Chiara Camoni, Cample Line review: 'her sculptures seem on the verge of coming alive'

Italian artist Chiara Camoni brings a fertile imagination and a dash of playfulness to the often mysterious objects she makes, writes Susan Mansfield

Chiara Camoni: murmur, buzz, hiss and rub, Cample Line, near Thornhill ★★★★

Ash Rise, John Hope Gateway, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh ★★★★

Richard Forster: Ost..!, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★★

The success of Cample Line, in the hamlet of Cample near Thornhill in the Dumfries & Galloway hills, proves that being remote from urban centres is no object to running a contemporary art gallery. There is a particular synergy with the current artist, Chiara Camoni, who has chosen to base her international career in the remote village of Seravezza, in the mountains of northern Tuscany.

​Camoni, who was the subject of a major mid-career retrospective in Milan earlier this year, makes art shaped by her rural location. Working mainly with clay, stone and plants, she harvests local materials (in the case of this show both in Italy and Cample), and works with a team of local people to create her more labour-intensive pieces. Her aesthetic speaks of folklore, the organic and the domestic.

Central to this exhibition is Sister (2023), a giant goddess figure with a cascading headdress of flowers and a majestic forking train who, at first glance, could be a wicker (wo)man, but is in fact fashioned from myriad strings of hand-made terracotta beads. Slightly taller than the average human and full of presence, she casts an imperious gaze on viewers as they arrive up the stairs.

Camoni draws on folk art and arte povera but with an ambition and quality of making which is also contemporary. Almost everything suggests a creature, from the “butterfly vases” with their hints at antennae, legs and wings to the Gioielli (“jewellery”), in which jewellery is melted down and reworked to make pieces suggesting bark, pupae, spiders and beetles. There are eyes everywhere: the more you look at this exhibition, the more you find it looking back at you.

The Sister upstairs connects to La Verene Barbona (“the old beard”), fashioned from a chunk of mimosa tree and greeting visitors downstairs with his plastic bag of sparkly trinkets – whether he’s a litter picker or simply has a magpie eye, we can only imagine. Burning Sister is a film of another goddess made from flowers and grasses being burned on a beach in Greece.

Next to Barbona are two snakes, beautifully fashioned from interlocking ceramic cups, and two giant “necklaces” of natural and found materials which seem to evoke the idea of a being big enough to wear them. “Evoke” is the key word here: Camoni’s sculptures don’t replicate natural forms, they evoke them. By attention, imagination and a dash of playfulness, she creates objects – beings, creatures – which, as the onomatopoeic words in the exhibition title suggest, are just on the verge of coming alive.

Work by Naomi Mcintosh at Ash Rise | Ben Addy

Staying in the realm of natural materials, Ash Rise is an impressive group exhibition by 20 furniture makers, artists and designers all working with ash felled in the same Killearn woodland due to the disease ash dieback. The fungus is likely to cause the destruction of some three-quarters of Scotland’s 11 million ash trees in the next two decades.

While all this is sad news, the touring exhibition, jointly organised by the Scottish Furniture Makers Association (SFMA), Scottish Forestry (SF) and the Association of Scottish Hardwood Sawmillers (ASHS) works hard to celebrate the particular qualities of ash (strength, flexibility, suitability for steam-bending) and to suggest different ways in which it can live on.

In 1993, the late, great furniture designer Tim Stead was commissioned by the Botanic Gardens to make objects from the wood of a huge fallen ash. His Botanic Ash Throne sits at the entrance to exhibition almost like a standard for everyone else to aim at. And they do, for there is some beautiful work here, from Tom Cooper’s intricate Emergence cabinet, to Kirsty MacDonald’s double-helix shelving unit and Nikita Wolfe-Murray’s In/Organic, a striking sideboard with an elegant curved decoration on its front.

There are experiments with materials and forms: David Buchanan-Dunlop and decorative plasterers Steven and Ffion Blench make a side table combining wood and plaster, using the 16th-century Italian techique of scagliola which imitates marble; guitar-makers Rory Dowling, Caelin Harrington and Zachie Morris and concrete designer Nicholas Denney collaborate to make an extraordinary (and fully functional) electric guitar from wood and concrete. Stephen Thompson makes a kayak, its wooden frame made entirely from a single ash.

Duke Christie’s monumental scorched Fire Vessels show off ash grain at its most dramatic. Richard Goldsworthy’s installation of shallow bowls with scorched edges make a visually strong display, and Naomi McIntosh’s intricate sculptural columns made from slivers of bent wood evoke the helicopter-like motion of the tree’s winged seeds. Stevi Benson’s work, in hand-cut paper, showing the space in the canopy when a tree dies, is one of the most elegiac in the show.

At the Ingleby Gallery, Yorkshire-based artist Richard Forster is also engaged in meticulous acts of making. Forster’s signature style is what he calls “photocopy realism”, manipulating source material on a photocopier and then reproducing the result as a meticulous pencil drawing. For this show, he is making three-dimensional objects as well, focussing on a subject which has been important to him for some years: “ostalgie” – nostalgia for life in Communist East Germany (DDR).

Installation view of Richard Forster's exhibition OST..! at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh | Courtesy of the Ingleby Gallery

At the centre of the show is a series of sculptures, re-made versions of East German products cast in jesmonite, resin and aluminium, from Spee washing powder packets to a bubble lampshade and an Orienta radio, as well as figurines from DDR pop culture such as the sandman and the cosmonaut. Each object is posed on an exact reproduction of the cardboard box in which it was delivered.

There are also two series of drawings: one reproducing photographs of events around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the other colour stills from the East German stop-motion animation Unser Sandmannchen, paired with children’s drawings and the logos of obsolete East German brands. These drawings are so polished they look like digital reproductions; the crucial thing is they are not.

The art of obsessively detailed reproduction has its placein the contemporary canon, but always begs the question “why?” It’s not exactly the wrong question, as it may well be the one the artist is trying to answer with each meticulous mark they make. Forster has made a series of copies which are so real they are almost more real than the things they imitate. It’s as if he’s gone through realism and come out the other side, asking: what is authenticity? What is memory? What is the true nature of connection to places and things?

Chiara Camoni until 15 December; Ash Rise until 12 January, then touring to Inverness and Dumfries in 2025; Richard Forster until 2 November