Inchmore Gallery, near Inverness, until 27 March 2010

The Box Player by James Adams

Looking Out of the Window  heralds the beginning of an exciting new creative partnership from First Line collective artists Gwen Black, Mark Lomax and Janet Soutar. Exploration of the artist’s book format and the relationship between visual and written text is central to the exhibition, ranging from traditional hand bound books to sculptural and installation pieces.

This is a promising and engaging show which presents a selection of work from each individual artist together with a central work created in collaboration. This title work in mixed media, each framed piece taking its lead from a single line of the poem Looking Out of the Window, flows like a three part harmony, a dynamic which shows great potential in terms of future work from the trio.

Three distinct voices are stylistically present, while creating a remarkably coherent linear statement from the group. Colour and texture are subtly rendered in the piece as a whole, conveying the emotional temperature of the original text.

The artist’s book format is revealed in a flowering of possibilities in this show, a variety of bindings, foldings and three-dimensional manifestations that convey the imaginative scope of the form. The tactile, intimate scale of the hand-bound object is beautifully represented by a selection of small editions by Gwen Black and Janet Soutar, together with one-off pieces contained in two glass cases.

Among these is Soutar’s poignant work Whose The Daddy, growing beyond the confines of its multilayered book form. Resting in front of this work is a postmarked envelope with typed text; “Being poor is always knowing you are second class”. This single piece of paper with its second class stamp on humanity makes an extremely powerful statement.

The social element of Soutar’s work is also expressed in a stark series of monoprints including The Brickworks, a scene of abandonment, and Hanging By a Thread, in its emotive representation of the female form. The artist’s sculptural work The House of Small Voices, though well constructed, is rather obvious in its use of the dollhouse as an exploration of childhood and domestic violence.

The piece may have benefited from further development of the house psychologically and sculpturally, together with a more considered approach to the relationship between interior and exterior content. The exterior wallpaper of poetic text wrapped around a white familiar house form seems a rather benign way to make those small voices heard.

The interior objects including a video loop of an animated doll skipping in short sequence while mildly unsettling seemed random and disconnected rather than leading the viewer convincingly into the guts of the piece.

Mark Lomax’s sculptural installation Thoughts Made Real, with its deceptive combination of seemingly organic stone and man-made book forms, arranged in 5 x 3 rows on the gallery floor, demands greater contemplative space around it. The drawn and collaged surfaces of each object are intricately rendered, with flashes of sky blue optimism among the dominant grey and white.

The artist’s techniques have continued to evolve since his last solo show, Ephemera, and through a series of altered map works to really engage with the excavation and investigation of surface using a variety of media and found objects. The strata here are physical, ideological and emotional, and the series of wall works in this current show naturally invite closer inspection.

Looking and Understanding, The Book of Hidden Poetry or Trying To Enter The Silence, The Book of Loss and Regret feel like they contain a torn human fault line in the treatment of materials. The universality of human experience remains at the core of Lomax’s work.

Remembered, Book of Caged Thoughts, a mindscape of low relief sculpture punctuated by a small protruding wire cage, the thought screwed up and discarded within, makes the unseen tangible. The nature of this work is its essential ambiguity, relating to life experiences but without the assurance of a clearly defined narrative or concrete resolution.

In this way the book form is completely expanded which is part of its essential beauty. It is always a pleasure to see Inchmore’s engagement with more experimental work in its upstairs gallery space and this latest exhibition is no exception.

Featured in the downstairs galleries is an exhibition of paintings and sculptural work by James Adams. Island Life refreshingly introduces the human figure back into the fabric of the Highlands and Islands landscape. A series of mild steel sculptures including The Peat Cutter and The Winter Walker are strong, elegantly elongated pieces that compliment beautifully the bold naïve style of the acrylics and oils.

The only unpopulated image, The Light Was Automated, provides an interesting introduction to the adjacent figurative work with its beam of light illuminating an empty croft house. Acrylics such as At The Loom, Digging The Tatties and The Box Player have an earthy physicality to them in the stark treatment of the figure and choice of palette.

Inspired by visits to Orkney, Lewis and Mull in 2009, Adams’s latest work brings the daily life of crofters, fishermen, weavers and winkle pickers into focus in his own inimitable style.

© Georgina Coburn, 2010

Links

• Inchmore Gallery