Archaeological exploration into the history of a family

Published on Thursday 13 December 2007 19:54

MARJOLAINE RYLEY: RESIDENCE ASTRAL ***

STREET LEVEL, GLASGOW

TRACES & TRAILS ***

COLLINS GALLERY, GLASGOW

OVER the festive season, many of us will spend time in family homes, the houses of parents and grandparents, places we knew as children and now revisit as adults. Often these places feel comforting, seeming to offer a respite from adult responsibility. After a few days, however, they can start to feel claustrophobic. By the time the holiday is over, we are more than ready to leave.

This is the complex psychological territory in which Sunderland-based artist Marjolaine Ryley operates. This show, in Street Level's new location on the first floor a block further south, is part of much larger project.

For more than 12 years, she has been taking photographs in her grandmother's apartment in Brussels, as an art project and family archive.

Marjolaine's mother left home as a young woman, raising her daughter in a series of squats in England. Visits to her grandmother, therefore, offered home comforts but also a sense of unease as the complex dynamics of the adult relationships unfolded. When a fire in the basement in 2002 covered the apartment in a layer of dust, and Marjolaine and her mother began to clean it room by room, they felt as if they were excavating their past.

The objects in these photographs are rendered with the precision of an archaeologist photographing her finds. Some simply pick out details – the brocaded edge of a lampshade, the space where a picture once hung, while others suggest entrapment – an ornate lock on a cabinet door, a strip of flypaper with its victims.

She photographs the people in the apartment too, but as objects of study rather than personalities, homing in on details: a silk scarf knotted at an elderly neck, the crook of an arm, a fold of skin hanging over a waistband. They are pictures full of resonance, but at the same time maintaining a dispassionate distance from their subjects.

Ryley is one of several contemporary artists interested in photographing their families, the best known being Richard Billingham, shortlisted for the Turner Prize with his uncompromisingly candid images of his mother and alcoholic father in their council flat. She, by contrast, photographs a middle-class home, full of structures and overtones and things unsaid.

However, all artists working in this way face the same challenge: how to make the work stand apart from its background, so it can speak to an audience who do not share the memories, the stories, the associations.

Just as Billingham's work is strongest when we know that his subject is his family, so Ryley's elegant, well-presented still lifes are more powerful when we understand the background.

Cities have long been a source of inspiration for the painters of the modern era, and the two painters currently showing in Traces & Trails at Strathclyde University's Collins Gallery have their roots in modernism and their imaginations focused on the urban environment.

Stuart MacDonald, former director of The Lighthouse and now principal of Gray's School of Art, draws on elements of building plans to create frameworks for his semi-abstract paintings. Within this grid structure, he creates pictures within pictures, glimpses of landscapes, figures or objects.

A series of sketches included in the show give us some idea of his building blocks: many feature trees in parks, studied from a variety of angles. MacDonald is very interested in these spaces, where the built environment and the natural world meet, and in lanes which intersect buildings, creating hidden sections of space.

He chooses colours carefully, working with a distinct palette for every painting: one contrasts tones of blue and orange, another is vibrant in black and red, another is almost monochrome save for flecks of pink and green. There is a sense of precision and planning in these careful collages.

Allan Lawson has a more flamboyant approach, both in the colours he chooses and the way he brings elements together, less placing them within a structure as weaving them around one another in a fluid compositional dance.

Details from the built environment – the patterns created by decorative brickwork, or a pantiled roof, or an ornate wrought iron fence – become his building blocks around which he weaves colour, image and texture.

Again, there are pictures within pictures. Symbols and images recur in a personal lexicon, dancing over, under and through one another.

Some paintings are clearly playful, while others, such as The Mall Part 1 have a kind of quiet abstract beauty. In a few, however, there are so many images and patterns jostling for attention the eye doesn't know where to go first.

This is an interesting show because the artists benefit from being seen next to each other. Their work is similar enough to share the gallery harmoniously and different enough to help us see the strengths and weaknesses of each.

&149 Marjolaine Ryley until 22 December; Traces & Trails until 21 December