Art review: Sara MacKillop / Mary Redmond at Dundee Contemporary Arts

Published on Wednesday 1 September 2010 15:26

Side-by-side sculpture exhibitions by two artists share values but provide very different visions, writes Moira Jeffrey

THE artists Sara MacKillop and Mary Redmond didn't know each other until Dundee Contemporary Arts commissioned them to create side-by-side shows and, while their interests and methods are very different, there are shared values in two adjacent sculpture exhibitions which highlight the major mood change that artists have been undergoing for the past ten years or so.

The big white spaces in Dundee have rarely felt so informal or so female; this is a combination which emphasises mind over muscle and process over product, though it doesn't shy from the physical.

MacKillop is an artist with a kind of sexy austerity. Her art is one of simple means and found objects, which sing sweetly and precisely in a pared-down show entitled Similar Variance.

Mary Redmond, on the other hand, exudes austere sexiness. Her work can be complex and has a definite erotic charge, but is crafted from makeshift materials and improvised methods.

Her exhibition is entitled The Floating World, a reference to the artistic and erotic cultures of Edo-period Japan, a time when the urban entertainments of theatres, brothels and tea houses emerged in middle-class Tokyo alongside art and literature that captured the thrill of it all.

For Similar Variance, MacKillop takes materials that would be at home in the office, the toy box or the second-hand shop and turns them into a subtle play on form and function.

A single gallery wall has been covered in wallpaper, an undulating line pattern of 1970s beige. MacKillop rescues it from kitsch decoration, however, with a series of careful cut-and-paste actions. The wallpaper's natural rhythm is interrupted and the pattern emerges as a sequence of double helices, like hidden DNA, emerging gradually from less promising surface appearances.

At one end the paper is left on the roll, unfurling on to the floor, and it's this gesture - a rolling and unrolling, a hiding and revealing - that appears again and again in the show.

There are two big rolls of blue craft paper, stacked like a column that only hints at its hidden contents, spiral key chains extended from floor to ceiling like barely discernible bonds.

A series of jigsaws lie completed but overturned, to reveal their pastel backings and the carefully crafted contours of their construction, but their signature faces well hidden.

A pack of cellophane dispensers clings to the wall, a series of suspended till rolls spill from the ceiling. The pink ink that is part of their manufacturing process - to tell you you're near the end of the roll - looks like an expressive gesture in paint.

To achieve these ends requires not just an inversion of your expectations but some hidden labour; those till rolls, for example, have been carefully unrolled and reversed. It's a clever enough essay on some art historical themes, like seriality, carried out not in the language of art but the fabric of the everyday. Yet somehow, for all its apparent lightness, it also seems to get to the deeper essence of things, its sequences evoking not just the rules and variants that form the stuff of art-making but the hidden patterns and vital variations in the genetic glue that binds us all.

Next door in the vast space of Gallery 2, Redmond's Floating World feels like a kind of sexy car crash of low and high art. It's a crammed show of 18 works, each itself an assembly of stuff, crafted from materials as diverse as breeze blocks, corrugated steel and fine embroidery threads.

Some of her signature methods are present, the corrugated steel this time painted in shades of pistachio and plum; a delicate mobile that is a cascade of coloured rods is actually created from umbrella spokes, each wrapped in thread.

The influence of Redmond's travels in Asia is apparent in materials such as bamboo and indigo-dyed silks. There are hippy allusions, tie dye and turmeric-dipped thread. One can almost smell patchouli, pot or jasmine.

There's also something of the strange reversal of our western versions of public and private one might get when thinking about a city built of friable stuff such as paper and cane and a public life so hedonistically dedicated to private pleasures such as ritualised tea-drinking and sex.

The rooms reverberate with motion, with interlocked forms and opposites attracting. If MacKillop almost inadvertently alludes to the secret life of matter, Redmond's show is a messy hymn to the pleasures of the physical.

Until 10 October

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday on Sunday, 5 September, 2010