Academy Building, Moray College, Elgin, until 21 June 2008

'fountainesque tunnel into an underbelly...' by Georgina Porteous.

THE FIRST BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree Show is an exciting beginning for Moray School of Art. Part of the growing awareness and professional context of art practice in the North, the validation of Moray College’s Honours Degree in Fine Art is an important step forward for art education and cultural development in Scotland.

Work of depth, maturity and skill indicate a promising future for this years graduates, some of whom are already gaining a reputation for innovative and challenging work. It is a pleasure to see continuing students from the 2007 Degree Show grow and evolve through a diverse range of creative practice. Experimentation, individual expression and a willingness to expand boundaries of expectation make this an engaging show.

Brian Crawford Young’s “Corrugated Irony” continues the artist’s exploration of the art of painting, introducing a cross discipline approach through sculptural and video work. Previous figurative explorations of colour emerging from the painted ground are taken a step further in a large scale “corrugated” canvas of reds and blues taking on a more sculptural presence.

Reminiscent of Colourfield Abstract Expressionist work, Crawford Young has really delved into the formal elements of picture making through abstraction. The central work, “Ironic” a large scale composition of assembled corrugated and painted metal, is beautifully balanced. Thoughtfully executed with shifting hues of pink, rust, grey and brown, fine textures and colour are contrasted with the robust character of metal.

There is a fresh approach to landscape and its depiction here which is also echoed in the tongue-in-cheek work “The JML 5″, a series of corrugated PVC panels painted in the highly successful primary palette of a well-known Argyll artist. It is an apt reference to the limitations of that kind of palette and way of marketing the Highland landscape for cultural consumption.

Undulating hills are also translated into the abstracted form of a sound wave through the sound recording/video loop “Wave” (8mins 15 secs), and in the sculptural “Wave” constructed from oil drums. The rust and deliberate oxidisation of these surfaces refers beautifully to the painted works and their subtle qualities of saturation, colour and texture.

Evelyn Benton’s installation work “Through The Surface” is thoroughly intriguing and wonderfully subdued. The viewer is led into an interior space through a series of screens and threads punctuated by found materials, books and pages, rolled, stitched, obliterated or protruding from their surface.

The effect is strangely comforting. Natural tones, fibres, softness of lighting and yellowed pages create a feeling of calm in spite of the fact that we are led into a dead end.

Openings in fabric and zips make the enclosed space more open to the mind’s eye. The suspension of pages with their text stitched over are as fascinating as the moving shadows they cast like breath. This is a place for the mind and imagination to wander as our eyes move over the suspended frontispiece dedication, followed by “The Meaning of Faith” and “The Meaning of Prayer”.

Use of written text from which we derive so much of our meaning is displayed in such a way as to prevent a public reading. Pages are rolled up, folded and deposited in the walls, we are compelled to stand in this interior space and find our own way. It is an intimate and personal psychological space to enter into with textiles used as a means of “display and concealment”. The outer book bindings marked by nails and the articulation of found objects throughout the structure have the quality of a drawing, as pure mark making on a neutral ground.

Matthew O’Connor’s work in pastel is highly accomplished, demonstrating significant development of technique. Understanding of tone and draughtsmanship renders the hard metallic surfaces of aircraft into sensitively detailed studies in the soft medium of pastel. The design and composition in a work such as “Airbrakes II” (Pastel on Card) is strong and focused, drawing the viewer’s attention to form and detail that we seldom pause to contemplate in the everyday.

Here the artist’s choice of material is integral, it encourages the viewer to look again at the unexpected grace of the industrial man-made world. The beauty of objects is framed by focusing on a snapshot of the whole and isolating this view, the antithesis of our daily visual experience of skimming the surface of all that surrounds us.

The experience of “realism” in this work is interesting, based not on mechanical illustration but an engagement with aesthetics, the idea of beauty. This element in the work might be further developed in parallel with the artist’s technique.

Mark Creaney’s work, seen last month with fellow Honours student Georgina Porteous as part of the “New Graduates” exhibition at Eden Court Theatre, makes a less coherent overall statement than expected in this particular show. Utilising the visual language of advertising Creaney’s work investigates popular culture in a series of brightly coloured works in the Pop Art tradition.

“Wait For Further Instructions” (Vinyl on reclaimed signage) presented in the manner of a ransom note, investigates how we receive meaning in the modern world. In a culture of continual upgrades individuals are measured in terms of their compliance with mass consumerism. Creaney asks important questions about how we define who we are, actively challenging our assumptions about visual “signs” and the accepted meaning of man made objects.

