Gaada: Plugging the gap

repeated theme of wood and stone pierced by strings reflects the medical suturing in the drawings and emphasises biomorphic elements of Hepworth’s work. The solidity of stone and wood strangely evoke the softness, warmth and vulnerability of flesh, particularly in the fossil-like piece ‘Small Stone with Black Strings’ (1952), its pinkish alabaster stitched with string. This representational plasticity challenges straightforward distinctions between abstraction and figuration, reflecting back onto medicoethical considerations of the human body as subject and object. The string-pierced forms also resemble musical instruments, anticipating the exhibition’s exploration of the importance of music, dance and movement in Hepworth’s art in spaces dedicated to her stage designs for Electra in 1951 (including ‘Apollo’, a beautiful wire sculpture seemingly entangled with its own shadow), and her set and costumes for The Midsummer Marriage in 1955. The circular insists emblematically throughout this exhibition, offering spaces to look through or traces engraved on the surfaces of forms, imprinted in lithographs, or drawn and painted. Circles exert a continuous gravitational pull on the viewer’s eye, establishing lines of force linking Hepworth’s art and life with the historical and political contexts on which she drew. The final room cements this centrality in the circular image of the moon, connecting her work with movements such as pop art, and affirming in lunar imagery her conception of the function of sculpture (and art more widely) in relation to human perception, a view which is central to this beautiful exhibition: ‘A sculpture might, and sculptures do, reside in emptiness; but nothing happens until the living human encounters the image. Then the magic occurs – the magic of scale and weight, form and texture, colour and movement, the encircling interplay and dance occurs between the object and the human sensibility.’

Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh

Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two) 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DR T: (0)131 624 6200 | nationalgalleries.org Open: Daily 10am–5pm

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‘Circles exert a continuous gravitational pull on the viewer’s eye, establishing lines of force linking Hepworth’s art and life with the historical and political contexts on which she drew’

1 Barbara Hepworth, Mother and Child, 1934. Purchased by Wakefield Corporation in 1951. Photo: Jerry Hardman-Jones

2 Barbara Hepworth, Genesis III, 1966. Photo: Jerry Hardman-Jones

3 Barbara Hepworth, Spring, 1966. Photo: Jerry Hardman-Jones

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Barbara Hepworth, Tibia Graft, 1949. Image courtesy of Wakefield Permanent Art Collection, Purchased 1951

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Barbara Hepworth, Sun Setting (from the Aegean Suite), 1971

6 Barbara Hepworth at work on the plaster for Single Form, January 1962, at the Morris Singer foundry. Photo: Morgan-Wells All image ©️ Bowness, Hepworth Estate

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Katie Paterson: Requiem

Greg Thomas

1 Katie Paterson, Endling 2 Katie Paterson, Requiem Courtesy of the Artist and Ingleby Gallery

Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh Until 11 June

Katie Paterson is an artist who invites us to imagine the impossible. Her works, often realised on a disarmingly domestic scale, have typically asked questions of life’s deepest origins in space, and the vast scales of time and distance that bookend our existence. Recently, her attention has seemingly been drawn to Earth, particularly the planet’s geological provenance and the responsibility we bear for non-human life at a time of epochal environmental damage. The origins of some of these themes can be found in ‘Fossil Necklace’ (2013), a necklace of tiny fossils representing major events in geological history. It was the artist’s storage of remnants from ‘Fossil Necklace’ in her basement that laid the seeds for this current show, Requiem, at Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery. Working with a team of researchers and technicians, Paterson has sourced and ground into dust a plethora of geological deposits – 364 in all – representing every age of Earth’s history: from pre-solar (over 4.6 billion years ago) to anthropocene (1945–present). Stored in hand-blown glass vials on thin ledges around the edge of the gallery’s main space, each 21-gram pile of dust (the fabled weight of the human soul) will be poured into a transparent funeral urn over the course of the exhibition. As so often in Paterson’s practice, a topic of extraordinary breadth is compressed into an idea-based durational artwork that can be explained in a couple of sentences. This opening out of the horizons of conceptualism, so that the questions it poses are not of narrow significance to the artworld but of immediate and gripping relevance to us all, is the great gift of the artist’s oeuvre. In this case, an invitation to audience participation – each layer will be poured by a different gallery visitor; my own includes 2.87-billion-year-old sedimentary rock from banded iron formations – might well enhance that sense of connection. Grasping a small cup of ancient dust, curved to suit the palm’s grip, the combination of intimacy and grandeur that has always defined Paterson’s work is realised on a new level. The anthropocene layers, of course, make up a compendium of ruin. An accompanying newspaper-format booklet, narrated with great verve by paleobiologist Jan Zalasiewicz, steers us through zombie forest, piles of wildfire ash and microplastics, via a Chittagong ship-breaking yard and the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Three hundred and sixtyfour layers are offered in total: as if we had one day left in the annual cycle to mend the damage.

