‘It was strange…here I was among all those people and at the same time I felt as I were looking at them from some place far away, a whole place seemed to me like a deep hole, and the people down in it like strange animals…like snakes…and I’ve been thrown into it…as though I were in the snake pit.’

With these words Virginia, the heroine of the 1948 film The Snake Pit, narrates a nightmarish sequence appropriated by Breda Lynch for the video installation The Pit, presented as a part of the present solo exhibition at Siamsa Tíre. This particular scene, remembered by the artist from her early childhood, served as a linchpin for this body of work, which she has been making since 2012. Lynch is an Irish artist known for her fascination with gothic and film noir aesthetics, which she employs in her visual negotiations of femininity and gender politics. In conceiving The Pit and Other Stories the artist again reached for a troubling and controversial stock of representations of the female body. Apart from the aforementioned video, the exhibition consisted of fifteen photographs, including the Thursday’s Clinic series and four other individual pieces displayed in the two gallery rooms at Siamsa. Works such as Ectoplasm, Mammy and Dog II were inspired by film noir and horror movies, namely Mother Joan of Angels, The Exorcist and Possession; while the ten pieces of Thursday’s Clinic referenced the famous 19th century photographic studies of hysterical women by Jean-Martin-Charcot, the Head of the Parisian mental asylum, the Salpêtrière. Overall, as the gallery informed the audience, the body pushed to its physical, psychological and social limits was the central concern of Lynch’s work.

The cinematic sequence selected by Lynch from The Snake Pit, one of the most visually compelling in the film, is no longer than 30 seconds altogether. It is a long point-of-view take where the camera, mounted on a crane, slowly rises up and seamlessly cuts to a zoom-out shot revealing a haunting image of female patients in a psychiatric ward. As the camera moves, the focus gradually shifts from an intimate close-up of Virginia’s face to the final frame, in which a tumult of distant silhouettes is visible, as if the convalescents were lurking deep down at the bottom of a gigantic snake pit. In purely cinematographic terms such a combination of impressive crane-shot and extreme zoom-out (offering a transition from the intimate POV to the omniscient God’s eye view) was popular throughout the 1940s and 1950s in Hollywood productions, and it served not only to highlight the magnificent sets and crowds but also to enhance the psychological impact of certain scenes.

Lynch manipulated the video by muting it, splitting the screen and looping two channels into one projection. Whereas the left-hand frame features the original sequence, the right-hand one simultaneously plays the same sequence in reverse. As a result, the spectator is affected by an unnerving visual vertigo, which, apart of its dizzying effect, never brings the narrative to any form of closure. It is impossible to view both images simultaneously with equal attention, and this confusing stereoscopic experience provokes not only a disorienting reaction but it also draws attention to the problematic nature of looking as such. The beholder is made uncomfortably aware of the act of seeing, pinned in the moment of looking in and out at once, which allows the spectatorial self to be sensuously realised.

On a symbolic level, the dynamic and fluctuating representation of the human body from a closeup of an individual to a multitude of anonymous, incomprehensible, twisting body-shapes, exposes the slim borderline between the human and the monstrous, the self and its other. This sort of technique, which relies on repetition, reversal, duplication and resonance, is often used and explored by Lynch in her video installations (for example, The Kiss, After Rebecca), and, as Jenny Keane has suggested, ‘generates liminality between presence and dispossession’. In these terms we may consider The Pit as exemplary of the unresolved tension between the experience and the representation of womanhood in its empowered and disempowered states. Lynch’s decision to employ this visually powerful sequence in such a manner that it keeps on folding into itself ad infinitum, proved effective at forging a link between the artist’s intentions – of representing the female body in extremis – and their expression in the detached mode of found footage. This essentially material and aesthetic joint proved to be of central importance to my interpretation of the surrounding photographic work.

In a famous 1957 lecture entitled ‘The Creative Act’, Marcel Duchamp stated that in every creative act, operating between the two poles of artist and spectator, there is always an inevitable gap marking the ‘inability of the artist to express fully his intention’. For Duchamp, this stood for the ‘art coefficient’, that is ‘an arithmetical relation between the unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.’ Encountering the Thursday’s Clinic series for the first time, I had a feeling that the artist’s intention was not fully realised. It seemed to me that the whole project was lacking something essential, or as if the artist’s statements concerning the body in extremis were too strong to be supported by the visual material. Lynch’s contortions and convulsions of the body seemed insufficient to represent such outermost limits as were conveyed by, for instance, the photographs of Man Ray in his fetishism series of the 30s and 40s.

