 2014).

By the entrance 'Fladday Reliquary' (1978), from IMAG's own collection, is a box construction on darkened boat-boards with a white gannet skull placed within a wooden niche and edged with rusted fishing hooks. The 'reliquary', traditionally a repository for saints' bones, is a common motif in MacLean's work, used to raise to almost votive status artefacts of indigenous gaelic identity.






Memory Board (mixed media and found materials)

Nearby, the fifteen panel 'Bottle Beach Settlement' series (1988) makes reference to even earlier, prehistoric time. A buried cache of small 19th-century bottles found on Lewis and cast in resin are a linking theme; each panel records and incorporates an aspect of the context of the find - flint, salt, bone and metal. Together the pieces create a quasi-archaeological timeline denoting time and continuity, from stone to bronze age towards the present day.

Over one broad wall 'Nomad Trace' (2011) is a large mixed-media construction on two white-painted fibreglass panels, with small burial-cist-like niches holding bones and created artefacts of human survival.

Opposite this, in an altarpiece-like boxed assemblage of painted toys and pudding-dolls, is a piece apparently of a more current historical nature, 'The Archaeology of Childhood- reworked' (1989, reworked 2012)

Again of a more personal nature is 'Study for Skye Fisherman - In Memoriam', a semi-abstract painting suggesting a figure in oilskin, the preparation for a final mixed-media work of 1989 dedicated to his Uncle William, who lost at sea.

Another piece where story is entangled with making is 'Crotal Box', a mixed-media commission for the RSA, which makes reference to an incident in which a tweed jacket was not permitted on a fishing boat because it had been dyed with crotal lichen.

Two series of collaborations with poets complement these very physical pieces. MacLean has worked with prominent poets over the years, including Angus Martin, Sorley MacLean and George Campbell Hay. In 'A Catechism of the Law of Storms', a collaboration with the poet John Burnside, MacLean's twelve screen prints are engravings found in the London Times of 1880 and reworked into surreal collages. Burnside then interpreted these images into fine poems that seem to relate to real events, including Song of a Storm Wave, Storm-Bird Harbinger, Towards the Voice of Night and Apparition of the Re-drowned. The second collaboration is with Kenneth White in a series of poems and paintings. In this case, the poems preceded MacLean's small watercolours, which have a simple fluency and energy that is a good counterpoint to the somewhat heavy sculptural works.

What is abundantly clear is that MacLean's works cannot be read quickly or superficially; each piece incorporates layers of symbolism and thought into a lengthy process of making. Through them he reimagines the many mythologies of maritime culture, his 'Cardinal Points' from sea reliquaries and whaling and fishing, to emigration and arctic exploration.


In addition to the two poetry collaborations there are two pieces that stand out for me. The first is fairly simple. Entitled 'Memory Board', it is a piece of boat rudder set on end, painted and inscribed in tiny script with the names of boats leaving the port of Stornoway. I like the simplicity of the concept, the hidden narratives suggested by the text and the construction of the piece, which seems to be half-seascape, half totem.





The second is a series of three pieces entitled Atlantic Messengers- Sula Sgeir, Hirta and Fulmarus (1998, mixed media, each 158 x 52 x 31cm.) While these installations are intricate, somewhat heavy in construction and clearly dense in symbolic significance, they are also intriguing to look at. Each one has a similar open shrine-like form, hung with 'offerings' shaped like small transparent bladders. They resemble the artefacts of a tribal culture. Closer inspection reveals that 'Fulmaris' contains a fulmar skull, oil sack and feather, representing the fulmar oil that provided the St Kilda population with light. 'Hirta' includes the fragment of a love song from St Kilda, and 'Sula Sgeir' makes reference to a nun who died on the island and whose skeleton was later found with a bird nesting in her breast bone. Their common theme is the miniature bladder-like messenger 'boats' that were set adrift at the mercy of wind and tide to carry messages from St Kilda to the outside world. While one might wish to relegate these pieces as nostalgic relics of a lost culture or as items of mere local historical interest, this would be to miss something of their significance. The strength of MacLean's work is that there is nothing artificial or glib about it. Of course these pieces speak of the real challenges of a particular place and time. But in bringing to mind those challenges, they stand counter to all that is fluffy and shallow in our increasingly virtual world. Perhaps, as well as reminding of the fragility of a lost society (St Kilda), they call into question the real durability of what we call civilisation.

Iceland!

Last year I did a module with Roxane Permar up in Shetland called 'Art and Social Practice'. I wasn't sure what to expect, except that it would be well out of my comfort zone, and that's usually a good thing.

In the end, the power of it really impressed me. I really love the way that everyone has a creative imagination. If you're able to help them tap into that, as an artist, and 'nudge' a process along with a collaborative arts project, then the outcomes can be incredibly powerful, and completely unpredictable. I worked with the local primary school on 'Project Wild Millbuie' to unlock the 'Wild' in them by building a relationship with a forest. What I found was the whole was way more than the sum of its parts, and we were all changed in some way by the creative process.

So when Roxane was seeking applications for the Iceland leg of the international collaborative arts project Northern Exchange: Cold War Histories and Nuclear Futures (http://timespan.org.uk/explore/artists/northern-exchange-roxane-permar-susan-timmins/) I thought I'd go for it. The project has already worked with communities in Russia and Alaska as well as Scotland and England. By luck, and perhaps because I am well old enough to remember the Cold War first hand (and lived in Russia for a couple of years) I managed to get one of the two student places on the trip!

The project is an international, collaborative, community based art project which will conclude with an exhibition and related public events in Reykjavik. Roxane and Susan are working with two artists who also teach at universities, Asta Jonsdottir (Iceland Academy of Arts) and Elina Harkinen (University of Lapland, Rovaniem, Finland)i. Each artist plans to bring two students from their respective universities to take part in the project.

The team will use methods drawn from socially engaged and place based art practices to explore the Cold War period as it exists physically in the landscape and in the memory. In Iceland we will work with participants in four remote communities, which in common with many other northern and Arctic
populations, hosted radar installations as part of NATO’s early warning defence system thus putting them in the front line for defence during the Cold War.

The project offers students the opportunity to learn new skills in socially engaged and place-based art practices by assisting the international team of artists who themselves will be working in new contexts and situations. Students can also gain understanding of our northern neighbours in the context of our
Cold War past and nuclear futures.


The next challenge is to find funding for the flights and food. I think I may have to take my tent!!!