So. I make here. It looks small when captured like this, almost cornered. My first admission is that I used this as an excuse to tidy the maelstrom driven mess it had become. An image of the Victorian terraced house I live in in Leith may be more appropriate as I inhabit the house with the full-time full-throttle artistic-endeavour that drives so many of us: the house is my place of work, not just this studio. I drift through the house, switching switches and drinking coffee, making cake and kneading bread, thinking. When I do sit in this space, it is with such focus and drive that the work comes fast. I edit, cut and write here. My films come to life here and settle here; still images taken on film or glass or tin come into focus here.

The wall behind us is a window to a Victorian cottage garden, sun dripped or rain drenched, it accepts the extremeness of Edinburgh’s weathers and refuses to stop propagating. The other wall is the wall of objects, it suffuses my influences. The opposite wall is blank, white, a nothing, a space to stare at.

So what can you see? All present and correct: a MBP, some Swedish furniture, a Super 8 camera. The intertwined glass and metal objects are from a residency I completed at North Lands Creative Glass in Lybster in May this year where I cast glass: this sea-worn wrapped-steel loop comes from the beach at Whaligoe in Caithness; I cast it in glass whole, the result the yellow and black piece on the left.

With regard to photography, I mostly don’t exhibit digital, I dance around the fringes of fine art photography, of analogue photography, of making images not taking them. Having said that, in Lybster I pursued my interest in Collodion wet plate photography, developing a kilned ambrotype process, which I will pursue further this year with the aid of a formative influence, Carl Radford. What I mean by kilned ambrotype is that we spent careful time preparing glass photographic plates using a Victorian technology and then I threw them into a kiln at 600 degrees. The results were astonishing, delicate and amber-bright.

My most recent exhibition of fine art photography, Analogue Decay, was shown at the Howden for a month over Easter; it is a collection of new analogue work, celebrating the disintegration and imperfections of this near obsolete process and the unique painterly images it can produce. The pieces are not digitally manipulated and were shown at full negative ratio. The best I can hope is that this is seen as honest work.

My room is now a midden again. I love it.

Currently, Alastair has a series of 12 short films in the Edinburgh Festival, as part of Kevin Williamson’s Robert Burns project, Not In My Name. The films intersperse with Kevin’s rote recital of Burns more radical, untagged poems. The second part of its run in the Edinburgh Fringe is from the 24th – 28th August 2011 at the National Library of Scotland, at 7pm each evening.

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‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.

Richard Healy and Gemma Holt

Sierra Metro

The sixth chapter of E.H. Gombrich’s 1979 book The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of Decorative Art provides a ‘unique language’ through which Richard Healy and Gemma Holt (in a new creative collaboration instigated and supported by the gallery) have considered the bonds and hierarchies that exist between pattern and object, whilst effecting to explore the divergent and often contentious relationship that exists between fine art and design practice.

Gombrich’s chapter begins with discussion of the kaleidoscope. Invented in 1816 as a scientific tool and named after the Ancient Greek for ‘beautiful form’, it quickly became appropriated as a toy, creating thrills and wonderment at its ability to subvert the natural order and familiar ways of seeing. Similarly in Shapes and Things, common and familiar order has been displaced and recontextualised, and whilst there is beauty here, it’s of a strange, awkward type, characterized by compositional peculiarity and visual clashes- a beauty that necessitates observation from many perspectives and allowed to unravel and reveal itself over time.

The ‘fruitful tension between functional and ornamental hierarchies’ noted by Gombrich, appears to be of significant concern in the exhibition. Objects sit awkwardly in this interstice between function and ornament- the mirrors, the pouffes, the lighting, even the curtains have an inferred domestic purpose- yet their installation in the gallery renders them untouchable and facile. Two polarized exceptions exist: Holt’s hexagonal plinth, built and utilized with the specific purpose of serving Healy’s projection, and the fake wall segment installed by Healy, adorned by his Studio Plant Study II, which sits uniquely as an object of sheer decoration.

Closer consideration and inspection of the designed elements themselves, provides further disquieting distancing from the familiar. Etched into the mirrors is a malevolent arrangement of sawtoothed forms, the three pouffes- stripped of their cordial covers sit together like naked chopped sections of a superfluous ornamental pillar, the curtains hover at a disconcerting height above the floor like mischievous apparitions, purposefully concealing segments of the space. This conflicting disposition in the objects occurs similarly in the artists’ use of colour. The clash of coral against grey strains and upsets the eye- yet the vibrant glow of the lunar pendant, first encountered as a haze through a curtain or a tantalizing reflected blaze in a mirror, prompts a desire to bask in its glow. Its night-light blush, rhythmically seeping from fuchsia into aquamarine and turquoise, intimating warmth and comfort against the cold stone background.

As time passes, a considered grouping of objects becomes apparent. Each of the three curtains is paired with its ‘own’ selected elements that it shields and protects. Despite these individual arrangements, there is a distinct sense of lopsidedness to the composition overall. Given that Gombrich remarks that ‘symmetry implies cohesion’, it would seem that the artists have consciously shunned a more predictable order in favour of something more dynamic and less visually comfortable. Gombrich also discusses the importance of the ‘centre’- how the kaleidoscope draws the eye into the middle and how we unconsciously esteem centrality more generally (in religious iconography, ceremonial events etc). Shapes and Things has no centre. The middle of the gallery is empty of objects- barring a curtains edge hanging vaguely nearby- from this central viewpoint the balance of the objects presented is out of line.

Healy’s projected video seems to act as something of a synopsis of the exhibition content. It presents a perpetual conveyor of analogous elements: fractal geometric shapes, minimalist creations and monochromatic segments of pattern. The effect is immersive and hypnotic, and once you lose yourself in the visuals they work to echo, not only the close vicinity, but provide a kaleidoscopic vision of works in festival exhibitions elsewhere: the fragmented architecture of Coleman & Hogarth’s Staged, Iran do Espirito Santo’s gradated monochrome wall, the hunks of marble set to create Martin Creed’s new Scotsman Steps glide systematically across the screen.

Overtime the disjointed temporary contents of Shapes and Things begin to converse with their surroundings- revealing and highlighting the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the gallery space itself. Healy’s pulsating orb acts as an inadvertent parody of the bright redundant buoys hanging outside the window, whilst there is a previously overlooked awareness of how three white pillars abruptly defy the comfortable symmetry of the other six.  Other patterns, shapes and shades from the work play-off the heavy permanent wooden fixtures, coatings of dark mustard paint and the frosted floral glass panels.

When discussing the general response to the effect of the kaleidoscope, Gombrich notes that people ‘usually respond with delight, but after a few exclamations of ‘ah’ and ‘oh’ they put it aside and talk of other things.’ Healy and Holt’s Shapes and Things provokes a similar initial reaction, however, there is enough intriguing conflict and intelligent construct here to hold the viewers interest long after this original impression has passed.

Image credits:

Shapes and Things, Richard Healy and Gemma Holt, 2010

Installation view, Sierra Metro, Edinburgh

Images courtesy the artists and Sierra Metro

Photography: Chris Park