However, when I looked deeper, once I started looking in and out simultaneously and tried to abandon my prior spectatorial expectations, then something happened. Drop by drop the Duchampian concept of the ‘aesthetic osmosis’ realised itself in me through the artistic medium, the transference from the artist to the spectator occurred through the material properties of the photographs. The pieces, carefully orchestrated and displayed in the ambulatory of the round gallery, opened themselves as not only visual but also tactile objects in space. The photographs, mounted by Lynch within liquid acrylic frames, may resemble contemporary computer screens, yet they look like sleek and ultra-modern versions of the 19th century Daguerreotype – the first precious image fixed on the copper plate coated with polished silver and described in 1859 as ‘the mirror with memory’.

The technique adopted by Lynch provides a pitchblack digitally mastered surface which serves as a background for the highly graphic, clean cut images of the female body clad in contrasting white shirt and vibrant red tights. And as with the Daguerreotype the highly reflective surfaces of Lynch’s images capture the spectator. As in a looking glass one can see oneself seeing, and thus the surface is pierced: punctured, as Roland Barthes would have it. The fictive dimension of the photograph is vividly stressed, the obsidian-like mirror surface exclaims: look, I am an illusion! Paradoxically, then, whatever properties are being exaggerated they are presented in a distorting light. The phantasmagorical nature of the pieces cancels, denies and negates whatever it may have affirmed. The images of the bodies captured by Lynch function as holograms producing an illusion of three-dimensionality, and yet they also stress the surface as a peculiar memory membrane. They remind us of the frail nature of photography by stressing their own inner construction of time and space, their reliance upon memory and history of certain images, and their impressive presence here and now.

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world…’ observed Duchamp, and Lynch’s The Pit and Other Stories provides an engaging spectatorial encounter, drawing its strength not so much from ‘the intended’ but rather from ‘the unintentionally expressed’.

The two exhibitions on view in Edinburgh offered a survey of Bourgeois’ extensive oeuvre. Exploring a chronological range that starts in 1947 with her early book of delicate engravings He Disappeared into Complete Silence, and includes pieces made up until 2010, the year of her death, this selection of works demonstrates the extraordinary range and compelling wit of this major artist. Together, the two exhibitions illustrate both the breadth and detail of her practice in a valuable curatorial collaboration that enriches the experience of both.

In the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Bourgeois’ manipulation of material is aptly demonstrated. Fillette (Sweeter Version) (1968- 99) is one of her latex and plaster phallic objects that dangles on a string away from the wall. Its brown, dehydrated surface implies both fleshiness and mortification. Her bronze patinaed Tits (1967) emerge strangely from each other. Their pointed, hard ends look almost animalistic. The 1996 fabric sculpture Couple I consists of headless pyjamas which are stuffed and hanging, seeming to embrace. Conscious and Unconscious (2008) is constructed of two towers, one a steel pole topped with a rubber cone punctured by needles that connect to spools of thread, the other tubes of knitted fabric stacked on top of one another. The allusion to psychic states is mysterious, but the forms seem poised and loaded with meaning.

A highlight is Cell (Eyes and Mirrors) (1989- 93). Demonstrating Bourgeois’ attention to detail and aesthetic play, the mirrors reveal parts of the large structure that are hidden from us by the cube of wire fence that encloses the installation. The stone shapes, rounded and doubled, become eyes, breasts and buttocks in the various reflections created by the combination of mirrors. However, despite the evocation of flesh, the hard, cold stone negates any sensuality. Instead, the mirrors lead us to a language of fetishism, presenting an uncomfortable, fragmented and alienated body that is removed and distant. Throughout the exhibition, formal and thematic coherence is established among the works, which means that even though Bourgeois takes a variety of technical, material and intellectual approaches, the work is experienced as substantial and satisfying. The Insomnia Drawings at the Fruitmarket Gallery were created between November 1994 and June 1995, made at night as a result of the artist’s sleeplessness. These beautiful works are made on lined paper, musical manuscript, notepaper from the Pompidou Centre, and headed paper from the artist’s studio. Comprising both text and image, the 220 drawings demonstrate the range that makes Bourgeois so exceptional. Created with red and black ink and pencil, they feel less like a series and more like a single project that expands to fill any paper surface it comes across. Their display along the centre of the gallery highlights the formal consistency of their delicate lines and carefully sketched shapes. Sometimes scribbles, sometimes illustrations, sometimes texts, the vastly different types of picturing seem to flow in and out of one another. Both geometric shapes and figurative drawings seem to work in the same way, representing something obscure but evocative. #170, for example, is made from an accretion of cursive lines that looks almost like a hydrangea, building in such a way as to make something that evokes the beauty and delicacy of petals. However, the shape is repeated so many times that it seems entirely inorganic. A huge amassing of lines, it is edged by large red polygons, coloured in with scribbled ink. Marked on both sides of the page, Bourgeois has made a note on the back. It reads ‘sudden change of mood / dark red’. This play between beauty and excess recurs throughout. The scribbled pencil oval of #180 implies a compulsive repetition. #72 shows bare-breasted women, phallic shapes, plants and rabbits, and scrawled texts in French; the page is over-filled, its scratchy doodling suggesting a late-night purgation.

