Alberta Whittle, Mount Stuart review - 'a show that digs into the past'

In her show at Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute, Alberta Whittle has exchanged directness for the power of suggestion, writes Susan Mansfield

Alberta Whittle: Under the skin of the ocean, the thing urges us up wild, Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute ****

Lys Hansen: Live It, Paint It, Park Gallery, Falkirk ****

A stately home on the Isle of Bute might not be the first place you’d go looking for contemporary art this summer, but Mount Stuart has been hosting artists for more than 20 years, inviting them to respond to the house, grounds, collection, or the history of the island itself.

Installation view of work by Alberta Whittle in the Marble Hall at Mount Stuart

And somehow artists keep finding interesting ways to place their work in the neo-gothic-meets-Arts-and-Craftsy splendour of Mount Stuart, every inch of which is already decorated. Alberta Whittle’s show comes on the heels of Sekai Machache’s triumphant solo exhibition last summer (in which Whittle was a collaborator) weaving the presence of black women into the grand house’s interior in a series of film installations.

How might she follow that? The answer is to look back further, dig deeper – literally – into the archaeology of Bute, which tells us the island was home to a Viking settlement and a Viking assembly or “ting”. Whittle creates her own assembly space next to Mount Stuart’s front lawn, a ting or bothy or Barbadian chattel house, a simple, practical structure to be used for rest, events and (on the day I visited) a welcome shelter from the rain.

In the entrance hallway of the house, Remembering Wildfire, a sculptural self portrait by Whittle, acknowledges Edmonia Lewis, a 19th-century sculptor of First Nations and African American descent, whose bust of Christ is currently on loan from Mount Suart to the Tate (Wildfire was her First Nations name).

The main body of sculptural work sits in the Marble Hall, the spectacular centre of the house. The five works reference ancient standing stones: two display woven textiles made using tufting and embroidery, the other three are salvaged doors which have been subjected to subtle interventions: the addition of coloured glass, a tiny sculpted ear, an old fashioned bell with which one might have summoned a servant, an inlaid pattern like the shiny track of a snail.

Visitation of the Block by Lys Hansen

Doors are highly resonant objects in themselves: portals in or out, open or closed. There are references here to characters from voodoo and Barbadian carnival, a knotted net, a map of Scotland. The semi-abstract woven works seem to depict black bodies in water, shapeshifting into a seal, a whale. The selkie is here, perhaps Caribbean myths too, a sense of embracing wildness.

And water is important for Whittle, always the carrier of history, something which unites as well as divides. Her screenprints on the first floor make the point most overtly with the words: “What sound does the black Atlantic make?” From the upstairs windows, we see the Clyde, one waterway in a network of waterways which once carried sugar, tobacco, slaves, and, in their time, brought the Vikings to Bute.

The final door sits in the upstairs conservatory where the windows look out to the water. This one lies flat, anchored by ropes underneath, a cross on its surface marked with shells and coral. Is it a tomb – the ultimate portal? Or a raft, a means of rescue, escape? One leaves with questions.

This feels quite unusual in Whittle’s work. Often, she is quite direct about what she wants to say whether about topics like slavery, deaths of black people at the hands of the authorities, climate change. Her show at National Galleries Scotland: Modern One tended to exhortation: Step Lightly, Create Dangerously.

This work stands back. While the context almost certainly hasn’t changed, the tone is different. Directness has been exchanged for the power of suggestion. As approaches to making art go, it’s riskier, but, when it works, arguably more powerful.

Of a different generation, but not so far away in spirit, is the work of Lys Hansen, now 87, being celebrated in Falkirk the town where she was born. She, too, is an ambitious artist with a lot to say, an artist with an eye on women’s experience, a concern for the bigger issues of the world and a set of reference points beyond Scotland – in her case, in Germany and Scandinavia.

Hansen works at scale, and Park Gallery has taken an extra space on the second floor of Callander House to accommodate this show, curated by artist Marianne Greated. Broadly speaking, the upper floor houses work which draws on personal experience and the ground floor has the more political. Much of this work has been made within the last 25 years.

Hansen trained at Edinburgh College of Art in the 1950s, quickly eschewing the suggested repertoire of domestic scale still lifes and landscapes, and creating her own version of a Fine Art degree in order to learn the territory. She grew into her voice through her life experience, and spent time in Berlin from the mid 1980s onwards, immersing herself in European history and German expressionism.

What resulted were ambitious, important works. She painted figures, often nudes, as naked in their emotions as in their physicality. Bodies were wounded, traumatised, split open. There are works about motherhood, family, what it means to be a woman and an artist, war, conflict, love, death.

The Trial recalls events of 1944, when 86 people in a French village were shot dead by the Nazis. Visitation at the Blocks references Berlin’s striking holocaust memorial, but collapses time from the present day, through the Cold War, back to the time of the death camps. The approach is the same, whether the subject is personal or global. If it’s not always easy viewing, well, neither is history.

Ideally, the show would reflect more the intermingling of personal and political, but no one can blame the gallery for doing the best they can to accommodate a big show. Many artists of younger generations prefer to work across a range of media. Hansen’s paintings show us what painting can, perhaps uniquely, do in terms of collapsing the boundaries of time and expressing emotion through line and colour. She stands in the tradition of Munch, Picasso, Francis Bacon. In an ideal world, an artist of her callibre would be further celebrated in a national level institution.

Alberta Whittle until 25 August; Lys Hansen until 11 August