Orkney Museum, Tankerness House, Kirkwall, until 26 February 2011

A RAPID spurt of plant growth and the bleached bones of a seal are two of the details artist Celia Clark has zoomed into with her camera lens.

Here is nature close-up and personal in a series of stunningly attractive studies created by digitally manipulating images, reworking the colour, tone and texture to create an abstract version and printing these onto canvas.

Detail from Celia Clark's Seal's Fate (photo Catherine Turnbull)

Long Grass viewed at short range appears to have brush strokes reminiscent of an Impressionist painting. Stand across the exhibition room and the cotton-style grasses swim into sharper relief and focus. It’s uncanny and hauntingly beautiful.

An old stone dyke stands out in 3-D relief, to be enjoyed without the glasses, with the lichen transformed from green to orange.

The slender bones of the aforementioned Seal’s Fate become a thing of beauty, lying in a shroud of blue beach. The fluidness of water is blown huge in big bubbles and the vividness of a growth spurt in Reaching Out is another eye-catcher.

Celia Clark's Feeling The Cold (courtesy of the artist)

Ammonites and other fossil shells offer remarkable details and you can feel the cold at the icy blue of the water spout. Orkney’s natural world is the inspiration for a large range of ground from the jagged edges of a cliff face to an abstract of a swan feeding.

This is the artist Celia Clark’s (nee MacInnes) first solo exhibition, and judging by the number of red dots and comments in the exhibition visitor’s book, has been very well received.

Celia studied sculpture and drawing at Edinburgh College of Art and graduated in 2000. Although sculpture was her main area of work she also spent time during her studies developing photography and printmaking skills.

Her current way of working stems from these earlier interests in photography and her love of the finished graphic quality of screen printing, as she explains:

“My work frequently focuses on small subject matter which is then enlarged, offering the viewer a much more unusual vantage point.  Ultimately it is presenting the viewer an original take on very varied subject matter.”

The work is available on canvas (A1) or in print (A3).

© Catherine Turnbull, 2011

Links

• Orkney Museum