Art reviews: Anna Barriball | Reflections | Recent Acquisitions

Anna Barriball’s undoubtedly attractive work is so open to interpretation that it’s effectively devoid of meaning, relying ultimately on the assumption that effort equals art

ANNA BARRIBALL ***

FRUITMARKET GALLERY, EDINBURGH

REFLECTION - CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTS AND CRAFTS IN EDINBURGH ****

RECENT ACQUISITIONS ****

CITY ART CENTRE, EDINBURGH

IT WAS great fun as a child to put a coin under a piece of paper, rub a pencil over it and see the coin appear magically, a perfect image from your formless pencil marks. Rather than drawing the coin, it was as though you were assisting it to produce its own self-portrait. Brass rubbing is a more sophisticated version of the same thing. At the Fruitmarket, Anna Barriball has taken this idea and sought to turn it into an art form. Her subject matter is neither medieval brasses nor little things like coins, though in a self-referential joke she has rubbed a five pound note with gold pen. You can just see the note’s identity through the gold which isn’t gold. Some sort of metaphor for our times perhaps.

Mostly she prefers to rub doors and windows, however, even walls, big things without any significant detail. She has rubbed the whole surface of a four-panel wooden door with graphite, for instance, so that its image is transferred to paper, actual size. Because the door is not flat, rubbing distorts the paper into a kind of relief. If you rub graphite long enough, it develops a silvery sheen. Grate polish – Zebo as it used to be – is just that, graphite in a suspension that with enough hard rubbing will polish steel or cast iron to a dark shiny surface, touched with silver. Barriball’s door, rubbed with graphite, no doubt for hours on end, has developed this surface and she exploits it extensively in her work. In the same way, for instance, she has taken rubbings of two round-headed windows with their rolling steel-link shutters pulled down. These are paradox windows, not only shuttered, but which you cannot see through even though their shiny surface suggests light. In this case, however, she has used a particularly dark graphite so that the effect calls to mind the memorable biblical phrase “through a glass darkly”. Before the invention of mirror glass, that was the only way you could see yourself reflected, darkly, or dimly in a mirror of polished bronze or silver.

In Window Wall, this effect is exploited on a grand scale. Sixteen identical square rubbings are hung in blocks of four so that they look like a row of big four-pane windows. She has used light-toned graphite here so that their reflective surface looks like glass catching the light, except for that paradox again. These are not windows at all. They are rubbings of a brick wall.

She does not always deploy the same techniques. She has, for instance, also made a lighter pun on windows in a set of small works where the detail of a window in an unseen photograph is framed in a tiny window cut in the mount that blocks out the rest of the picture. It’s a window in a window that’s not a window. In contrast to such miniaturisation, however, she has covered an entire wall with identical beach windbreaks joined together to form a single work 20 metres long and the full height of the room. The windbreaks are made of plastic, woven into varied bands of red, yellow, blue and green, but with mind-boggling patience she has worked over the entire surface, around a hundred square metres, with dark marker pen so that the bright colours of the plastic are dimmed, but not obscured. Their garishness softened to a glimmer, the whole effect is rather pretty, more like painting than drawing.

She uses the same idea of screening what you see in a video of a fireplace with a sheet of paper suspended in front of it. The draught in the chimney is causing the paper to “breathe”, to move in and out, expanding and contracting. As it moves against the chimney piece, you can momentarily discern the tiles that decorate it. Breathing is a theme in a series of small pictures, too. She has taken what she calls “found photographs” and defaced them by blowing bubble mixture onto them. It is meant to be a kind of visible breath, breathing life into the image. I do object to the use of phrase “found photographs”, however: it implies that what is significant about these pictures is the fact that she has found them and adopted them as hers. She may have found them, but they are still pictures of individual people. Who they are may have been forgotten beyond recovery, but it seems arrogant, all the same, to diminish their humanity so unthinkingly. Blowing bubbles at them only makes it worse.

She also includes her own screened self-portrait in the show. It’s a big sheet of paper, inked deep black then wrapped around herself to make a slightly rumpled column. Vestigially you can see her shape in this ambiguous sculpture-drawing.

Anna Barriball’s work is nice to look at, but it is really pretty thin. Like so much contemporary art, it’s mostly just a peg for wordy, semiotic commentary and once you let in semiotics there’s no limit to the meaning words can impose on the dullest art. It’s a paradox in an age dominated by images that in contemporary art it’s words that seem to count most. With things like windows that are walls, or fireplaces that breathe, you can hang endless interpretation onto a very limited form of expression; limited, that is, in everything except effort, for another common feature of contemporary art is the obsessive, mindless activity to which Anna Barriball’s drawing is witness. It is as though sheer effort was enough. It isn’t.

Across the road at Edinburgh City Art Centre in Reflections, an exhibition of artists and craftspeople who work in Edinburgh. Anna Ray’s Knot, made up of hundreds of stitched pick-up-sticks, is perhaps a little bit obsessional, too, but there is also evidence of much more imaginative and more skilled making here. Keiko Mukaide’s beautiful compositions of dichroic glass – glass that appears to have no colour, yet transmits colour brilliantly – testify to both her technical and aesthetic skills. Rebecca Wilson’s ceramics are as good. Her Dirty Rotten Peaches, dainty porcelain fruit that double as saucy bottoms sprouting golden leaves, are charmingly kitsch and exquisitely made. So is her hanging light made up of translucent porcelain cups and saucers on wires that reflect the light like rainbows. Caroline Douglas’s miniature allotment greenhouses made from cast lead crystal and silver are equally beautifully made. All together, there is much to celebrate here.

Recent Acquisitions are also on show. The City Art Centre, even with its limited means, remains the most consistent collector of contemporary Scottish art. I don’t like all of it. Louise Hopkins’ painting of patterns on printed fabric perhaps belongs in the obsessional art-equals-effort school, for instance, but I am delighted to see the collection has acquired significant works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, Christine Borland, Glen Onwin, Alan Shipway, Donald Urqhart and Ian Robertson among others. Victoria Crowe’s Last Portrait of Jenny Armstrong is a major painting by an important artist. There are also some interesting historical pictures and a good many wonderful additions to the collection of paintings of Edinburgh. A vivid painting of Holyrood was done for a railway poster by Claude Buckle. Waverley Station by JH Ross was painted around 1840 before it was much more than just the place where the trains stopped. Robert Eadie records St Andrews House under construction back in the 1930s when it was still just a huge steel frame. Pictures like this are real documents of the city’s history. Anybody for painting the tramworks? Or perhaps a group portrait, not of the usual civic dignitaries, but of those responsible who must bear our civic shame? Now that would deserve a good piece of explanatory prose.

• Anna Barriball runs until 9 April, Reflection until 12 February, Recent Acquisitions until 4 March