Three Camuslusta Gallery

7 Aug 2006 in Highland, Visual Arts & Crafts

Waternish, Isle of Skye, 2006

Camuslusta Gallery.

PART OF the pleasure in visiting the Three Camuslusta Gallery on Skye is the journey to get there. About twenty minutes walk from the village of Stein along a rocky beach, across two streams (with bridges, I hope – Skye burns can be mighty frisky – ed.) and you arrive at a beautifully converted contemporary space that is completely unexpected.

Full of light and affected by the sights and sounds of the environment outside, this gallery is a wonderful place to take time to view work of excellent quality and considerable depth. The current exhibition features work by gallery owner and artist Judith MacLachlan and artists Linda Ridell Smith, Caroline Dear, Julie McWhirter and Kyra Clegg.

Linda Ridell Smith’s white felt bowls and beakers defy expectation in their use of material. The rigidity and solid form we expect from a functional vessel is replaced by the softness and feathered edges of sculptural objects, breaking down ideas about division between craft and art in a wonderfully tactile way.

Julie McWhirter’s work is also reflective of the fluid and dynamic relationship between art and craft, and moves effortlessly between disciplines. The elegant simplicity of her ceramic work in black and white is defined by its marked surface. The artist moves from the medium of clay into a charcoal, ink and mixed media drawing such as “River Island”, and this quality is also evident in an abstract work such as “Red Island” in acrylic. The energy in her mark regardless of medium is always engaging and distinctive.

If you enjoy art which reveals more with each viewing, then visiting Three Camuslusta Gallery on Skye will reward your mind and senses

Black and white photography by Caroline Dear, “Ice Reflections” and “Sand Reflections”, are beautifully observed studies of the subtlety of nature. Her large photograph “Bog Cotton” produced on a large scale acrylic sheet reads like an abstract composition.

Nearby a bog cotton open basket also by the artist brings the viewer into contact with a three-dimensional object that is part drawing seen against the white background where it is displayed, part sculpture and part traditional craft. The artist continues to push the boundaries of expectation in the same way that the exhibition in connection with the Big Willow project did so successfully.

Judith MacLachlan demonstrates a considerable range of work in mixed media, acrylic, collage, lithograph, relief and screen print. The cross influence of different disciplines is evident in paintings such as “Poet and Bird” in mixed media, where part of the abstracted surface seems delicately etched. There is sensitivity and awareness with regard to layering of materials consistent with a printmaker’s art.

“Guillemot” is a great example of the way in which a sense of landscape is achieved by abstraction that defies location. The energy of the piece is on the beach outside and yet this painting translates into something desolate and universal in feeling in the figure of the dead bird in a minimal space.

“Beached”, with its transition from white sky to grey horizon, the suggestion of two figures and the blue square that seems to confine and contain the sea that we expect to be displayed to infinity is also an image of great loneliness and feeling.

Kyra Clegg’s body of work originally created for the St Andrews poetry festival is breathtaking. It displays a true connection to the spirit of Emily Dickinson’s poetry which inspired it, and the figure of the poet. I found myself going back to these multilayered works which are stimulating and affecting. Working through a series of box constructions that comment on aspects of the poet’s unique identity, work like “The Night Garden” reveals the dark interior of the poems and the illumination of creative practice.

The poet’s literal sensitivity to light and sensitivity to the gaze of others made her reclusive but unbelievably productive as a poet. Of 1800 poems written by Dickinson, only seven were published in her lifetime. The delicacy of New England butterfly specimens seen in what we feel are nineteenth century displays seem to communicate ideas of confinement and transformation beautifully.

The most poignant aspect of this exhibition is the distillation of these creative ideas into a sculptural cocoon form which is linked to the white dress that Dickinson wore. The white dress of the poet as a human being is perfected in the central sculpture and four smaller hanging panels of printed Perspex which surround it. The light in the gallery reflects through these panels, dancing around the central figure in patterns of transient light.

On the floor two lines of mirror shards lead into the cocoon form, gleaming with the iridescence of broken butterfly wings. Printed on each shard are the words “I am feeling for the air”.

On the second floor four cocoon forms are suspended as delicate as if they had been spun by nature. The phrases “I’m feeling for the air, my cocoon tightens, the power of the butterfly and a dim capacity for wings” are written minutely across their surfaces. They are enigmatic, containing the suggestion of freedom in nature’s transformation that is expressed only as an aspiration in life and as the poet’s words on the page.

Other works by Kyra Clegg include “Bird”, four sculpted pebbles with the relief of views of the skull progressively emerging like fossils from the surface, and a collaborative work with Judith MacLachlan titled “Levels”. This multilayered Perspex construction contains found materials from outside. Carefully displayed are pieces of wire, fibre, plastic, stone and bone with the delicate remnants of fish. It is yet another piece in the gallery that invites closer inspection and interpretation by the viewer.

If you enjoy art which reveals more with each viewing, then visiting Three Camuslusta Gallery on Skye will reward your mind and senses.

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