‘Grey to Blue: Ecological Entanglements’ at the Edinburgh Art Festival

Detail of Pawpaw | Dark Flower Scarab Beetle sculptural installation, 2019. Image: Kenny Lam.

Earlier this year, ASN graduate Yulia Kovanova took part at the Edinburgh Art Festival, presenting a new body of work ‘Grey to Blue: Ecological Entanglements’. The exhibition was hosted by the Tent Gallery and the Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh.

Through an investigation of ecological interactions, Grey to Blue focuses on the exploration of colour and its spatio-temporal dynamics, to reconsider perceptual boundaries, looking at how spaces are shared with human and nonhuman. Each artwork explores the in-betweenness of things and how seemingly separate objects, bodies and phenomena relate.

A series of abstract interactions are presented through sculptural, photographic, moving image and sound based works, drawing attention to the role of colour in the living world, while highlighting ecological loss and absence.

“Our world is a web of intricate relationships and interactions – some easily accessible to human senses and some less so. It is those very delicate relationships that Grey to Blue takes as its focus.” — Yulia Kovanova

Taking inspiration from the natural world, the work looks at how different organisms interact with their environment, and questions the place of humans within their surroundings.

Yulia Kovanova, Red Silky Oak | Swallow-tailed Hummingbird installation, 2019. Image: Kenny Lam.

A sculptural installation comprising of thin multi-coloured wooden rods [above] looks at the interaction of a hummingbird and its flower as the bird enters the flower to drink nectar. The coloured lines representing the flower interpenetrate the colours of the hummingbird, creating one spatial experience. The audience can walk through the piece, thereby entering the hummingbird-flower experience.

Avocado | Giant Sloth installation, sound, 2019. Image: Kenny Lam.

A pile of real soil spanning almost six metres is studded with casts of avocado stones of different shapes and sizes. The sculptures are absolutely white; their hue is missing – reflecting the extinct large mammals who would swallow and distribute the avocado stones. Those animals are long gone, yet the fruit hasn’t caught up to this reality, and continues to call for its lost partners. Sound piece by Lars Koens.

Avocado - Giant Sloth - Yulia Kovanova - 2019 - Image by Michal Jesionowski

Further element of Avocado | Giant Sloth installation, 2019. Image by Michal Jesionowski

As the hue left the avocado pits, the actual avocado dye became one of the components of the three plaster casts, presented next to the soil. This piece shows the various shades that can be derived from avocado dye. With the giant mammals gone, it is the role of the human as a surrogate to continue the work of helping these plants disseminate.

Purple Coneflower | Rusty Patched Bumble Bee installation, sound 2019. Image: Kenny Lam.

Developed in collaboration with light programmer Siyao Zhou, the ‘Purple Coneflower | Rusty Patched Bumble Bee’ installation explores relationships between bees and flowers. The lights are mapped to a bee’s movement, lit with the colour that of the flower, so the piece creates an experience of a bee-flower, as one entity – alive only in coexistence. Sound piece by Lars Koens.

Detail of Mango | Stegomastodon instant image installation, sound 2019. Image: Kieran Gosney.

A mango ages from unripe to spoilt in a progression of instant photographs that trail to the floor, much like the fall of a mango from its tree to where it will lie uneaten by its extinct evolutionary companion, the Stegomastodon. Thousands of years ago this great giant swallowed the entire fruit with its pit, helping the plant to disseminate. With the animal now extinct, the fruit continues to appeal to its ghost of a giant.

Detail of Red Silky Oak | Swallow-tailed Hummingbird installation, sound, 2019. Image: Kenny Lam.

The Red Silky Oak | Swallow-tailed Hummingbird installation is comprised of a blurred video of a brightly coloured hummingbird and a flower projected onto an imposing fractured ‘screen’ made of suspended paper tubes, along with a sound piece by Lars Koens that carries the audience through the columns.

The exhibition is supported by the University of Edinburgh and Hope Scott Trust.

MUNGKI DEWI; TENT PROJECT & IN TIME

ASN final year student, Mungki Dewi, recently presented a further two outputs from her ongoing research into biophyllic imagery being used to slow viewers in the urban environment. Both projects used video, specifically filmed in the landscape by Mungki.

