Art reviews: Marianne Greated | Laura Drever | Paloma Proudfoot
Marianne Greated’s paintings of Grangemouth Refinery have one foot in a dystopian future and the other very firmly in the present, writes Susan Mansfield
Marianne Greated: This Island Earth, Park Gallery, Callendar House, Falkirk ★★★★
Laura Drever: Glimro, Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★★
Paloma Proudfoot: Glass Delusion, Collective, Edinburgh ★★★★
Falkirk’s Park Gallery turned 25 last year, an example of the outstanding work being done to present art in local authority-run spaces outside Scotland’s cities, often largely down to the determination and commitment of a few individuals. Situated inside the magnificent Callendar House, the gallery also has a solid track record for community engagement, which continues with the current show by painter Marianne Greated, Head of Art at Edinburgh College of Art.
One of the biggest issues currently affecting the Falkirk area is the closure and repurposing of Grangemouth Refinery, a step forward in the move away from fossil fuels, but at a heavy cost to local employment. On a different note, the Grangemouth plant has come to occupy a space in the Scottish imagination, its great floodlit site visible for miles, especially at night, like the set of a dystopian sci-fi movie.
Greated’s paintings of Grangemouth speak to both of these. Her large-scale paintings revel in the otherworldly forms of the towers and huge spherical gas tanks, and she adds fluorescent colours: greens, pinks, trees lit yellow by floodlights in the dark. These unpeopled industrial landscapes have one foot in a dystopian future and the other very firmly in the present, amid real-life arguments about land use, climate change and employment.
However, This Island Earth is not only about Grangemouth. Also included are paintings of the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, where Greated’s mother was born. A picturesque place of fishing villages and sandy beaches, it is also home to a vast granite quarry, another monumental site with cylindrical stone crushers and overhead gantries for shifting newly quarried rock.
In a painting such as Quarry Roads, there is a kind of harsh beauty. The opposite of picturesque landscape, for sure, but with a set of strong aesthetic forms, rendered in a palette of pastels and greys under pale, flat island skies. The Grangemouth paintings are more eerie, often pictured at night. Both are entirely unpeopled, though occasional vehicles feature in case we were in any doubt about the scale.
As paintings, these challenge the conventions of landscape painting, while opening up questions about the relationship between humans and our environment. They are questions, not conclusions. They simply present us with things and invite us to do some thinking about them.
Orkney-based artist Laura Drever is concerned with landscape too, but with landscape as a sensory experience. She works from a place of immersion in the landscape and weather of her native Orkney, where she has lived since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2003.
She walks for four hours per day and paints for the same, and this body of work for her first solo show at the Scottish Gallery moves through four seasons of coastal walks around the Mainland of Orkney. The title, Glimro, comes from the ancient Norn language meaning phosphorescent glow or gleam of brightness. The paintings have lovely, evocative titles, often also from Norn: Smoogro, Mirkady, Yettna.
Drever lays down layers of colour suggesting hills, fields, water, cliffs, ocean, long grasses shifting in the wind. Then she paints over them a layer of dense, repetitive brushmarks, often in gold. These marks shimmer and swirl like weather systems on a satellite map. This is a landscape which is never still, it is constantly shifting with the wind, the changing light. Even on canvas it shimmers and shifts in the play of light coming in through the gallery windows.
Again, this landscape is unpeopled, and it is expressive more than it is realist. Some works are more abstract than others. At times, we’re not sure if we’re looking down at a landscape from above, or staring intently at a pebble or a patch of lichen. But whether the lens is micro or macro, we’re in no doubt about the consistency of vision, and in no doubt at all about where we are.
Another ECA graduate, Paloma Proudfoot, has her first solo show in Scotland in Collective’s City Dome. Proudfoot, who has a Masters from the Royal College of Art, works in sculpture, textiles, text and performance, and her interests include medical history and the female body. The works in this show are part of an ongoing body of work about the pioneering 19th-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, and his work on female hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital.
The title of the show, Glass Delusion, comes from a psychiatric condition which emerged in the Middle Ages in which people believed their bodies were made of glass. The idea of fragility, physical and mental, is central here, and it would also seem inherent in the making process given that the major work here is a large-scale frieze made in glazed ceramics, a medium notoriously prone to breakages.
Proudfoot’s craftsmanship is highly accomplished. The frieze is inspired by a well-known painting of one of Charcot’s demonstrations, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière, by Brouillet, and she replicates elements of the painting, including the windows and light fittings, adding details like feathers - which Charcot would sometimes attach to the bodies of his patients better to observe their tremours - and an electric fan, plugged into a (ceramic) electrical socket. That Proudfoot originally worked in textiles is clear from the way the clothing and fabrics are rendered.
However, she is also remaking this history. In her version, the patient on whom hypnosis has been performed, Marie Wittman, faints into the arms of a female medic, and Charcot’s all-male audience is replaced with tableaux of women and non-binary people: a choir singing a lament, and an artist making a painting. All three activities - hypnosis, singing (specifically keening) and making art are all processes which channel deep emotions to the surface.
So, unlike the Brouillet painting, there is empathy and agency. However, the work remains wedded to the material with which it is in dialogue. Other works spin off from it: delicate sculptures of lilies in which the flowers become mouthpieces for women’s voices, and a ceramic mannequin which will be used during a performance on 22 May. Doublespeak, a standalone ceramic relief of a woman sitting with the torso mannequin against her body, documents an earlier performance.
There is clearly much more the artist could do with this material. Perhaps she has already realised these ideas elsewhere, but here they feel as if they are just in the process of maturing. While her skills are much in evidence, the ideas in the show might yet be made to resonate more powerfully and with more clarity.
Marianne Greated: This Island Earth runs until 19 April; Laura Drever: Glimro until 28 March; Paloma Proudfoot: Glass Delusion runs until 24 May
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