Visual arts review: Francesca Woodman/ Tommy Grace

Published on Monday 11 May 2009 19:33

FRANCESCA WOODMAN **** TOMMY GRACE: DUMMY **** INGLEBY GALLERY, EDINBURGH

SOONER or later a conversation about fine art photography today will come round to Francesca Woodman, which says much about the legacy of a young American artist who died aged 22, in 1981.

Despite her short working life, she has become one of the most important and influential photographers of the last 50 years. Young artists today often talk about her influence.

Woodman's delicate silver gelatin prints of female nudes, often made using herself as subject, staged in semi-derelict houses against backdrops of peeling wallpaper and decaying plaster, were barely shown during her lifetime but are now iconic. This exhibition from the Woodman estate, which is administered by her parents, is being shown as a complement to the works from the D'Offay collection in the Artist Rooms show at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Though small, these works are extraordinarily powerful. Read through the lens of her life and death – she killed herself amid worries about work and a relationship break-up – their rawness and intensity is paramount. Given time, however, they reveal a level of exactitude, a clarity of composition and an awareness of form and tradition which is sometimes overlooked. They work well at the Ingleby, where light floods in through long windows not unlike those in the old houses in Rhode Island in which Woodman loved to work.

The earliest of the works here date from the early 1970s, when Woodman was in her early teens. Photographed naked in glassy water under the extending roots of a tree, she looks like some sort of wood nymph in a Victorian fantasy. It says much about the early formation of her artistic vision that these works sit comfortably with pictures she would make nearly ten years later.

Woodman's art is very self-aware, sometimes painfully so, and her being devoted to her medium while at the same time constantly questioning it makes her a very modern artist. Her image of three young women, each holding photographs of Woodman's face in front of their own, feels like a very modern comment about image-making. But these pictures also have a much older sensibility, harking back to early photography that conjured ghosts and fairies from the magical lens.

This show is a compact survey of Woodman's career, from her early work made at home in Colorado, through Rhode Island, where she went to art college, and Rome, where she frequently visited, to New York where she moved to begin her professional life as a photographer.

It shows the range of styles and moods in which she worked: dressed up in clothes from vintage stores and thrift shops to hint at narratives; playing with the conventions of Old Masters paintings (one image juxtaposes a leaping, naked figure with another seated formally, like one of Raphael's cardinals). A few are interiors without figures, simply saturated with a sense of place.

The Self-Deceit series made in Rome in 1978 are some of the most raw, vulnerable images. Most contain mirrors, and they create an uneasy dynamic with the viewer. While making herself vulnerable to the gaze of the camera, Woodman seems also to hide, flinching away from both the lens and the mirror, from herself and from us.

Often, she pulls at plasterwork, peels at wallpaper as if she might hide behind it, as if hoping the walls might absorb her. She curls on the bottom shelf of a vitrine full of stuffed animals, crouches as if trapped behind the leg of a fireplace. The emotional range of this work – playful, threatened, vulnerable – is also about what it means to be young, how the emerging self also seeks to hide from the light.

Along with the Woodman show, the Ingleby is hosting its first solo show by Tommy Grace, who graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2002. He and his partner and collaborator Kate Owens showed remarkable work at the Ingleby in November 2007 in which windblown carrier bags were transformed into something akin to classical sculpture. Although this work is very different, it has the same classical sensibility twinned with a very modern range of questions.

Here, Grace focuses on printing, in particular "dummy" text, the traditional blocks of text that begin "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet". It's a tool that may go back to the 15th century and still used by graphic designers today to show typeface effects without the distraction of meaning. He has used it to create his own newsprint, which he then collages into precise repeating patterns, like a classical frieze.

Two double-sided prints exploit the problem (to Grace it is more of an opportunity) of "show-through", where a picture on the reverse of a page shows through to corrupt another. His prints show found pictures of the figures made by Michelangelo for the sarcophagi in the Medici Chapel, enigmatic works generally understood as allegories for Night and Day, Dawn and Dusk. He shows us only their backs, enhancing their sense of mystery, and bleeds one into the other until the differences become indistinct, the supposed opposites become part of the same continuum.

Grace is interested in how we read what is before us. We recognise newsprint, and try to read it as such. He strips away that possibility by reducing it to patterns, so we look for meaning in those instead, just as we do in Michelangelo, and it eludes us, while at the same time dropping enough hints to keep us in thrall. And if you look closely at Lorem ipsum, you can begin to translate it. Guess what? It has meaning after all. Of course it does.

&#149 Both shows until 13 June