The work is developed from current research into therapeutic aspects of biophyllic art practice. See also – Blue

REFLECTIONS ON WATER SURFACE

Mungki’s Tent exhibition explored the ideas of using moving imagery to project calming, natural imagery – bringing the landscape into the city.

Stills from the films

Six analogue monitors were displayed within Tent Gallery, oriented to be viewed from outside, each monitor showed films of reflections captured on water surfaces.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The length of each film and the sequencing varied, with black screen edited in. This created a dynamic display, starting with each monitor displaying different films, then some displayed the same film whilst some displayed blank screen. The sequenced, rhythm of the display echoing the movement of the filmed imagery.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

IN TIME

On Thursday and Friday, 25-26 January, IN TIME was back-projected from the upper floor windows of John Knox’s House in Edinburgh. The tranquil film captured the movement of leaves blown by the wind in glistening sun light, in a mesmeric flow. The presence of ‘green’ in a ‘grey’ environment acted as an unexpected visual experience in the city’s bustling High Street.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

‘De-compose/Re-compose’ : ASN1

In late December, ASN 1 held a follow-up exhibition, De-compose/Re-compose, a further development of their initial response to their field trip up to The Flow Country. The students individually explored different aspects of the landscape to develop and communicate alternative perspectives of the natural environment.

The artworks were conceived as aesthetic explorations of conceptual and formal ideas coming from the direct observation of natural processes and structures. Those explorations engaged with different visual languages and media, including video, drawing, sculpture, and installation.

The creative process was informed by ideas from ecology and biology in different contexts, through scientific meetings and workshops. The dialogue with scientists added layers of complexity to the initial scope and opened a more specific approach towards the representation of the landscape, which was reflected in each of the individual pieces.

‘For reasons unknown’ MFA Art Space and Nature Degree Show, 2-11 June 2017

‘For reasons unknown’; the degree show exhibition by students Alex Hackett and Will Urmston, graduating from the MFA Art Space and Nature programme. The exhibition was held at Tent Gallery from 2-11 June, as part of the wider annual Edinburgh College of Art degree show.

‘untitled collection’, collaborative works by Alex Hackett and Will Urmston

For reasons unknown
a coupling
a collection of people of objects and stories
your stories are fated encounters, actions
or missed encounters and the wonderings
of what is not this here
instead it happened like this

a diving beetle under fragility
a relationship on ice
seeking perspective from
unknowns
a nurturing process, it all being in the rituals
and the simplicity and tenacity of growth
sometimes struggling through, resilient
yet absorbent
fruitful pink and yellow gills
unexplained
in our creature surroundings
with a Boy’s deep listening
and the growing and the not knowing
teaching small irises of contentment

and then
soaking in salt water
forming little crystals sometimes
crystalisations realisations of thought
sometimes just soggy crumblings
and damp embraces
a pillow come rest your head
on the dusk shore
with everything breaking in the iridescence
but For strength
there’s being on the water
and in the water
skin shaking and dripping alongside each other
a strand of sugar kelp drawn out slowly
through your dreams
there’s magic in islands and isolation
in being seen and known closely
and the fear of losing

seeking vulnerability
as a place to be
revealing a changing world through the details
the collections and the delicacy.

[collaborative exhibition text]

‘caught by your bracelet / Tugging on the thread’ and ‘lying in the gap between pillows’

‘sail stick’ and ‘untitled’

‘a strand of sugar kelp drawn out slowly’

‘untitled’

‘blossoms and crumbs’ [detail]

installation with various pieces, Alex Hackett

photo: Russell Beard

‘untitled’ installation with newspaper, sawdust, tissue, twine, mushrooms, Will Urmston

installation view ‘untitled’ and ‘Irises’

‘Irises’ [detail]

‘Irises’

‘untitled’ with ‘Irises’, Will Urmston

‘in the hope a little delicacy will make things easier’

‘do you think you have to be by the sea to fall in love with someone ?’

‘you could never be too tender’

‘you could never be too tender’ [detail]

‘cherry patisserie’

‘you me and the sea’ [detail]

‘folded jumper / lost pearls’

‘cockle-infused’

‘he observed fishes with beautifully iridescent surfaces and this effect was especially apparent at the moment when the fish died’

‘pearl on pillow’

installation with various pieces, Alex Hackett

From the Bog – an exhibition on the Flow Country by Art, Space and Nature 1 students

In February, the students took a fieldtrip to Forsinard, in the Flow Country- see https://asnse.wordpress.com/2017/03/12/flow-country/. They were introduced by RSPB members to the value of the peatlands as a carbon sink and to the restoration currently being undertaken within that landscape.

