Art reviews: Lauren Gault | Grace Ndiritu | Frank Easton
Lauren Gault clearly has something to say, writes Susan Mansfield, but with her DCA show it feels as though she has gone to a great deal of time and effort not to say it
Lauren Gault: Stone Bone Voice Alone, Dundee Contemporary Arts ★★★
Grace Ndiritu: Compassionate Rebels in Action, Cooper Gallery, Dundee ★★★★
Frank Easton: A Hidden World, Virgin Square Art Gallery, St Monans ★★★★
God forbid that art should have to be easy or straightforward, but seeing Lauren Gault’s show at Dundee Contemporary Arts has prompted me to consider the ways it deals with complexity.
It made me think about the recent Andy Goldsworthy show at National Galleries Scotland, how at the heart of even the largest works was a relatively simple concept, a fusion of idea and materials. From there, viewers could tease out as much complexity as we wished - that was up to us.
Gault’s work is very different to Goldsworthy’s, but the comparison bears thinking about because both are concerned with the land. Gault, who graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone School of Art & Design in 2008, is originally from rural Northern Ireland, and the history and politics of the countryside is an important theme in her practice.
This show, curated by May Rosenthal Sloan in DCA’s newly refurbished gallery spaces, is a single multi-faceted work, ambitious in scale and scope. It explores humankind’s relationship with the land from present day (represented by shiny new components of agricultural machinery) to the days of early man, then looks back still further, to the time of the dinosaurs.
It’s a complex arrangement of made and found objects: stone, glass, pewter, quilted fabric, embroidered cloth. Words (for example “goodbye deinos saurus”) are printed in rock slurry, or carved into stone (Gault has a long list of collaborators, from embroiderers to stonemasons and scientific imaging specialists). Dinosaur bones and fossils are represented in Japanese Takuhon prints, essentially moulded in paper - absences given shape.
New and old are placed next to each other: a 3D-printed hyoid bone sticks to a slab of rock 600 million years old; a charmstone from the National Museums of Scotland is scanned using cutting-edge Photon Counting Detector Computed Tomography. A ghost of a tweed jacket emerges, the sort of thing that might have been worn by an agricultural labourer 50 or 100 years ago. A half-empty water bottle looks as though a worker might have left it behind.
The horseshoe-shaped hyoid bone (from the throat, essential to speech) is a recurring form, while the soundtrack, on which Gault collaborated with Richy Carey, offers percussive drips, mechanical drones and what might be a distorted human voice. The character of Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphosis is key: a character who slowly fades until all that remains is a voice.
This work is the product of much time and thought, and if you spend time with it, you do notice more and more. Interesting questions emerge: how do you give voice to an absence? What would the stones say if they could talk? Is our machinery the megafauna of the anthropocene, left for future generations to find? But they don’t give themselves up easily.
Voices are important here, but Gault “resists the imposition of a single, authoritative voice”. While she clearly has something to say, it feels as though she has gone to a great deal of time and effort not to say it. There are times when it’s right to conceal and complicate, but the danger is that you lose your audience. During the time I spent in the show, I saw too many people enter only to exit a few minutes later looking bemused.
Meanwhile, DJCAD’s Cooper Gallery is concluding its impressive Ignorant Art School series, having secured another big name, award-winning British-Kenyan (Maasai Kikuyu) artist Grace Ndiritu. With a practice springing from and steeped in activism, she is the ideal candidate for the project’s finale.
Her demarcation of the space is clear from before you enter: murals on the glass front doors and a red-and-white aesthetic throughout, plus you’re asked to take your shoes off or wear shoe covers. From the get-go, she drops the viewer into the midst of activism, with wrap-around murals featuring photographs from the Women’s Strike for Equality in New York in 1970: then, but also now, Ndiritu has a way of bringing past events into a kind of eternal present.
In the upper gallery, her Protest Carpets on the walls and the floor witness Aboriginal land rights marches, women’s rights rallies and characters like Li Yuan-chia (LYC), the Chinese artist who set up his own museum and artistic community in Cumbria in the 1970s.
Visitors are invited to sit on floor cushions around one of the carpets to watch two of Ndiritu’s films: a group reflecting on and discussing an essay by John Latham, a founder of the Artist Placement Group in the 1980s, and an event in which the artist herself acts as shaman for a group of pregnant women, inviting them to meet spirit guides who will reveal their babies’ names.
This last one takes place in a museum, and is part of Ndiritu’s radical reimagining of what museums can be: not places where people passively imbibe culture so much as spaces where they come together, have ideas, take action.
Although most of these works are not new, Ndiritu has produced a publication with Cooper Gallery, Glossary for Art and Action, riffing on Mao’s Red Book, and her reimagining of the museum is absolutely in step with curator Sophia Hao’s bold exploration of art education. Her show is an action, and a space for action, and the way she has made the gallery her own is nothing short of masterful.
Meanwhile, a small gallery in the East Neuk of Fife is hosting a remarkable debut exhibition - by an artist who is 93 years young. Frank Easton, who lived in Auchtermuchty until recently, quietly produced box dioramas for more than 20 years in which he collaged photographs, illustrations and found objects, though none was ever exhibited. The work only came to light recently, when artist Alan Kilpatrick, who runs the Virgin Square Gallery in St Monan’s, spotted some in the back of Easton’s daughter’s car.
They are extraordinary things, meticulously crafted with freshness and exacting skill. Easton’s ability at collage is matched by a deftness with ideas. Some of the works have a touch of quirky, end-of-the-pier humour (indeed fairgrounds are something of a theme), others tackle serious and contemporary subjects: the environment, gender fluidity, feminism.
Easton was an antiques dealer for 50 years, and his choice of found imagery often comes from the past, though he makes it modern in the way he layers and juxtaposes, prompting comparisons to Paolozzi, Peter Blake and Joseph Cornell.
It is obvious why Kilpatrick felt they deserved a wider audience. These works give off the aura of newness yet somehow one feels they have always existed. This kind of original voice is rare, and it is to be hoped that many will beat a path to St Monans to see the work of a man who is living proof that you’re never too old to break new ground.
Lauren Gault: Stone Bone Voice Alone runs until 18 January; Grace Ndiritu: Compassionate Rebels in Action until 13 December; Frank Easton: A Hidden World until 25 January (open weekends and by appointment)
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