Art reviews: Susan Aldworth | Shenece Oretha and Camara Taylor | Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival
A suitcase of imagined items conjures up one woman’s poignant history reflecting the greater migrant experience, writes Susan Mansfield
Shenece Oretha and Camara Taylor: Some Rhythms Persist, Glasgow Print Studio ★★★
Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Various venues, Hawick ★★★★
What does it mean to belong in a country not your own? Hostile narratives about migration from right-wing politicians prompted artist Susan Aldworth to explore her own story as a third generation Italian migrant. In imagining the contents of the suitcase belonging to her grandmother Luigia, she draws out the story of one family’s search for a better life.
In the centre of her installation is a linen nightdress passed down through several generations of women to Luigia and on to Aldworth herself. Luigia’s face, from her wedding photograph, is printed on it in a halo of light like an icon of a saint, and around it are antique children’s clothes, embroidered with family history, photographs, anecdotes and recipes by students from the Royal School of Needlework.
Luigia traveled from Barga to London in 1924 with her six-month-old baby to join her husband Giuseppe. They carved out a life in Kingston upon Thames, where Giuseppe delivered ice to cafes and restaurants. During the Second World War he was interned as an enemy alien, leaving Luigia with four children in a country which now felt hostile, relying on the kindness of neighbours to survive. The couple kept their Italian citizenship, always planning to return, while encouraging their children to become culturally British. Luigia died in her nineties in 1997, having lived most of her life in a country in which she hadn’t truly belonged. It’s a nuanced picture of an ordinary woman, specific to her moment in time but analogous to so many more.
The installation is beautiful and engaging, even if the stories are occasionally hard to read in the various embroidery styles. A wealth of supporting information is provided in the accompanying booklet, both about the family and migration in general – perhaps too much. Less might have allowed Luigia’s story more space to work its magic.
The upstairs gallery hosts examples of Aldworth’s more usual art practice. Modern Alchemy, the project which gives the show its name, is a collaboration with Edinburgh-based scientist Dr Amanda Jarvis, in which Aldworth’s experimental prints seek to capture chemical reactions on the etching plate. This dynamic, experimental element is also part of series such as Brainscapes and Birth of a Thought, which draw on the chemistry of printmaking to look at the big questions of the self, life and death, and how ideas begin.
Meanwhile, Shenece Oretha and Camara Taylor are pushing at the boundaries of printmaking in different ways. Their two-person exhibition at Glasgow Print Studio, the result of a production residency supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, includes sculpture, sound, molasses-based etching and residual materials from the making of rum.
Both artists are interested in the interconnected histories of the Caribbean and Scotland. Taylor makes work with materials derived from industrial processes around sugar, steel and rum and the show includes residual elements of the sculpture Falls of Clyde, shown in Tramway in 2024, in which a cascade of rum recirculated over a steel panel.
She has also made “cradles” of mild steel, in which words and phrases are picked out, and has made work using slide photographs of a field of sugarcane in Barbados which she has burned and rephotographed. “Cut and burn” refers to the tactics of settlers displacing native peoples, but were also used during rebellions by enslaved people against their oppressors.
Oretha draws on research into grasses, rice and steel drums: a soundtrack of drumbeats fills the space. Large-scale prints on acetate made with rice hang at the windows, dappling the sunlight. An etching, in which the copper is beaten with the rubber-tipped mallets used to play the drums, creates a kind of pointillist effect in which a mirage of abstracted figures appears.
Both artists are working with profound and problematic histories, with themes of enslavement, industry, colonialism, resistance and – somewhere in all this – the complicit role of Scotland in building and exporting the apparatus of empire. But the work is elliptical, driven by process and material. The intense engagement on the part of the artists does not always communicate the same intensity to the audience.
At the beginning of May, the Borders town of Hawick hosts the Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, becoming, for four days, the centre of the world in relation to experimental film. A packed programme of screenings is accompanied by installations which run through the festival.
While there are no red carpets, the festival opened with Waves Turn, the debut feature of Austrian filmmaker Josephine Ahnelt, an intimate portrait in 16mm of five women in their first year of motherhood. Filming with sensitivity and intensity, she focuses first on mother and baby, then gradually broadens her scope to include partners, friends and community.
Collaborators Jen Conway and Jessie Young have turned their 2019 essay pamphlet Milk Report, about the economics of motherhood as unpaid labour, into a film with an absurdist edge, reading sections from their essay while dressed in outfits made from inflated pink kitchen gloves which look like udders. The mixture of hard fact and barely controlled chaos captures something of the wild early years of parenthood.
Lebanese filmmaker Ghassan Salhab presents a powerful pair of films which feel like dispatches from the front line in the Middle East. Contretemps is nearly six hours long, a collection of footage from protests in Beirut from 2019 until 2023. Some are jubilant and defiant, some feral and violent as protesters face rubbers bullets and tear gas. After a while the sheer length of it has a numbing effect, while communicating the sense of a struggle which goes on and on.
The second film, No Title, having its UK premiere at Alchemy, is shorter and quieter, much of it filmed on the dashcam of a car driving through South Lebanon in the wake of the 2024 Israeli air strikes. One moment it’s steering around fruit stalls and pedestrians on narrow streets, the next we’re looking at piles of rubble, burned-out cars, partially collapsed apartment blocks. It’s fragmentary and hypnotic, presenting what the camera sees without commentary. Screened in the same room so the content interweaves, both speak fiercely to the present moment.
Jade Wong’s multi-screen installation records the voices of a diasporic community of Asian women food workers in Seattle chatting about how to cook wasps, the warm, gossipy tone of their chat juxtaposed with a documentary about the life cycle of a wasp larva. And staying with food, Scotland-based Kialy Tihngang’s Out of Office is a satire-meets-conspiracy-thriller about the tedium of office work in a dystopian food corporation.
Canadian artist Matthew Lancit takes us back to the body with his four-channel installation Stomach, Thighs, and Ass which details the daily practices of managing type one diabetes. As we see him inject at a family picnic, on a plane, in his bedroom with his pregnant partner, his voiceover relentlessly records the figures from his blood-sugar tests. It’s unceasing, but not overwhelming, a constant background rhythm to all the other shades of life.
Susan Aldworth at Edinburgh Printmakers runs until 28 June; Shenece Oretha and Camara Taylor at Glasgow Print Studio until 30 May; Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, run ended.
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