Kilmorack Gallery, Kilmorack, until 20 June

Helen Glassford - Blackened Heather

KILMORACK’S latest exhibition offers a strong show of work from three strikingly different but equally engaging artists.

A graduate of Duncan Of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Helen Glassford’s exploration of landscape is at its best and most potent when transcending the literal. Though works such as After The Burning and Rannoch Moor, November, are well painted atmospheric evocations of landscape, it is in works such as Blackened Heather and First Flurries (Both Oil on Board) that she really comes into her own.

Here subtle variations of the palette, understanding of form and composition and handling of paint are acutely balanced. She distills the experience of the physical landscape into tangible poetic abstraction, creating an image which allows us not just to see but to feel unique qualities of location. These are images for the eye and mind to wander into rather than the two dimensional presentation of a particular view.

In Blackened Heather the strong compositional formality of the ashen foreground is complimented by sweeping ethereal under-painting, orange emerging through soft sage green. The sensitivity of the artist’s palette is further extended in First Flurries, matched by variation of brush marks. The purple darkened sky offset by hues of green, blue and pink are richly animated by gestural marks, fine areas of decalcomania and sweepingly curved drawn lines. A smaller work, A Little Piece of Paradise, is aptly named, a vision of green and vivid turquoise with strong blocks of colour dominating the composition.

Jim Bond’s sculptural and collage works are characterised by their playful sharp wit and creative engineering. Of the collage works on paper Crush, Errors, Pause Longer and Withdrawn are the finest, utilising aged paper documents, fragments of text, image and correspondence beautifully in each finely wrought composition. Use of found elements and collage technique recall Dadaist and Pop Art sensibilities, a spirit of humour and unease which permeates a work such as Crush.

Here the juxtaposition of factual fragments with unintelligible script and illustration create a beautifully absurd series of references for the viewer. There are echoes of Eduardo Paolozzi in Bond’s collage and sculptural work, elements which become fused in two beautiful small scale bronzes, Small Bronze Head and Letter Head, the latter seemingly collaged from concrete metal letters. The bronze surface is delicately scored and beautifully textured in an ambiguous way, striations of underlying metal suggestive of teeth in a fusion of organic and man made forms.

Elegant scaffolds of human form and ideas in steel and copper, the life sized Binary Man and Illustrated Man expand the idea of three dimensional drawing, while Nothing Can Stop My Headlong Rush introduces the element of movement. The sprinting figure rendered in beautifully drawn lines of metal responds to touch, the balance on one foot precariously launching the figure into space in an image of human vulnerability and emotive action.

Bond’s wonderfully disturbing kinetic sculpture Blink interacts with the viewer, the realism of the human eye encased in a robotic outer shell of copper. The shutter-like action of the eye triggered by movement of the viewer on entering its field of reference is a point of contact and alienation, the wires and mechanism clearly visible.

The whole piece sets up an interesting dialogue of human and industrial elements. The sculpture is reactive in a way that is disconcerting, a human/machine hybrid that takes the eye and renders it soulless in its mechanism while at the same time being self reflexive. The core sculptural element of the eye is recognizable and on some level as a viewer/participant we immediately identify with it.

This curious mirroring is also at play in Myopic, where the extended lens echoes the human sculptural form behind. In a clever manipulation of scale the sculptural head encased in a varied patina of camouflage is brought sharply into focus. Even with the lens the human face is obscured, we are unable to see the distant object clearly even though we are up close. The human form and its relative scale make the act of viewing personal. The juxtaposition of the concrete and the imaginative in Bond’s art is an essential and satisfying part of its intrigue.

Inspired by his experiences in South America, Ian Cook (RI RSW) has contributed a darkly engaging series of paintings to the exhibition, populated by iconographic figures, objects and animals. The Sorceress is a potent example, a juxtaposition of magical elements drawn into the composition and emerging mysteriously out of a black and purple ground.

This ground also represents richly fertile subconscious territory, a visual assimilation of sign and symbol animated by the artist’s vibrant use of colour. A rainbow-like flash of colour and energy equals the powerful gesture of the sorceress’s outstretched hand illuminated beneath the dominant moon. Similarly a heightened sense of reality is created in Nocturne; the high illumination of mask-like human, bird and abstract forms is achieved not just by tonal contrast but with colour, a dark night of the soul brought vividly to life.

Equally powerful is Fisherman’s Tableaux (Watercolor and Gouache), presenting a strong totemic image in blue, black and red like an imprint on the mind. Among the most dynamic paintings in the exhibition are Cook’s large scale figurative works, Mother and Child, reminiscent of De Kooning, and Running Woman (Oil on Canvas).

The monumental almost sculptural treatment of the figure compressed into the rectangular picture plane intensifies the expressivity of the body. Running Woman is Picassoesque in its treatment of the female form; darkly outlined and strikingly angular accented with bold flattened areas of cadmium red, ultramarine and cerulean blue.

It is a pleasure to see the introduction of new work to Kilmorack in a format which allows appreciation of each individual body of work. The exhibition represents a strong and divergent trio of artists fully engaged with their chosen medium.

© Georgina Coburn, 2009

Links

• Kilmorack Gallery