Porteous Brae Gallery, Stromness until 18 October 2008

Heather Aberdein - Accidental V

AT THE famous Whistler v Ruskin trial in 1878, the painter of ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold’, a representation of fireworks falling over Cremorne (one of the most popular pleasure gardens in late Victorian London) was asked by the Attorney General “How long did it take you to knock it off?”

Laughter.
Whistler: “I beg your pardon?”

A G : “I was using an expression which is rather more applicable to my profession.”

More laughter.

W : “Thank you for the compliment.” ( Laughter.) “I knocked it off in a couple of days.”

More laughter.

A G: “And for the labour of two days you asked 200 guineas?”

W : “No. It was for the knowledge gained through a lifetime.”

Loud applause.

Casual viewers of exhibitions – or in this case, Attorney Generals inspecting evidence in a hotel in Victoria Street – may be accustomed to equating effort with worth. The Sistine Chapel took a while and the guy had to lie on his back getting plaster in his eyes. Gotta suffer for your art.

They may also prefer a sense of recognition, even familiarity, when they look at works on view. (The Attorney General, in that stuffy hotel room, having gazed at what Whistler called “an aesthetic representation of the scene”, said incredulously “this is Cremorne?”)

I was mindful of that brush between art makers and the world which views what they end up with when I visited Small Marks, an exhibition of weaving, drawing and sculpture by Heather Aberdein, Isla Holloway and Amy Todman. It has become one of the trademarks of the Porteus Brae Gallery that unexpected effects arise when you put very different disciplines together on a wall.

Aberdein works with stone and glass. Holloway is a weaver. Todman, for this exhibition, rubs drawings onto paper. All three think hard about objects and places, and approach their conclusion in completely different ways.

Not for Aberdein “the labour of two days.” ‘Inscape’ (what Gerard Manley Hopkins described as haeccittas, the essence of things), is a red sandstone boulder from Rackwick Bay. If you have been there you will know the massive rusty beauty of these huge round stones; if you haven’t, you are the poorer.

For Orcadians, the colour – fading from rose to peach – is instantly recognisable. This boulder, however, has been cut asymmetrically, and from the split emerges turquoise float glass deepening to shadowy grey, a smoooth slab of it. The pocked stone texture, sandwiched by glass which is almost like frozen water, seems like a meditation on solidity and flux. What happens when a stone splits? What might flow out when it’s broken?

When the sculptor describes the process – the diamond cutter, the rolled window glass, the weight and time and physical energy required to create this work – and I look again to see traces of blood sweat and tears – there are none. It looks as if it’s always been like that, solid and yet penetrated, its essence, its inscape, changed forever.

There are three enormous glass blown bubbles on the window. They look as if they are resting the way a child’s soap bubble blown through a ring sometimes does for a moment – on the carpet or a jumper sleeve – before bursting. Full of reflections and slight imperfections, with jagged holes where the iron blowing pipe went in, they are about light, fragile emptiness, rather than the solidity of ‘Inscape’.

The process of making these airy balloons is much sweatier than it looks, requiring an assistant, a lot of puff and an excellent technique ¬ but you’d never know. Same’s true of what she calls ‘Accidentals’ _ cast glass halves of Rackwick boulders strewn with copper wire ¬ the verdigris against the purity of the glass is like seaweed caught in water, in curling organic shapes.

The making process involves rubber moulds, wax, plaster and flint, and days in a kiln. (Hence the title – the copper assumes random, contingent twists and colour). What emerges looks tranquil and light. It’s not a surprise that her drawings recreate the curves and curls of boulders and organic forms. She has a clean, confident style here and strong feel for deep colour sparingly used. She’s holding an exhibition in Rye soon. Look out for it.

Isla Holloway’s work is a direct contrast, and yet it inhabits a similar world, of precision and craft. She loves stones too, tiny striated ones, banded with white or grey lines. Her cartoons – the preparatory drawings for tapestry work – are done on graph paper (it helps to plot the finished shape of the weaving, I’m told), and the slightly rubbed and muddied stone shapes arranged on the geometry of lines are very powerful, because they seem so organic in contrast to the dry greenish crisscross of triangle and angles which say to me school geometry.

Translated into woven panels, in the ‘Cone Tapestry’, her stones sit in elegant washed out sandy backgrounds, and the meditation about striation becomes a link between each panel. White thread used to score through the deeper shades of stone join an Orkney piece to a Fair Isle piece, like a journey, which moves you round a corner in the gallery as you follow the line.

It seems though that each panel is for sale individually, which is a shame, as the threads will have to be cut, and what is at present an interesting installation, incorporating shadows, movement and connection between different stones and their background, will be lost. I’m looking forward to a loosening of her weave and a deepening of her fabric palette; the muted tones suit the seashore, it’s true, but there are a million colours out there I’m longing for her to experiment with – you can see them in the pile of stones she’s put there for us to examine and enjoy.

Her pin drawings – tiny pins arranged on graph paper like standing stones seen from far above – throw shadows against the ever present graph paper, or leave marks – like the lost stones in the Stenness circle here – to be deciphered by someone. The thread strung round them, barely visible, reminded me of Knitting Jenny, a wooden toy you wrapped wool round. From the other end emerged a scarf-sausage, as you twisted and pulled the wool.

Perhaps these are about connection. Perhaps they’re a riff on the tools of her craft and what emerges. Whatever they are, they’re interesting, but works in progress, I think. We have a great more to see from this maker; when she’s braver with size, colour, and the interconnection between shape and form on a wall. It’s good to hear there may be another collaboration with Aberdein. They can bounce off each other with profit.

Amy Todman likes things, the jumble that’s random life. Stones, scissors, paper – yes, the game came to mind, because there’s something very innocent about this work, and the methodology, paper rubbings done on transparent paper, like we used to do at school.

Remember making rubbings of pennies on greaseproof paper? Todman superimposes her rubbings, one set of subjects layered over a second set, blurring the lines between what’s sharp (a bird’s skull) and what’s not (a butterfly, a handkerchief, a shadow.)

The effect is curiously nostalgic and old fashioned. She deals in layers, like Aberdein, and in tiny detail, like Holloway; but solidity is not her thing. As a result, the work has an evansecence to it which makes it seem less profound. It has the virtue of being very simple – no hours in a mould or a kiln or over weft and warp for her, and the Attorney General comes to mind.

“That,” he might have said, “is a handkerchief?” Todman might say, with Whistler, that it’s an arrangement, not a handkerchief. It’s about line and not-line. There is more to be explored here, for larger, more meditative works. Like Holloway’s stone cartoons, there are on the way to becoming something big. But they’re not quite there yet.

The final thing that unites these women is that they are all young and talented. There’s nothing more fascinating than seeing early work and what happens to it next, whether it deepens in complexity or goes round in circles. Whether they knock it off in two days or two years, they all have something to offer, something to confuse the old Attorney General in his hotel room.

© Morag MacInnes, 2008

Links

• Porteous Brae Gallery