Art preview: Christine Borland, Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney

By Moira Jeffrey
Published on 03/06/2012 00:00

IN A Glasgow café, the artist Christine Borland and I are struggling for words. We are looking at an extraordinary shape on her computer screen. “What would you call it?” I ask.

She looks at me wryly from beneath her straight fringe and smiles. It wouldn’t be the first time in the last decade that Borland has gently suggested that she’s the artist and I’m the writer: I’d better just get on with the choosing the words bit.

The three-dimensional shape has odd protrusions, and certainly has more than a suggestion of male genitalia, but when I try to make a drawing it looks most like the lopsided head of an elephant.

What we are looking at is a digital image of the inside of a very famous piece of sculpture, Barbara Hepworth’s Oval Structure of 1943, part of the art collection at the Pier Arts Centre in Orkney’s Stromness, where Borland will open a major show later this month as part of the St Magnus Festival.

It’s an artwork that has intrigued the artist in the 15 years since she first visited the Pier. An ovoid of plane wood, hollowed out in the centre: its irregular concavities are painted white. “I’ve been fascinated by it forever,” she explains. “Especially the interior space.”

Some say the sculpture is reminiscent of the caves of Cornwall where Hepworth lived when she made it, others that it is closely linked with the human body: with the wonders of childbirth, the mysteries of sex.

For Borland, though, the sculpture is also a physical puzzle she has longed to solve. “I’m always trying to inject the positive into the interior space, irrespective of the references that may or not be there, all the mystery and the intrigue about Hepworth’s life that she never talked about.”

So with the gallery’s assistance she had the sculpture laser scanned and prototyped, turning its mysterious interior inside out to create an object that she may later cast in plaster or recreate in marble.

Hepworth, she says, has long been a lodestar: “To go right back to starting off, it was that whole woman sculptor thing… somebody who is being really tough about their career, getting it done, being up there amongst the boys, that in itself as well as the actual forms.”

It is characteristic of Borland’s art that she can take such a forensic attitude to a beautiful thing without destroying its magic. In a career that has seen the Glasgow School of Art graduate nominated for the Turner Prize back in 1997, and recently appointed to the prestigious new role of Baltic Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Northumbria, it’s the combination of delicacy and fearlessness that has made her art stand out.

Her new show will bring together a number of strands of her work: there is a new film reflecting her continuing interest in anatomy, now focused on the training of medics and the use of simulation figures and scenarios.

A work involving lace from MYB Textiles in Newmilns will see volunteers work on textiles in the gallery and touch on her family background in Ayrshire lace-making. Another new artwork will explore Orkney archaeology, particularly an unusually shaped stone formation known as the Venus of the Whins.

What unites all these disparate strands is human anatomy, particularly the female body. “I have found a way to work figuratively now that is not about life drawing or something like that,” she says. “It was always a concern early on in my career. I knew I was absolutely obsessed with the figure and with the female figure in particular but it took such a long time because I knew it wasn’t the traditional ways for me.”

Borland has a longstanding relationship with Orkney. Her partner, the artist Ross Sinclair, has strong Orkney roots and his father retired to Kirkwall 20 years ago. Typically what fascinates Borland about Orkney is the unseen as much as the obvious: its buried archaeology as much as its fine monuments, its decaying Second World War heritage, the submarine net that once lay hidden on the seabed across a two kilometre-stretch of Scapa Flow. “It’s all those layers of heritage in Orkney, what’s official, what can be preserved, what’s just left to rot.”

Somehow an exhibition that will be more fluid and more personal than her usual practice makes sense in an Orkney context. “Whether there is more time or whether that is just a perception there’s a sense that things can be done away from the great noise,” she says. “All those layers and history and things building on top of each other, some things may be a good fit, some a wonky fit, but somehow it all works. There’s a personal aspect to it, where I’m introducing my own family and all of that and things like the Hepworth, works I have admired. It’s amazing.” «

Christine Borland is at the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, 23 June until 18 August. The St Magnus Festival runs from 22-27 June. www.stmagnusfestival.com