The exhibition ran from the 11th to the 14th of May in Tent gallery.

The body of work was both varied and cohesive. It included: large-scale botanical drawings onto a wall, colour samples using sponges, explorations of depth and time using peat paint, two video works, a floor piece on droplets, a poetic lichen glossary, and an installation on sleep within the bog.

‘piecemeal barnacle’ : Alex Hackett

how did it break ?
in five pieces
a sacred circle
left on a wooden windowsill
under the glowing light and the gaze
of Stacashal
where there’s smokiness
embedded in warm dark jumpers
it’s a vivid belonging
on a salty rock
and it’s piecemeal
[text from piecemeal barnacle exhibition]

A conversation between objects and text; retrieved from the ocean and washed up on the shoreline, emerging piecemeal. Sculptural objects are assembled and formed within the gallery space; with forms, folds and fragments created in-situ.

Textures are liquid, soft and rocky; resembling the watery, the sandy shores and the barnacled. Chalk, milk and earth thicken with peat ash and plaster, colours remains muted and pastel, like plastics worn and weathered by the ocean but with the touch of the human hand. The work has an ephemerality yet also stillness, existing somewhere between the eternity of the abyss and the current of the surface waters.

The texts are addressed to a new owner. They often describe small and intimate temporal moments, interactions, and sights of imagined significance, and reflections on place and the elemental. They mimic the sensitivities of the sculptural work in their intimacy and concentration on texture, colour and sensation. Throughout the text works the sea is used in parallel with descriptions of the personal, existing as an alternative realm to the human habitat of the land. In a similar way language accompanies sculptural works through titling to reflect an element of the personal.

The presence of the sea is evident throughout Alex Hackett’s work, existing in the nature of the sculptural forms and materials, many being found on the shoreline itself, with others imitating textures, effects and life within the sea. It is a continually changing body of water, a carrier of abundant life and energy, with its appearance constantly altered by its surrounding colour, light and weather. Fascination with the sea lies in its mysteries; its unknown depths, creatures and stories. In the novel Moby- Dick, Herman Melville captivated by the sea, wrote “there is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath”[1]. This mystery and unknown sublime is retained in the work through absurd and imaginative objects, merging found materials from the sea and made materials by the artist.

piecemeal barnacle [exhibition view] Plaster, paint, sand, peat ash, paper, shell, cookie, bonbon. ‘piecemeal barnacle’ Tent Gallery, Edinburgh, 2017

The nature of the sculptural objects, as brought directly from the cluttered environment of the studio and assembled within the exhibition space encourages a vivid sense of their creation. There is a happenstance quality to their forms, some lie broken at the weakest points, with fragments of their bodies in plaster, sand, scattered at their feet and hinting of the movement involved in their assemblage. This is similar to the way in which Karla Black describes the final form of her work, “practicalities create accidents … how I can make something stand up, or how I can hang it often determine what a work is.”[2] Even gentle unravelling of Alex Hackett’s sculptural work can cause breakages and new forms to arise. In piecemeal barnacle, inners of sculptures are displayed alongside their wrappings, casings and crumbs. Displaying these evidences of their creation emphasises the beauty in the ephemeral. Sometimes everything is broken.

Delicate shell rubbings on napkins are draped on a wooden rod, avoiding the walls of the gallery. Sculptures are placed on and close to the floor. The work’s placement requires specific acts of looking, and close observation from the audience, encouraging a method of looking not dissimilar to that of a beachcomber on the shore. Kathleen Jamie refers to this focused act of looking closely, emphasising the value of the “care and maintenance of the web of our noticing”[3], even elevating the act of observation to a prayerful one and crucial to engagement with the wider world.