Images such as barbed wire, a rocket launcher or the image of a bomb take on an entirely different reading when wrapped in candy coloured playfulness. “Change” an image of a pack of explosives with one second left to go off suggests an alternative interpretation to that implied by our global media experience of the “war on terror”.

Creaney suggests that “Change” might also be the explosion of a new idea, rather than a negative image of potential destruction. The artist’s previous outdoor interventionist work and continued engagement with the meaning of visual language demonstrates great potential.

Kathleen Sanderson’s “Eau Non Potable” installation, created from water bottles collected with the involvement of local schools and businesses, is intended as an environmental statement. In purely visual terms or as an abstract composition of clear plastic, green and blue, variations of colour and scale fill the entire room and have a real presence.

The objects are a collection but they also represent a collective consciousness or shared responsibility. For me the assembled bottles read like figures, suggesting human consumption and our ever increasing ecological footprint. Use of bottled water in the western world and the global implications of water as a commodity are explored by the artist with community involvement central to the creation of the work. There is a strong and important message being communicated in relation to the artist statement and accompanying statistics which begs further creative development.

Caroline Bury’s latest body of work “…more than words can say…” draws on a wide range of inspiration from everyday experiences; “rugby sports pages, acquired objects, current headline news imagery, life drawing, observations and free hand drawing”. A series of predominantly figurative paintings in oil are richly textural.

The most compelling of these for me are “Glanced” and “Seen”, semi-abstract works of oil on canvas. Bury’s octagonal installation piece assembles imagery from her sketchbooks in a temple-like structure with two inner sanctums draped in red satin containing surreal assemblage sculpture. Use of dolls and birds wings like fallen angels adorn walls in a riot of black and white imagery. Printed mugs sit uncomfortably beneath domed glass flanking either side of the entrance and elements such as this seem somewhat thrown together, subverting the spirit of interrogation suggested by the news text and the creation of an internal space.

In comparison, Bury’s work in the 2007 exhibition “This Way Up” demonstrated a strong focus with sculptural and projection work that combined to make a striking artistic statement. A promising artist in both still and moving image, it is disappointing not to see a stronger voice and the same level of craftsmanship emerge in this body of work.

Georgina Porteous has continued to develop her own personal iconography in her final year through the use of found objects, sound, projection, automatic drawing and writing. The energy of line drawings in her sketchbook and wall works flowing like coloured streamers present an expressive narrative of human transformation from pain and loss.

Porteous gives the viewer enough visual cues to embark on their own imaginative journey without being too prescriptive. The stark white purity of her inflatable works such as “13 Week Foetus” (4.5m inflatable collaboration with Pete Hamilton and Design Air ) naturally invite contemplation. There is an aspirational quality to the growing child floating dream-like above our heads, then deflating like a sigh as the steady hum of air through the convoluted umbilical chord reaches the end of its mechanised sequence.

“Toilet signs with head cut outs showing 6 min video loops” utilise a recurrent motif of the female toilet symbol, joined here by the male. Facing each other either side of the threshold, there is a wonderful sense of recognition of the “other” in the presentation of this submerged footage. One feels that the artist’s vision, like her imagery, has expanded in the evolution of the instantly recognised figurative sign as symbol.

In complete contrast to the main studio exhibition by the artist ,”Grollicking” a “future work” showing in the main lecture theatre next to the college reception, is uncharacteristically graphic and unexpected. Video footage of a deer being dissected is strangely mesmerising and sickening in equal measure. The manner of filming is slowed so that the carcass seems to tremble with life even as it is being cut open, innards intact and displayed rather beautifully in pale blue.

The artist’s ability to juxtapose objects of beauty and ugliness call into question our perception of both, an approach to the visual which is consistently challenging. Porteous’s exploration of ideas and visual language has tremendous potential on an international stage.

Artists such as these will be instrumental in redefining our region in the future. I sincerely hope that with this inaugural show UHI will demonstrate the same dedication as these graduating artists and continue to invest in the development of creative industries through professional training. Moray College of Art is uniquely situated as a prospective centre for excellence, education and visual research and it is particularly gratifying to see the emergence of potential lead artists within this first Honours year exhibition.

© Georgina Coburn, 2008

Links

• Moray College Degree Show
• Degree Show Catalogue