Inchmore Gallery, Inchmore, Inverness, until 16 May

James Bruce Thomason - Packing The Silver Darlings

CURRENTLY on show in Inchmore’s upper gallery space following its recent tour to the Farum Kulturhus in Denmark, Crossing Waater represents an abridged showcase of work by Shetland Artists’ group Veer North. Since Veer North’s formation in 2003 the group have actively promoted links between professional artists in Shetland, the UK, Scandinavia and Europe.

There are some beautiful and engaging pieces to savour in this latest travelling exhibition, albeit in a condensed form. As a larger scale project, Crossing Waater will be shown at the Shetland Museum (4 July – 3 August), incorporating a series of art labs in the local community.

It is a shame not to have access to the full programme including art labs in a space completely devoted to the show as a whole. The quality of many of the works warrants such a statement, and audiences unfamiliar with the Shetland artists’ work may be puzzled by the continuity of showing unrelated work by stable Inchmore Gallery artists in the same exhibition space.

Nevertheless, this is a wonderful opportunity for local audiences to sample work by Shetland artists they may not have had the chance to see before, and I hope that Crossing Waater will set a precedent for more regular exposure to the group’s work in the future. Featuring work by Roxane Permar, Ruth Brownlee, Kristi Cumming, Anne Bain, Lesley Burr, Paul Bloomer, Susan Timmins, Mike Finnie, June Redman, Frances Browne, James Bruce Thomason and Howard Towll, the show gives a tantalising glimpse of each artist’s work in a variety of media including film, painting, drawing and printmaking.

One of the highlights of the show is Susan Timmins’s six minute film Red Gown, a visual response to a historical incident / piece of oral storytelling from Burra Isle in Shetland. The film presents fragments of narrative through still and moving image, poetry and music and is beautifully evocative of the fragile nature of memory.

The shifting, dream-like quality of the piece, superbly in tune with natural elements of sea and clouds, is accompanied by the music Stormy Weather arranged and played by Martin Naylor. Solo piano adds to the character of the work and its poignancy of faded romance and remembrance, but the most compelling element of Red Gown is the composition and human presence in the work, the merging of the cold green sea with the vibrant red fabric of the dress which has an almost figurative quality.

The moving images are painterly abstracts in some sections, beautifully composed in a single frame. The texture and detail of each composition, the folds of fabric, the weathered rib-like hull of timber and the ebb and flow of the sea is part of the inherent beauty of the film. There is too a deeply affecting sense of loss in the work, the dress half-submerged beneath the foam and sinking, the suggestion of a drowned woman whose face we never see, lost in the current and drifting endlessly in the imagination.

Mareel, St Ninians (Oil on Canvas) by Paul Bloomer can also be seen as an ethereal hinterland. The isthmus of land defined on either side by the sweeping curve of the sea is superbly rendered in phosphorescent yellow, luminous blue and umber under-painting. It is a scene that Bloomer has returned to many times in all weathers and in an infinite variety of colour, texture and mood. Here the simplified forms of land balanced against the delicacy and luminosity of liquefied paint give the image a devotional quality. This is a meditative work alive with colour and movement. It is a spiritual and physical image of landscape, the narrow stretch of sand a journey between this world and another.

Leslie Burr’s Whirlpool (Oil on Canvas) resonates with a vibrant saturation of cadmium red and vermillion. The composition is pared down, with the main figure isolated in profile in the foreground and the house anchored in an ellipse at the centre of the composition.

A psychological space is created by the use of colour and positioning of the figures in relation to each other, the distant male figure within the home defined by an outline while the female figure is positioned on the outer frame of the space. It is an intense and surreal image caught in a vibration of colour. Burr’s style, reminiscent of the work of Odilon Redon, has at its core a profound sense of stillness and contemplation, evoking the simplicity and elegance of a Japanese print.

Dwaalin (Acrylic on canvas) by Kristi Cumming enters into pure abstraction with loose brushwork and blocks of rich turquoise against drawn marks of red and black. This is a beautifully balanced composition in which colour and form are equal partners.

In total contrast, the photo realist style of Brian Henderson’s Rockpool revels in detail as the eye descends into the water. Parcel (Acrylic on board) has the same crisp execution but with a Magritte-like play on the image unwrapped. Here the brown paper and bubble wrap of the life-like parcel is peeled away to reveal the image within, a window-like depiction of a boat and water that is both real and unreal.

Like many of Magritte’s works we are led to question what we are actually seeing, the heightened realism suggesting another layer of reality. The association of the boat with journeying is also an effective play on this idea.

James Bruce Thomason’s Packing The Silver Darlings (acrylic on canvas) recalls early John Bellany and even Lowry in its naïve treatment of the figure. The starkness of dark boats and clothing against the white shore and icy blue water give the image an uncompromising quality, with the yellow-tinged sky animated by looser expressionistic brushwork. The arrangement of figures, salting barrels and boats lead the eye into the scene, a pattern of life caught between sea, land and time.

Frances Browne has contributed an excellent series of black and white photographic images entitled Waters Journey. The strength of high contrast tonality is beautifully juxtaposed with the intricacy of a liquid element in close focus. A living image of chiaroscuro is created, animated by the movement of the water suspended momentarily within the frame.

Browne’s microcosmic image is contrasted with Anne Bain’s menacing snapshot Stormy Weather (Acrylic on paper), in which a framed section of ocean in intense blue and green is whipped into movement by wind and waves. There is a frightening sense of the enormity of nature’s elements at work in this image; although we cannot see the entire expanse of ocean we can certainly feel it and our human scale in relation to it.

Crossing Waater presents a fascinating exploration of journeying from the Veer North group and an excellent opportunity for Inverness-shire audiences to sample work by some of Shetland’s best artists. I sincerely hope that this will be the first of many more exhibitions and exchanges between Shetland artists and Highland audiences.

© Georgina Coburn, 2009

Links

• Inchmore Gallery
• Veer North