Art reviews: Solange Pessoa | Ciara Phillips | The Palestinian Museum in Scotland

Bringing together large quantities of natural materials from all over Scotland, Solange Pessoa’s site-specific installation at Tramway invites gallery-goers to explore their senses, writes Susan Mansfield

Solange Pessoa: Pilgrim Fields, Tramway, Glasgow ★★★

Ciara Phillips: Undoing It, GoMA, Glasgow ★★★★

The Palestinian Museum in Scotland, 13a Dundas Street, Edinburgh ★★★★

“Scotland stole my heart,” says Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa and, for her first major exhibition in the UK at Glasgow’s Tramway, she has harvested large quantities of natural materials from the length and breadth of the country.

Raw sheep’s wool from the Hebrides and reeds from beside the Tay are placed next to kelp from Scottish beaches and large quantities of home-grown moss. Pessoa, 64, who has exhibited around the world, including at 2022’s Venice Biennale, draws on a Brazilian tradition of working with natural things, sometimes on a monumental scale.

Installation view of the Solange Pessoa exhibition Pilgrim Fields at Tramway, Glasgow | Keith Hunter

Her new, site-specific installation for Tramway is Pilgrim Fields, which visitors are invited to explore using their senses. Soft, earthy aromas are much in evidence; it isn’t clear whether you’re allowed to touch, but people were doing so when I was there and no one stopped us. Pessoa says, in the accompanying film, that she doesn’t want to explain her work, the point is “feeling it”, though I think she means that metaphorically.

The materials are laid out on the floor in discrete circles: hops, marigold petals, moss, dried leaves. Black fleeces pool in the corners. Some of the circles include sculptural forms, giant seedpods, squashes or eggs cast in bronze which catch and disperse light, or ceramic, which don’t. Spheres about the size of watermelons are stacked carefully next to one wall, nestled in sheep’s wool. Outdoors, in the Hidden Gardens, Pessoa’s Lesmititas, evocative brown pods made of soft fabric, hang from a group of pine trees and cluster on the ground beneath them.

Tramway 2 works well when reimagined as a outdoor space, and this is a kind of a landscape, a patchwork of fields illuminated by natural light from the roof windows. But it also feels like a palette, raw materials assembled in an ordered way ready for an artist to do something with them. In the past, Pessoa has built large-scale sculptures and installations, and made paintings inspired by folk art and cave painting. I’d like to see what she does with these but, it turns out, this is it.

Does the work speak (as the interpretation suggests) to “colonial, agricultural, ecological and material histories”? Seeds have a rich story, from the very beginnings of agriculture to their genetic modification today. The role of agriculture in shaping the Scottish landscape is a huge topic, with many jagged edges. Are the giant pods symbolic of renewal and transformation? These ideas could be here, but there’s nothing in the work to signal that either way.

If these objects are meant to transcend being merely objects, they need a sprinkling of fairy dust from the hand of the artist in order to communicate that transformation. Instead they feel inert, still waiting to be transformed. Or perhaps I’m just not “feeling it”.

Artist Ciara Phillips pictured at her Undoing It exhibition at GoMA in Glasgow | Neil Hanna

Ciara Phillips’ show of new and recent work at GoMA promises to foreground the artist’s process, which is a phrase which usually sinks my heart into my boots. I keep having to stifle the urge to say: “Just go ahead and finish it, and show us the finished work!” Phillips, though, has won me over.

The Glasgow-trained artist, who is now a professor at the University of Bergen in Norway, works chiefly in printmaking, ducking and diving between woodcut, etching, screenprint and monoprint, and combinations of them, working in abstraction and with images and writing. Every inch of wall in the GoMA’s Gallery 3 is “wallpapered” with prints.

There is something delicately beautiful about the images she employs in the first room: a braid of hair and a sliver of new moon in Antidote, a single dark strand drapped over the moon in Lingerer. Ghost resonates with abstract presences and beautiful colour. The larger abstract pieces are almost pure texture: ink wiped across a plate somehow keeping its wetness, the woodgrain in a woodcut, hints of physical, hands-on process.

If these works are more “finished”, further into the space she digs under the surface. Pages from her sketchbooks become large-scale prints; notes on making and to-do lists are immortalised as works in themselves. She collages text and photographs, images and shapes, sometimes adding, sometimes taking away. Ideas connect and reconnect like mind maps. Making can be unmaking too.

Phrases come to the surface: “Empathy is a political issue”; “Being a human being”. Gertrude Stein is here, as is artist Amy Sillman and, perhaps most importantly, Toni Morrison, being incisive about what art does: “…keep asserting the complexity and originality of life, and the multiplicity of it… This is about being a complex human being in the world”. Her words draw the show together, in all its complexity and multiplicity. Phillips has bravely lifted the veil on her process and we go away understanding it - and her - rather better.

Detail from Jidar, OOC, 2022 by Ghassan Abu Laban | Contributed

Meanwhile, a permanent museum of contemporary Palestinian art has opened at 13a Dundas Street, Edinburgh, in the space vacated by Arusha earlier this year. Entrepreneur and art lover Faisal Saleh opened the first Palestinian Museum in Woodbridge, Connecticut, in 2018, and has held temporary exhibitions around the world, including at the Venice Biennale. The Palestinian Museum in Scotland is his first long-term space in the UK.

As reports reach us of the worsening situation in Gaza, he aims to “tell the Palestinian story to a global audience through its art”. The work (all of which is for sale) includes paintings by leading figures from the Palestinian diaspora, such as Samia Halaby and Nabil Anani, as well as artists from inside the West Bank and Gaza. Saleh believes the Palestinian people have been “dehumanised” in the eyes of the West. Art, by its very nature, is a manifestation of humanity.

The majority of the work speaks to the current situation: how could it not? Mohammed Al Haj’s painting of displaced people was made in 2021, but it feels somehow prophetic: now the artist, who lives in Gaza, is enduring a series of forced evacuations. Ibrahim Alazza’s installation All That Remains, links bundles of possessions with barbed wire. The female figure in Nameer Qassim’s painting Enough, raises her crossed arms in a gesture of defiance and protest surely as old as time itself. The figures in Hamada Elkempt’s Under Observation cluster on either side of a barrier wall; one holds up an empty pot.

In truth, nothing here can avoid being political: not In Pursuit of Utopia No.7, Nabil Anani’s monumental landscape of the verdant countryside west of Ramallah; not Haya Ka’abneh’s two women in traditional dress, which is titled Spring Mourning; not Ghassan Abu Laban’s wonderful painterly work of a couple looking out from a ruined building. As Toni Morrison might have said: in a context like this one, exploring human experience is a political act.

Solange Pessoa: Pilgrim Fields until 5 October; Ciara Phillips: Undoing It until 26 October

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