The objects are a combination of found, made and assembled. Found objects usually have personal significance, from a particular place and time and often reappear in the text works. Some materials refer directly to place, with peat ash and salt from the Isle of Lewis, bleached seaweed from Lindisfarne and shells from Scottish shores. The plaster objects reveal the processes of their making, some lying in their skins and shells. Creases and wrinkles form on material, pulled like skin by force, tidal. The sculptures involve spontaneous decisions, layered quickly as the plaster sets. Objects are made intuitively, as are the small sculptural assemblages and larger installations in gallery spaces. The resolved work builds upon objects, natural patterns and structures observed within both natural and manmade landscapes.

The work created for ‘COAST’, adopted visual elements of the Dunbar shoreline; drawing on a unique turquoise colour deposited on shells, and the deep red sand of the local coastline; both incorporated into sculptures mimicking the man-made rocks lining parts of the coast. The objects become unfamiliar creatures, laid out like underwater archaeological finds, yet with an element of the touch of the human hand in their delicacy.

a rare and wondrous find Plaster, sand, sour mallow, barnacle, gold thread. ‘COAST’ Dunbar Town House Museum and Gallery, 2017

These combinations of natural and manmade material are uncomfortable yet simultaneously belong. Shimmering blue glitter coats a gingerbread cake wrapper and its crumbs, imbuing a grotesqueness to a perhaps comforting object, whilst imbuing a synthetic value in a usually cast-away object, as it lies on the floor.

Anthropologist Mary Douglas writes of holiness and impurity being oppositional, similarly this piece brings the stain and the disposable in to the realm of what is seen as sacred or treasured. This positioning and use of contrasting materials questions our value of material objects, what is kept and discarded, the sentimentality of objects. “Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death”[4].

Edible materials are used frequently in Alex Hackett’s work, most often for its intriguing sculptural forms. Popcorn is used frequently for its coralline form and subtle colour. Cast in plaster it creates a new and unfamiliar creature. The popcorn coral elevated on a bleached yellow pillow acquires a new value and emphasises a preciousness and fragility to the absurd and unexpected. Hinting at a personal language and romanticism. Pastel pink spherical sweets leach their colour in a tide mark onto white plaster.

popcorn coral Plaster, paint and popcorn on pillow. ‘piecemeal barnacle’ Tent Gallery, Edinburgh, 2017

popcorn coral [detail]

Plaster pieces are propped on bleached wooden rods, balanced against walls and surfaces of the gallery, evoking sea stacks and a sense of a recent high tide. A long rod rests up on a small wooden column, surging in with the tide from the window of the gallery. The positioning of the objects creates a sense of stillness in what has passed, yet also a readiness for an anticipated motion, and tentativity in their precarity. The work hints of the larger environmental situation, a calm in coming chaos, anticipation within the Anthropocene.

piecemeal barnacle [exhibition view] Wood, plaster, paint, popcorn, peat ash. ‘piecemeal barnacle’ Tent Gallery, Edinburgh, 2017

This balance between stillness and motion is particularly evident in the installation I’ll take you to the shore / to show you the dog rose. This suspended work responds directly to the experience of being on a sailboat in the Outer Hebrides, watching the flicking movement of the small lengths of rope, reefs, which determine the level of the sail and reveal the action of the winds. With reefs encrusted with salt, sand and shells and hung in the gallery space from a wooden yard and eyelets, the work adopts aspects of the construction of the sail whilst maintaining a delicate nature. Many of Alex Hackett’s sculptures incorporate movement and dynamism in their form, resembling living beings. This sculpture acquires a gentle movement through its suspension from a single point, tilting gently in the space, with the reefs moving independently in small breezes. Bringing this object into the gallery gives it a sense of stillness, away from the sail’s natural environment out on the sea. This is emphasised by the time-based processes involved in its making, with slow processes of evaporation creating the salt encrusted reefs.

I’ll take you to the shore / to show you the dog rose Wood, metal, rope, salt, sand, shells, pocket. ‘Ropes of Sand’ An Lanntair, Stornoway, 2017

I’ll take you to the shore / to show you the dog rose [detail]

In other works, Alex Hackett balances objects within themselves, often combining the natural and unnatural into absurd compositions. A curved piece of plastic buoy appearing burnt and sea-washed, a flat shrimp cracker resting within and a curled silverleaf cradled in this material clutch. These assemblages create a sense of human touch, as they evoke the cupped hand, a cradling and gentle nature. As the artist Michael Dean writes “all shores describe touching”[5], emphasising this overlap between the natural world and our own.