That the Insomnia Drawings are marked on both sides of the page creates an enticing viewing experience. Because the paper is thin, the lines on the back are sometimes visible but never clear enough to be fully discernible. The analogy to her practice is clear: something is revealed but kept at a distance, nearly forming in our vision but remaining just out of reach. Importantly, however, it does not feel as though Bourgeois is keeping it from us. Embroiled in her own aesthetic and conceptual expedition, we are shown the artist’s attempts to grasp at meaning. What is displayed are Bourgeois’ ever-developing efforts to understand and represent her own psyche, or at least a version of it. In a text contained in a vitrine displaying the artist’s poetry and prose at the Fruitmarket, there is a short list composed in 1958, which delineates the artist’s sense of her own failures. ‘I have failed as a wife / as a woman / as a home hostess / as an artist / as a business woman / and I am 47 – / as a friend – / as a daughter / as a sister – / I have not failed as a / truth seeker / lowest ebb – ’, she tells us. Maybe she fails to find the truth, but what is on view here is just this search, and it is as compelling and beautiful as such a quest can be.

The continuous looping of Distant Words creates a strange atmosphere in which a new day dawns and night descends every five minutes. This in a sense parallels the workings of some kinds of music, or any art whose primary ‘hook’ is the repetition or looping of its main elements. Visually, Distant Words is a highly layered piece, which explicitly invites us to explore its complex effects, such as those produced by the intricate patterns projected onto walls of miniature model cities in the video itself. Every repetition allows us to see more, while the narrative relayed to us by the large lettering on screen remains the same. The viewer is called to look around the lettering to see what the purely visual elements convey of the video’s themes. A link with music is also present in the narrative where ‘hope’ is signalled by the onset of a female voice singing an Arabic folk song. It is interesting and relevant that music is itself sometimes referred to as ‘a language above language’ or a ‘universal language’. Thus music can become communication by other means, and a tacit signal of hope. These thoughts arising from Distant Words will be confronted by the second work in the show.

While watching Distant Words it was impossible not to notice, projected behind it and to the left, images of flamboyantly dressed street musicians. These figures belong to the second work in this show (which has been skillfully curated by Rose Issa): Hassan Hajjaj’s installation, My Rock Stars Experimental, Volume 1. The installation consists of a video projection of nine musicians of mainly Moroccan and English residence (the two countries where Hajjaj is based), dressed in dazzlingly patterned clothing designed by Hajjaj himself. This video is housed within a make-shift viewing space, replete with upholstered Coca-Cola crates to sit on, a blue and black striped plastic rug, and two low coffee tables bearing advertising insignia (one is Hassan Hajjaj’s own artist brand logo, the other is for New Improved Baba Ijebu Aloe Vera Soap). Each projected musician is enclosed in their own rectangular window not directly in contact with the other performers, though they take turns to perform and all face in the direction of the musician who is playing at that moment. The performers are brought together from different times and spaces to play on the same ‘stage’. The fact that the crates on which the musicians sit are also those used by the audience viewing the performance creates a certain unfamiliar common ground between the ‘rock stars’ and the spectators. The Coca-Cola crates signify the interaction between cultures that commodity circulation necessarily brings about, as companies seek new markets in which to exploit labour, sell commodities and make profits. The capitalist culture is the shared culture of the world, which helps explain the fact that most of the nine musicians sing in English, or perform styles of music synonymous with western musical genres: Pop, Rap, R&B. These performances would seem to be at odds with the kind of folk music that we might expect, given all the acoustic instruments on view here.

Hajajj refers to his work as a ‘celebration of “his” culture’. However, the fact that this celebration is carried out through the means of a Pop Art aesthetic (the proliferation of branded images, and the music’s closer ties to pop rather than ethnic folk music), does not fully support this claim. The strategies of Pop Art inevitably leave the artwork on an ambiguous footing, particularly as regards its complicit or critical relationship to the commodity form. The visual aspect of the video part of Hajjaj’s installation is filled with an over-abundance of colour and patterns. This over-abundance is mesmerising to the degree that the patterned backdrops of the performers begin to resemble or mimic the pixelated quality of lower grade digital equipment. Reading the work in conjunction with Distant Words we can see how Hajjaj problematizes the hope hinted at in the video loop by offering us the veneer of Spectacle that covers the entire world under the reign of globalised capital, from the big studios to the streets.

