Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until 21 April 2012

LIGHT is like salt. It’s essential for making some forms of art, in or out of the kitchen.

IT’S essential for photography even in the digital age, as I rediscovered last week, seeking the shine of a copse of silver-birch. It’s essential for the work of Roger Ackling because directed light becomes his stylus.

Roger Ackling Installation at the Ingleby

For many years his working practice has been defined by the use of a magnifying glass to direct the rays of the sun to burn marks into objects, usually wood. I first saw it in the home of Graham Rich, another artist who has shown in both The Ingleby Gallery and The Pier Arts Centre. Both artists take materials which have no intrinsic value – driftwood or mundane objects – and make a quiet intervention. In Rich’s case, it’s a process of finding the place to etch an iconic outline of a simply rigged vessel. Roger Ackling sets up a pattern of smokey dark lines, which alter both the texture of the surface wood and the way light hits it.

The upstairs gallery in the Ingleby in Calton Road is a long and broad corridor. In the last few years I’ve seen two Scottish shows by Ackling, one at The Pier and one in Cairn Gallery, Pittenweem.  The Pier show was almost busy in some areas, showing a wide range of works and proving that the same central idea can result in a  host of variations so it continues to engage the audience. The Cairn show, was, as you might expect, daringly minimal.  This show has both aspects.

It is really one work – a sculpture installed in the space. And there is a single motif – the garden shed, its contents and the inevitable bleed of a chain of articles out into a differing light.

You meet a stretched line of treated string. This continues then stops then starts again so it is a constant reference point through  the conceptual garden. Light-etched pegs are sprung here and there along. It’s like the notation of very minimal music.

Roger Ackling Installation

And then you approach a more dense grouping of objects. A main bulk of this is  wooden packing cases of various types and sizes – fruit boxes of the sort that get transformed into seed-boxes. And this has a strange but very specific connection with the Outer Hebrides.

There is one specific shore near Rodel. Harris, where detritus which has come visiting on the ocean has been delivered by the complex inshore tides of that area. Richard Ingleby described a conversation with Ackling which takes us to that random pile of drifted timber as a starting point. Interventions on the salt-bleached packing cases, led to a whole body of new work.  The show at The Pier included several examples of this. But the Ingleby show puts these into a single context.

Let’s look closely at individual examples. There is a light, slatted case. The burned lines are grouped so they form two blocks of lines. Here it’s impossible not to mention another artist whose whole body of work has for years been restricted within a tight working practice but delivered with fascinating variations. It looks very much as if two David Connearn drawings have been made on the inside of the base of one box. Balancing that, at the other end of the composition of objects, is a similar box with similar drawings burned on the outside.

Then there’s a mallet, but the interventions continue over every visible aspect of the object. A wooden-handled club-hammer is balanced so it would be sculptural even without the hallmarks. A hoe is wedged so the handle juts at a particular angle.

The documentation describes a process of joining individual burned dots to make a show which seems to be about lines. You could apply this to the whole Roger Ackling installaton in the Ingleby.  If the individual components are the dots they are indeed joined-up by orchestration.

Also showing in Gallery 2 is project artist Andrew Miller, who is Glasgow-based.  These are also sculptures composed from found objects. Don’t miss the discreetly warped elegant red sculpture on the grey office walls adjacent to the main gallery upstairs. It’s a tapering shelf in five parts.

There will be a further Highland connection in an Ingleby show scheduled for 17 March to 21 April. Alec Finlay has strong connection with most Highlands and Islands galleries, and HICA and his recent echo of the journeys of Basho (with Ken Cockburn) took The Road North in its highland aspect. (theroadnorth.co.uk)

© Ian Stephen, 2012

Links

• Ingleby Gallery
• Ian Stephen