October 5, 2024 – November 9, 2024
An exhibition of the work of Neil Bickerton, Maggie Hills, Jane Hyslop, Paul Keir, Andrew Mackenzie.
These are five artists whose various practices span a wide range of technical and conceptual territories. One is an out and out formal abstractionist, another makes densely lyric images conjured from dreamlike journeys. One makes work derived from meticulous observation of the botanical world, another makes paintings constructed from the intersection of the manmade into the larger natural landscape, and one makes invented images in which faint echoes of half- remembered places and people are implied rather than fully stated. What they have in common is a kind of intelligent reserve: the work has a speculative, questioning impulse. Each having evolved their various and sometimes contradictory position over some years. They share a certain sense of scale, and a sense of the specific value of the various analogue means of production at their disposal.
MAGGIE HILLS
The common fabric in the paintings of Maggie Hills is their poetry and the clarity of her artistic voice. Each is a distinct and unique poem, pared back to the bones of what needed to be said in that specific instance. There is no grand ambition to dominate a gallery space here, these paintings have an inward energy, they draw one singularly into the reality of the world they represent.
There is an intrinsic melancholy and calm in Maggie’s artworks, but it’s the perspective on this that is so extraordinary. It feels as though I, as the viewer, am weightless in relationship to the scene depicted, as though I have become spectral. What is truly remarkable about her work is that it invites the viewer to become a participant in the etherial. And by entering inward into each realised microcosm, one finds oneself looking outward at the world depicted, at instances that pass forever.
Working from a personal archive of ‘found’ images (gathered from diverse sources, from old family slides to 1970s TV detective series), Maggie amends, layers, and re-works them, often repeating forms and figures between canvases so they have a shared language. The resulting compositions are both elusive and familiar – glimpses paused and their meaning searched for. The fleeting is repurposed into something to reflect on, calling attention to the weight of time. Maggie lives and works in Glasgow.
NEIL BICKERTON
Neil’s paintings are realised on a fine balance. They are illusive and to some degree defy description. There is of course the matter of fact; acrylic on board, an economy of material and construction. But somehow, beyond the mundane, the images themselves communicate with such subtlety that I find myself unexpectedly unmoored.
The paintings are an act of recall – fragments of intimate experience – his memory, his experience. There is no artifice in these images. They simply draw one’s attention to that which Neil has himself witnessed. And each is treated equally: tree, apple core, building. This disarming honesty makes the images feel deeply personal. This is unsettling. It is as though he has offered to share pages from his his diary. These small images are not only remarkable and beautiful, but courageous too.
Neil creates intimate works, evoking particular time and place. Often assembled from bits of board with framing devices, with assorted shapes and strips of wood glued to the surface, the paintings feature a range of personally emotive subjects. In his work the mundane becomes transcendent. Neil lives and works in Glasgow.
JANE HYSLOP
For all its simplicity and astonishing, joyous beauty, this is a profound, deep and layered artwork. It is a visual exploration of a fictional poem that forms a central motif within a fictional narrative by Virginia Woolf: Orlando.
This playful approach to form is integral the artwork itself, where the two principle styles employed, cascade and convulse in a kind of duet. It is an artist-book exploring a poem within a book, but it feels more like music than anything else. One can almost hear its intricate, looping rhythms play out across the long, single, folded page.
There is extraordinary ambition to the artwork too. These exquisite drawings of plant-life span 700 years, not only precisely referencing moments of Orlando’s narrative through his/her centuries, but then extending beyond the publication of Woolf’s book in the 1920’s through to the present day. That it so successfully encompasses such ambitious historical scope is due entirely to Jane’s lightness of touch and clarity of purpose. This is an artwork that has been years in the making, it is a work of endurance and love.
Jane works across art and design making artist’s books and works on paper. She combines natural and human histories by investigating points of tension where these different worlds meet. Place and identity are vital within her work and subject matter is often sourced in her native Midlothian.Jane lectures in Art and Illustration at Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh
ANDREW MACKENZIE
The three dimensional structural interventions depicted in Andrew’s paintings challenge the more traditional landscapes in which he places them. These are motifs that simultaneously work with and against one another, both alien and integral. The decision to explore his artwork as a wall drawing is then an inspired choice. For a wall drawing to work it must dialogue with the architecture of the space in which it is set – either sympathetically, or contrarily. The intervention with actual architecture extends the dialogue already present in the artwork out into the real world. What’s remarkable about Andrew’s drawing is his instinctive appreciation of the relationship between these two worlds – depicted and actual. The filaments that define the structural intervention in his landscape echo the physicality of the wall on which he paints. In his work Andrew’s seeks to explore three dimensional spaces within two dimensional depicted worlds. The extension of that exploration into an actual three dimensional world feels entirely natural, as if it had to be.
There are two firsts here for Andrew: its his first wall drawing and it’s also his largest work to date.
Andrew’s practice includes painting, drawing, lithography, public art and sculpture, and seeks to explore entangled relationships between the built environment and personal perceptions of nature, with a repeated interest in presenting woodland and human activity as inextricably linked. Andrew teaches painting at Leith School of Art in Edinburgh and lives in the Scottish Borders.
PAUL KEIR
The simplicity of Paul Keir’s work belies it’s depth. While, it is apparent that Paul has spent a number of days using his constructions to redefine the space of No31 garden, to divide precise new planes and interventions with lines of cord, pulleys, pegs, wood and aluminium (amongst the rotting leaves and fallen apples), what one actually becomes more aware of is the frailty, and transient nature of the work – the intrinsically human qualities in the work: it’s playfulness, it’s ephemerality. It is a work that seeks to define that which is human in relation to the structural divisions.
Paul’s practice utilises a range of formal strategies – walldrawings, paintings, objects, floorworks, and drawings: much of his work is centred on tensions between improvised and formal elements, and is characterised by a spareness and frankness of means. Paul lives and works in Edinburgh.