In the last few years more and more exhibitions of Middle Eastern and North African art have been shown in the U.K., and especially in and around London. With the news media regularly reporting on political events surrounding the Arab Spring it is important that art that is from and about that region is shown in galleries in the West, hence the contemporary importance of this exhibition. Though there were only two works presented here, together they articulate the project of coming to terms with globalisation, and the difficulty of maintaining cultural traditions in its wake. Valamanesh shows us a glimpse of isolation in this world, while also trying to signal hope. Hajjaj’s piece confronts this with the collective image of his rock stars performing together, while at the same time pointing to the globalising forces of capital which stifle such promise.

This painting combines figuration with non-objective pattern as it shows the critic and dealer Félix Fénéon in three-quarter profile against a swirling, spiralling decorative background, constructed from densely massed pointillist tâches. On an untitled LED video wall at the back of the TBGS gallery, Fernandes has isolated this background and has set it spinning. And here we encounter some problems. First clockwise, then anticlockwise, the whole pattern advances and recedes, producing a rather aimless and crude movement reminiscent of hokey powerpoint animations. This crudeness is increased when, as its furthest point of recession, the black background to Fernandes’ spinning rectangle can be seen, suggesting a lack of attention to the compositional problem of how to reconcile this shape with its support (the LED screen).

This lack of compositional awareness is my main concern. It is evident, too, in the placement of the five floor sculptures lying in front of the LED screen. These are made of cast iron, and consist of two lines, a shallow curve, a number 1 without its base, and a shape reminiscent of a half-size Gothic arch. These shapes are placed side by side in succession from beneath the screen toward the window onto the street. We are told that they are ‘inspired by primary art school manuals from the turn of the twentieth century’ (TBGS press). That may be so, but their placement in the gallery here demonstrates little about how these shapes functioned or how they were supposed to be used constructively and pedagogically. It seems that being ‘inspired by’ in this case indicates a diminution of value. The use of cast iron is supposed to ‘speak of an era when the focus on education and demands of labour were closely related’ (and are they not now?). Yet, Froebel’s Spielgaben, for instance, were designed to educate (working-class) children above and beyond the demands of industrial labour, and to help them learn intellectually through construction and organisation.

My point is that, judging by the composition of her works, Fernandes seems to engage with her sources only half-heartedly. For early practitioners of pictorial abstraction, the abstract forms of applied arts and childhood pedagogy were of interest precisely because they indicated that there could be a grammar of forms, that there could be a lexicon and a syntax to non-objective painting. This suggested that abstraction, as it abandoned mimesis, might also avoid the ‘dead end’ (Klee) of pure patterning or doodling, the aimless placement of one form next to another. Fernandes is not quite doodling, but neither is she re-engaging the problem of how one might construct a grammar of plastic forms, without which abstraction risks solipsism.

And this returns us to the question of legacy. How is it that pictorial, but also sculptural and filmic, abstraction can compel artistic conviction at present? To answer this question requires an investigation of abstraction’s origins, certainly, and I am encouraged by Fernandes’ interest in these latter. But it seems that she only wishes to points things out, without working through the debt, as when she exposes the pillars in the gallery to indicate the industrial history of the space. What does Fernandes want to do with this more or less interesting historical fact?

This is particularly significant when that legacy is the anarchist pastoralism of Signac. In Signac’s painting, Fénéon looks upon a lily held between the thumb and forefingers of his outstretched right hand. This gesture, which can be found in other of Signac’s works but which Fernandes elides, appears to signify aesthetic contemplation, which, in Signac’s pastoral utopia, would be available to all. As dated as such sympathies might be for contemporary artists, Fernandes sifts through them as through a box of signifiers that can be rearranged at will but, ultimately, without very much consequence.

The mechanisms and rituals of a given environment, and the complex relationship between viewer and object are what particularly interest Koťátková and Lang. In presenting a space encumbered by sculptural objects and detritus, Joseph Beuys’ theatrical approach to sculpture immediately comes to mind. In thinking of Beuys’ work – in particular his dynamic room environments such as End of the Twentieth Century (1983-85) and Hearth I and II (1968/74 and 1978-79) – Wasteland can be appreciated in terms of how it engages the viewer through direct involvement and movement within the space. There are visual cues that evoke Beuys too: the irregular slices of cement are reminiscent of Beuys’ infamous wodges of unctuous, slippery fat; the employment of everyday objects, including umbrellas and bicycles, albeit sheathed in brown paper, can also be considered as a Beuysian element; and the railings that line the back wall again recall the metal rods that feature in many of Beuys’ environments.