I’ll take you to the shore to show you the dog rose [detail] Dyed cloth, buoy, cracker, silverleaf. ‘Ropes of Sand’ An Lanntair, Stornoway, 2017

Alex Hackett is an artist and writer soon to graduate from the Art Space and Nature MFA programme at Edinburgh College of Art. She has exhibited at An Lanntair, Stornoway, the Dunbar Town House Gallery and Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation. Her work exists across fields of poetic text, small-scale sculpture and the edible, to form installations with a dialogue surrounding the natural world and the intimate.

The exhibition ‘piecemeal barnacle’ was at Tent Gallery, Edinburgh College of Art, 9-10 February 2017.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851. London: Penguin. Chapter 111
Karla Black in conversation with Barry Schwabsky’ in Karla Black, Susanne Figner (ed.) 2013. Köln: Walther König. p.13.
Kathleen Jamie, Findings, 2005. London: Sort of Books. p.105
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, 1966. London: Routledge. p.6-7
Michael Dean, [exhibition pamphlet] Turner Prize 2016, London: Tate Britain

To the shore : Exhibition 1 December

totheshoreexhibitionposter

From the realm of the sea

To the shore.

A recent exhibition by continuing Art Space and Nature MFA students investigated the sea’s vibrant materiality and chaotic order, following fieldwork in the Outer Hebrides. A further exhibition building on this work will follow at ‘An Lanntair’ gallery, Stornoway in March next year.

‘ORIGINS’ Russell Beard

Filmed on Tulsa Beach on the Isle of Lewis in the Scottish Outer Hebrides, Russell Beard’s video installation ‘ORIGINS’ consists of a mirrored moving image of the complex patterns created in water, sand and sunlight where a river meets the sea.*

*Alternatively it could be read as a time piece, concerning the origins of our own vital materiality…. and how certain properties emerge from complex chaotic systems amid the ongoing oscillations between the creative generative forces of life’s perpetual becoming and the dissipative cosmic processes of entropy and decay.

Alex Hackett

Photo: Russell Beard

Alex Hackett

Photo: Russell Beard

Alex Hackett

Alex Hackett’s work goes within the sea to experience the shoreline. Adopting sculptural forms and materials from the Isle of Lewis alongside sympathetic found materials, she creates objects reflecting the mystical nature of the shore. Texts document the material qualities of the water as affected by weather, the elements and light, whilst bearing the mark of the personal.

hole4

‘swell’ Will Urmston

Will Urmston’s piece came to light during a stay in a cliff-side bothy on the west coast of Lewis. Looking through to the sea below, we enter ‘the cave’ and look outward with clarity as we face the peace of our own elemental existence.

a leaf, a dream

Yulia and Yurika had never met before, and they wouldn’t ever have if they had different names, looks, or chosen occupations. Yet, the similar sounding names, similar body build and similar occupation was enough of a premise for them to be introduced through a collaborative art project.

They agreed to monitor transformations during this period of seasonal change in Scotland and in Japan: over the last few weeks Yulia has been gathering fallen leaves, while at the same time Yurika has been gathering her dreams. Yulia covers each leaf with golden paint, Yurika draws images of what she had seen in her dreams. The exhibition will evolve as both keep adding new dreams and new leaves.

The exhibitions run simultaneously from the 21st November 2016 in Tent Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland and in Container Gallery, U8 Projects in Komaki, Japan.

Container Gallery, U8 Projects view:

Container Gallery, Komaki, Japan

Tent Gallery view:

Tent Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland

‘animot’ at Tent Gallery : 17-22 April

‘animot’, was an exhibition resulting from a series of discussions and reading groups initiated by Edinburgh College of Art PhD student Ronald Binnie. By addressing the ethical issues involved in the use of the animal body in contemporary art, the exhibition presented alternatives to anthropocentric culture.

Alex Hackett and Olivia Tutton

Yulia Kovanova

Russell Beard

Will Urmston

Solo Shows in Tent Gallery

Art Space and Nature MAFA students recently organised a series of One Day Solo Shows in Tent Gallery, showing current work.

The first of the solo shows featured work from three artists; with Olivia Tutton’s work delicately exploring themes of memory and language. Russell Beard examined entropy and transitioning physical materials, and Alex Hackett’s installation of sculptural objects presented an absurd and Anthropocenic sea.