Art reviews: Michael Fullerton | Felicity Hammond
The Michael Fullerton exhibition at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh brings together two very different sides of the artist’s practice, writes Susan Mansfield
Michael Fullerton, City Art Centre, Edinburgh ★★★★
Felicity Hammond: V4: Repository, Stills, Edinburgh ★★★
Few artists have a practice which combines conceptual printmaking with traditional portrait painting, but Michael Fullerton manages it. The Glasgow-born artist’s current exhibition, over two floors at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre, takes in both aspects and even tries, in a limited way, to bring them together.
One floor foregrounds painting. In 2023, on what seems to have been a break from art-making, Fullerton took as a job as live-in staff at the Hilltop Hotel in Cumbria which was, at that time, housing asylum seekers. During his six months there, he earned the trust of the men - the hotel housed entirely men as the genders are kept separate - and, at their request, started to photograph them as a basis for painting their portraits.
There are 13 portraits here, each man from a different country: Georgia, Sudan, Iraq, Syria. Fullerton is always attuned to political messaging and here, by naming the men and painting the humanity in their eyes, he makes individual and human a cohort too often turned into a generality, a political football or a faceless threat. Sometimes he adds backgrounds inspired by other painters, Lowry or Gainsborough, placing them artistically in the UK.
Lest we mistake this for a painting exhibition, he adds “interlopers”, other works which are more determinedly conceptual, some speaking directly to the paintings, such as the half-finished stone carving by an Afghan stonecarver. Others play with the hotel’s name: Hilltop Hotel is a new screenprint in gold of John Thomson’s 1828 painting Abbotsford, The Home of Walter Scott, a classic romantic view of the Borders with added overtones of Overlook Hotel.
The other floor is a showcase from his print archive of the last 25 years. Fullerton is always alert to how images are used to send messages, and the printmaking side of his practice allows him to interrogate that and to send some of his own. George Robertson, the former Secretary of State for Defence and once his MP, gets toppled on his side, apparently out of disappointment.
Alan Turing is clearly a subject of fascination. Having built a computer during World War II to crack the Enigma code, he could be regarded as one of the founding fathers of the digital age, of digital reproduction and of AI. After being persecuted for his sexuality, he took his own life in 1954 by taking a bite from an apple poisoned by cyanide. How much of a coincidence is it that one of the most famous tech brands of our time has a logo featuring a bitten apple? The question hangs in the air. On another wall, a sequence of reproductions of Turing’s face on newsprint fades as the ink runs out.
Nothing is not giving messages, as George Wyllie might say. Agit-Prop is a large-scale gold print of a landscape from Gainsborough, also written through with the propaganda about wealth and power. A portrait of Glasgow indy band from the 1990s, A C Acoustics, is called The War That They Are, a reference to Nietzsche’s idea that culture, too, was a Darwinian battle for survival.
Jean Harlow, Hollywood’s original “blonde bombshell”, is featured in a work called Cipher. Next to her is a portrait of Slatz, the first MGM lion (one of eight in the film giant’s history), and then Bert Lahr, best known for his role as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, taking a custard pie to the face. His eyes seem to suggest the bittersweet relationship he is said to have had with his genial screen persona and his most famous role.
These faces tell stories, as do the faces of the men from the Hilltop Hotel. The portraits have added poignancy because, though they have been made visible here, most of these lives are now invisible again, granted asylum or deported, we don’t know which. They hang on these walls as a reminder of all who make the same journey.
With ideas of digital reproduction and the power of the photographic image in mind, one might make the journey round the corner to Stills where Felicity Hammond is showing the fourth and final part of her project, Variations, commissioned through the Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship. Each part has been shown at a different location around the UK.
The series has set out to examine issues relating to digital image-making and the environment, exploitation of land, resources and labour, and inherent in data extraction and generative AI. This final part seems to archive and store the physical and digital data created in the first three parts, raising issues of data storage and how to dispose of tech waste.
The first of the three spaces is a physical warehouse. The second, in near darkness, might be a digital warehouse, with metal beehive-like structures to represent the hardware needed to support digital storage. The third speaks to waste, with its pile of redundant cabling and suspicious-looking dust. There is the kind of ambient soundscape which seems de rigueur in contemporary galleries these days.
This is an important subject: the virtual world isn’t really virtual. Much physical space and physical technology is needed to house the Cloud, and even as users like ourselves pay a premium for that space, there are attendant costs to the environment in energy, in the extraction of rare minerals and in working conditions, usually for people in the global South. How to dispose of redundant technology is a huge and growing issue.
However, these issues don’t come across powerfully in this show. The installation gives you the gist, but the photographic images in each part are deliberately blurred, fragmented and unexplained. They should be the most impactful part of the work, but the impact is lost. Maybe this is viewer failure, and it’s likely we suffer from not seeing the previous three parts. But if one is unable to engage with the images, one is unlikely to engage as one should with this work or with the important issues it highlights.
Michael Fullerton until 12 April; Felicity Hammond: V4: Repository until 28 February
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