Inchmore Gallery, Inverness, until 15 September 2012

THIS latest exhibition upstairs at the Inchmore Gallery features recent work from the First Line creative partnership of artists: Gwen Black, Mark Lomax and Janet Soutar.

EACH artist has explored the concept of “journeys” through the creative process, exploring the relationship between visual art and text through artist books, painting, mixed media and sculptural work.

Book by Janet Soutar

Janet Soutar’s Genome series of altered books transform familiar objects into sculptural meditations, playing with the idea of hereditary information and the “small changes in the genome which make every living thing different”. Each mark, fold and added pigmentation renders each found publication unique. Genome 4, with its golden metallic edges and origami-like folds, presents the viewer with a precious individual object, rather than one of a multiple, in this case a intimately pocket sized edition of Burns. The found object is distilled and transformed as raw material in a creative process of reappraisal, drawing a parallel between written language as poetry and evolving visual grammar.

Genome 5, with its circular form and bluish green washes feels almost like a living organism, the curvature defying the object’s original geometry and functionality. Parts of the text are visible but it is the physical and perhaps metaphysical presence of the object that is felt, rather than the transmission of information through text, traditional forms of visual narrative or through our genetic code.

This transmission of knowledge rather than information is also inferred by Genome 3, an altered book whose cover is displayed outstretched like wings. Dappled with earthily russet pigment, a folded central mass of form links visibly to words such as “mankind”, “moral” and “grief. The object suggests a figurative, human presence in the work in the relationship between form and text, a quality also subtly present in Soutar’s Winter in Ashaig.

Here, beneath a mixed media landscape composition of ultramarine, naples yellow, green and opaque white, collaged newsprint and drawn pencil marks emerge, a human presence in an otherwise unpopulated landscape. Other works such as B2 and Red Cuillins in Autumn are more exploratory in terms of mark rather than text. It would be interesting to see further investigation of the dynamics between visual art and text prevalent in the altered books series by this artist in the future.

Gwen Black - Standing Still

Gwen Black’s artist books and mixed media works combine investigation of life’s journeys with the journey of creative process. The strongest works are those which combine Black’s skills in abstract composition, with multi-layered printmaking techniques, collaged found materials and text. Wild and Wonderful is a good example, a beautifully balanced image of form, line, colour and texture where fragments of text, like the plastic elements of the composition become catalysts for association/contemplation. The words “Wild and Wonderful” in a font suggesting a lifestyle magazine headline are juxtaposed with the linear portrait of a middle aged woman and the adjacent words “this is the life you have chosen this is the life you must lead”. The subdued palette of olives, greens and greys adds to the ambiguity and contradictions within the image in terms of freedom and confinement of the individual.

In Single Entity the human figure appears in a model magazine pose, silhouetted as cut out text against a wonderfully textural collaged background. What is written on the body or on the individual in terms of viewer/ audience perception is also present in Standing Still, where three figures poised in adolescence are placed within an abstract set with the words “it looks like I’m moving but I’m standing still”. The central figure of silhouetted text, hands in pockets with a sideways glance out of the picture plane is repeated and contrasted with one semi-shaded and one linear figure. The eye is lead convincingly into the composition to contemplate these elements by the abstract design and Black’s accomplished multi-layered technique which encourages closer inspection.

In contrast Where to Fit In and This Life feel a little clumsy in their exploration of identity and of the pictorial surface by comparison. In This Life a young woman’s catalogued outline upon a grid of pastel colours with the hint of a landscape in the background resists multiple readings; instead the text reads very much like a label, especially alongside the idealised female figure. The balance achieved between technique and ideas in works such as Wild and Wonderful or Standing Still, where arguably a more complex world of association or journeying into the nature of image is created, present a more compelling relationship between image and text.

Mark Lomax - The Alchemist's Stone

Mark Lomax’s three dimensional sculptural works and wall panels in mixed media invert the physical/ creative process of excavation seen in his last solo exhibition, Discarded Thoughts, in May 2012, exploring the mind’s capacity for concealment of what lies beneath the surface reality, thought or image. The artist’s handling of materials and the relationship between the title text and art object illuminates this idea. In Beyond The Surface, Lomax articulates this dynamic of conceal and reveal in caked layers of mixed media where encoded sign, symbol and signature text are scratched into the surface, revealing under painting in crimson and oxidised green like fragments of memory. Another panel, Ghosts of Past Conversations (Mixed Media, Decayed Fragments), with its graffiti-like marks also presents a surface of the mind, etched in concrete form where the absence of traditional narrative makes us aware of the process of erasure and obliteration over time.

In The Naming of Things, the artist alludes to the impossibility of precise language and absolutes, presenting a textural, multi-layered surface where man-made and natural marks become blurred. The need to construct meaning is played out not in terms of traditional visual narrative or illustration, but in the mental and physical processes of creation, in the manipulation of raw and found materials and the entire foundation of “painted, stained and obliterated” marks beneath. In human terms this feels akin to Soutar’s exploration in the Genome series, although here an entire inheritance of vision is suggested, concealed and revealed within the picture plane.

Wall mounted sculptures such as Buried Deep (Mixed Media, Thought Stone) with opaque layers of written and drawn elements have poignancy in their natural rock-like form. There is an inference of weight in this visualisation of human memory, the suppression of thoughts which inevitably resurface carrying emotional gravitas. The Source of the Splash develops this idea further with the art object or stone the source of disturbance, or ripples of expansive thought. Lomax’s The Alchemist’s Stone alludes to the transformation of matter by the artist, maintaining the ambiguity and mystery in an object which refuses to entirely give up its secrets. Creative process as text presents another dialect to the viewer.

Journeys is a fascinating exhibition in its exploration of visual language/ ideas which beg further development and it will be interesting to see how the dialogue between this trio of artists and their work will evolve in future shows.

© Georgina Coburn, 2012

Links

• Inchmore Gallery