Watermill Gallery, Aberfeldy, until 13 September 2006

Blue Creature by Lotte Glob.

IN THE INTRODUCTION to her current exhibition at the Watermill Gallery, Lotte Glob writes: “My creative process involves a close, continuing and intense relationship with the landscape and wilderness of the Scottish Highlands, a part of which is long hikes into the mountains, bringing back materials such as rocks and sediments.

By working directly with these materials in a raw and unrefined state, combined with different clays, I create sculptural forms which are direct responses to the materials’ physical nature.”

For those unfamiliar with Glob’s work, this is as about as succinct an introduction to this artist’s practice as it is possible to get. Even a cursory glance at the assembled sculptural forms, bowls, platters and clay ‘books’ reveals an artist captivated by organic form and natural material – after all, it’s not possible to use anything more fundamental than rock and clay.

Her palette is a reflection of sea, sky and earth: a work such as ‘Rock Dish,’ for example, combines stony earth glazes with deep, succulent blues, the kind of colour you sometimes see reflected from the darkness of a Highland lochan under a clear, intense sky in late evening.

The glaze, which has been combined with small fragments of quartz, has oozed and melted from the vessel’s surface running like lava or magma. Its colour, texture and form immediately take the mind back to some primordial moment when our planet was being formed, when the immensity of time and vast unimaginable forces of gravity and pressure caused rock to form, melt and reform.

It’s like looking into a pool of temporality; not imagined but real because the materials before you are unimaginably old. The schists and gniesses which Glob interweaves between the pages of her vitrified rock ‘Journals’ are some of the oldest rocks on the planet, dating back to pre-Cambrian times, some 3000 million years ago.

It’s hard to imagine an artist more in touch (quite literally) with her subject matter and material. Glob’s life and art are as one; living inside the landscape which so clearly defines her being accounts for this spiritual, physical and aesthetic integration.

Although her work rarely, if ever, comments on human concerns such as society or politics or ‘the environment’ or even her subjective internal state, the work is important nevertheless, and is successful in part because it appears to transcend such temporal matters and touch directly on the reality of existence.

It’s about geology, time, space, place, and the interconnectedness of all things. If that sounds imprecise and all-encompassing then there can be no apology because Glob’s work really is this expansive, wide-ranging, ‘deep’.

Some years ago Glob initiated her Ultimate Rock Garden and her Floating Stones projects. These were and are ambitious attempts to re-integrate art with landscape and re-connect the spirit of the artist with nature. Ambitious, not only aesthetically but also practically – to date, over 70 pieces of sculpture have been placed in a landscape which covers more than 5000 square kilometres.

Glob’s floating stones are carried a handful – or more precisely, a rucksackful – at a time and placed in the myriad lochans which dot the north-west Highlands. They float and move in the wind and the small waves, are frozen and encased in ice, are perched on by birds; some are broken by natural forces or perhaps even carried away by a walker lucky enough to find one.

They seem to become as much part of the landscape as anything else and are subject to the same physical and elemental forces as everything else. Here, inside this beautifully converted watermill, they sit static and tamed, motionless and untouched by direct sunlight.

Other forms such as the trio ‘Lady of the Hill’, ‘Rock Bone’ and ‘Rock Fish’ look similarly forlorn and out of place; lashed by rain and wind or caressed by sun they are, to paraphrase, better able to find a habitation and a name.

© Giles Sutherland, 2006

Link

• Watermill Gallery