Art reviews: Chris Ofili | NowandThen | Home: Ukrainian Photography

Detail from Caged Bird's Song by Chris Ofili at Dovecot | Dovecot / Gautier Deblonde

Chris Ofili: The Caged Bird’s Song, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh ★★★★

NowandThen: Dalkeith Palace (Part 2), Dalkeith Palace ★★★★

Home: Ukrainian Photography, Stills, Edinburgh ★★★★

After the Battle Bannockburn, the tapestries that adorned the tent of the defeated English king, spoils of war, ended up hanging in the convent of St Catherine of Siena in Edinburgh, remembered in the street name Sciennes. Whether keeping the wind out of royal tents or insulating draughty castles, tapestries really do seem to belong to the Middle Ages. Certainly some of the most beautiful are from that time. Although tapestry did continue to be made until much later, domestic improvements made them redundant long ago. Not only is it apparently archaic, tapestry is also labour intensive and extremely expensive, yet in spite of all this, the looms at Dovecot Studios seem as busy as ever. Looking at the tapestry currently on exhibition there, Chris Ofili’s The Caged Bird’s Song, the answer is, I think, the sheer beauty of the work that the studio produces.

This exhibition includes a lot of technical information about looms, warps and wefts and much else. There are also samples and trial pieces on view showing how the weavers test colour mixes and imagery. These relate both to the tapestry made to Ofili’s design and to the studio’s long tradition of working with leading contemporary artists. It all gives insight into the complexity of translating Ofili’s original, a fairly small watercolour, into a tapestry three metres by seven. Certainly not a simple process of reproduction, rather it is a subtle and complex business of selecting and mixing colours and threads to create a new, collaborative work of art. That the original is a watercolour in this case also added to the difficulty. The weavers had to match in wool the transparency of the medium and the accidents that are a natural part of a freely handled watercolour.

Commissioned for the Clothworkers’ Guild, the tapestry is a triptych with a single image across the three panels. The scene is set in the artist’s native Trinidad and the title reflects how on the island men apparently keep caged songbirds and have them compete in singing contests. The image of the captive singing bird also suggests the dark history of slavery, however, but also how within that darkness music endured.

In the tapestry a male figure on the right is carrying the caged bird of the title. On the left, a female figure, hand raised to her chin, is listening to the bird’s song. These two draw back curtains to reveal the central panel where two naked lovers are entwined on a beach beside a waterfall. The man is playing a mandolin and while he is plucking its strings his hand is also between his lover’s open thighs. She, meanwhile, is also being served a cocktail from the heavens. A long stream of coloured liquid pours down from a palm tree into her cocktail glass. The colours, except for the curtain on the right which is in pink and gold, are cool greens and blues. The drawing is in fluent, sweeping curves. This, but also the idyllic mood, recall Matisse. It is very beautiful, but even if Ofili had worked up his watercolour to an oil painting the same size, the effect would have been quite different. As tapestry, it has become a collective art work, certainly, but really the difference is physical. Wool is tactile. The colour is in the body of the work, not on it. Wool also absorbs light and the colour saturation in tapestry is quite different from any other medium.

Tapestry also features in the second part of this year’s VAS centenary show, NowandThen. The first part was in the RSA in February. This second part is in Dalkeith Palace. With over 540 works by 341 artists displayed across two floors of the building this show is billed as the biggest ever. You can’t really talk about a palace as being domestic, but the 17 rooms used for the show really are more domestic than palatial. They do still have the undomestic palace feature of opening into each other, however; not much privacy, but handy here. You can walk from room to room and end up where you started.

VAS has always shown craft along with every other kind of visual art and one of the most striking works here is in fact a tapestry. Made by by Vincent Deighan in knotted wool, it measures three metes by four. Called I Care Not, it is certainly impressive and its apocalyptic imagery is vivid if not entirely clear in its meaning. Alexander Birks’s Home is in the same technique, slightly smaller in scale, but with the sun shining into a kitchen and another room visible beyond, it is much gentler. It is also rendered in an informal style that cleverly deploys the inherent softness of tapestry to make a warm domestic image. Amongst many other textile works, one of the most striking is by Katie Hart Potapoff who has made a beautiful small rug by printing blue cyanotype onto linen. In a different medium, Gino Wong has been equally ingenious by printing an image of the Mona Lisa in reflective ink. You see yourself as well as her.

VAS

Among a good number of works on a large scale Nicoleta Bucsaru’s Hora: Harmony of Unity is a circle of nine dancing figures. Martha Ellis has made a free-standing screen of wild flowers cut from black painted plywood, while Esther Helfer’s The Circling Sea is a wide ring of interlocking driftwood. Laid out on the floor, it looks very like a crown of thorns.

Among the crafts, Duke Christie’s Wych Elm Amphora, made partly by burning the wood, is very beautiful. As a piece of furniture Max McCance’s Triplex Table is handsome, but with rotating, interlocking teeth it does look a bit like a mediaeval instrument of torture. Among the ceramics, I noticed a charming, small stoneware bull by Miranda Macdonald and some very lively pots by Melanie O’Donnell. There are also good paintings. Flag 3, Kigali Rwanda is a strongly composed abstraction by Frances Stevenson, for instance, and there is a fine monochrome portrait of a girl by Alastair Dunstan. A touching and mysterious painting by Svetlana Kornilova of a young girl holding a black hen is also memorable. Caroline Milne’s Still-life with Thistles and Alison Stewart’s Stripey (sic) Teapot and Cups are both very satisfying. Haunting Tide, Whitby, is a luminous sea painting by Jade Stout. I also liked Ruth Addinall’s powerful seated figure, Study in Orange and Grey. Prints include an etching of Dalkeith Palace itself by John Grey, some handsome prints of seabirds by Caroline Convey and an etching of figures struggling with the mountain winds by Gregory Moore. All this can only scratch the surface, however. There is a great deal to see and you have to hurry, too, as the show is only on for two weeks.

Mykhaylo Palinchak: Damaged residential buildings in the aftermath of shelling in the Podilskyi district of Kyiv, Ukraine, March 18, 2022. | Mykhaylo Palinchak / Stills

Home, an exhibition of the work of eight Ukrainian photographers at Stills, is in a very different mood. Mostly taken since the Russian invasion, with few exceptions the photos are not directly images of its brutality. It is written, nevertheless, in the haunted faces of Alexander Chekmenev’s sitters in a series of studio portraits, for instance, in Nazar Furyk’s pictures of the fertile landscape of Kherson destroyed by the breaching of the Kakhovka dam, or in Andrii Rachynski’s photos of buildings damaged by the Russian shelling of Kharkiv, but with the Ukranian word for “people” spray painted on their doors. There are people inside. They are still someone’s home. It is a moving exhibition.

Chris Ofili and Home until 5 October; ThenandNow until 8 September