Greg Thomas is a critic and editor based in Glasgow

Katie Paterson: Requiem

Ingleby Gallery 33 Barony Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6NX T: (0)131 556 4441 | inglebygallery.com Open: Wednesday to Saturday 11am–5pm

Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer

Neil Cooper

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V&A Dundee Until 4 September

Michael Clark was still only in his midtwenties when he danced solo on Italian television to Marc Bolan’s 1971 song that gives this epic exhibition its title. In the footage, Clark moves slowly, swathed in a swishy yellow dress and black lipstick as Bolan sings over elegiac strings of how he danced himself ‘right out of the womb’. Broadcast in 1986, with Thatcher’s Britain in full pomp, Clark was already feted as a taboo-busting enfant terrible of contemporary dance. Thirty-six years on, and with Clark now in his 60th year, his performance looks as vulnerable and as heroic a show of strength as it ever did. It is the perfect curtain-raiser to what might be regarded as a sort-of prodigal’s return to Scotland for the Aberdeen-born polymath following the show’s London run at the Barbican, who initiated and curated the show. The first of 14 rooms is occupied by A Prune Twin (2020), Charles Atlas’ multiscreen mash-up of two films he made with Clark in the 1980s; the quasi-biographical Hail the New Puritan (1986), and the even more impressionistic Because We Must (1989). Atlas’ realigned footage captures Clark and his gang of lost boys and girls at work, rest and play, children of the revolution taking steps towards building their own brave new world. Pulsed by a narcotic mix of outrageousness and naughty fun as it is, beyond the bare bums, the up-all-night hedonism, the why-the-hell-notness and the sheer bloody two-fingered cheek of it all, there is serious artistry at play. Each room charts Clark’s creative connections, be it through Elizabeth Peyton’s understated portraits or extravagant costumes by performance artist Leigh Bowery, BodyMap and Stevie Stewart. There is the Proustian thrill of standing on the chessboard floor and giant Big Mac set of I Am Curious, Orange (1988), Clark’s ballet that put Mark E Smith and The Fall onstage for a week at the King’s Theatre during the Edinburgh International Festival. A visceral bombast resonates from Sophie Fiennes’s film of current/ SEE (1998), set to a live score by Susan Stenger’s all-bass band, Big Bottom. Presented as an installation, the coruscating metal soundtrack evokes the black-box primitivism of a dive bar rock club, while the dancers on screen map out even more ancient rituals. Posters and programmes of Clark’s back-catalogue style him as the ultimate poster-boy pin-up. There are more TV interviews and performances, videos by Derek Jarman and footage of Clark as Caliban in Prospero’s Books (1991), Peter Greenaway’s arthouse reimagining of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. There are constructions made by Clark with Sarah Lucas, and a room of photographs of Clark by Wolfgang Tillmans. Edinburgh-born artist Peter Doig’s ‘Portrait (Corbusier)’ (2009), originally made for Clark’s production, come, been and gone (2009), is set against home movie footage of Clark’s dancers taking a walk across the rooftop of Cité Radieuse, Le Corbusier’s brutalist apartment block in Marseille. Above all, Cosmic Dancer reveals Clark as a collaborator and a catalyst. The array of designers, dancers, filmmakers,