Beuys’ work is frequently considered in terms of traumatic memory and the dangers of its repression. Whilst this aspect is not necessarily made explicit in Wasteland, ideas of concealment and covering over are central to the experience of the installation on both a visual and figurative level. In the lower left hand corner of the room, an obsessive smattering of round objects of varying lumpy shapes, wrapped in ubiquitous brown paper, are loosely organised in size, with the occasional larger oblong package obstructing the neatness of the order. The assortment of paper parcels provokes a childlike curiosity to peel back the paper and reveal the prize underneath. Yet, at the same time, these boxes and parcels, in some cases carefully tied with string, are troubling for what they conceal: what is hidden underneath and do we really want to know?

As the title suggests, an atmosphere of doom and gloom permeates the space, almost as though there is in fact a hidden trauma here that one is not yet privy to. The brown-papered rails at the far end of the room, evoking perhaps the Gothic fencing of a graveyard, suggest a state of constraint or imprisonment . Through the use of displaced tree trunks and bare branches, salvaged objects and the mound of rot-brown leaves in the enclosure, a dreary air of decay and desolation pervades Wasteland; so much so that it is impossible not to be reminded of T.S. Eliot’s bleak imagery in his eponymous poem: ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?’ (The Waste Land, 1922).

Yet the sense of the dismal disorder of the installation is perhaps only a surface appraisal of what Koťátková and Lang are actually trying to achieve. A series of 32 framed letters on black A4 paper hang on the right wall nearest the entrance. The letters reveal one side of a conversation written from what we presume to be the artists’ perspective, or some fictionalized version of it: the letters are signed ‘E’ for Eva or ‘D’ for Dominik – to some anonymous ‘Sir’ (as in ‘Dear Sir’). Whether one opts to read the correspondence on entering the installation or after having wandered about the space for some time (as I chose to do), one’s perception of Wasteland is irrevocably changed on encountering the documents.

From reading the letters, Wasteland somewhat bizarrely emerges as a park in limbo, a ‘hypothetical place’ awaiting a suitable relocation. Following the closure of their local park, the letters record how ‘E’ and ‘D’ are looking to transfer the objects of the park to a new location, and eventually how plans have been made, approved and then halted. Among the correspondence is an itemised list of man-made and natural objects that comprise a typical park, many of which can be identified in the given surroundings: ‘a young apple tree’, ‘a book that someone has forgotten on a bench wrapped in paper’, ‘a forgotten umbrella’, ‘236 stones’, ’10 fence segments’ and even a ‘fragment of sidewalk with a rain puddle’.

Wasteland, then, effectively presents a storeroom, and there is a poignancy to the items’ unrealised status. Yet even more than that, Wasteland, as park-to-be, invokes a scene of grim but playful absurdity, not unlike that of a Beckett play. A bench propped on its side, an enormous steely crescent (presumably the ‘metal playground structure’ on the itemised list), turned sideways like an oddly spherical ladder, and a soundtrack of water trickling yet not a single drop to be found, all suggest the sort of mischievous humour characteristic of the absurd.

On exiting the exhibition, that familiar feeling of ‘what was all that about’ creeps up, and one cannot help but feel a little deflated. It is not so much a feeling of let-down as it is confusion tinged with the tragicomic nature of it all. The typed correspondence does not only illuminate the ways in which our lives and spaces are dictated by bureaucratic structures and institutions, but, somewhat ironically, how the viewer’s sense of space is equally governed by the rules and practices imposed by the gallery as institution. In light of this, Wasteland precariously exists as both exhibition and store cupboard.

However, in drawing attention to how our perception of space changes through knowledge and involvement, the experience of Wasteland, much like Beuys’ project of ‘Social Sculpture’, is transformative. By way of the viewer’s active engagement, Wasteland, with its strange alignment of park facility, bureaucratic site and art gallery, propels its visitors to reconsider the ways in which space is shaped and framed by institutional structures as opposed to passive acceptance of their rules and authority.

Schendel (1919-88) is regarded as one of Brazil’s most significant and influential artists. Born in Switzerland to parents of Jewish heritage, she became a political exile after she was stripped of her Italian nationality in 1938 while studying philosophy at the Catholic University of Milan. She spent the Second World War in Zagreb, and afterwards emigrated to Brazil, settling in the city of São Paulo in 1953, where she lived until her death. She began to make work as a painter and returned to painting in later life, but after 1964 Schendel devoted herself to language-infused works on paper (often semi-transparent rice paper hung in space between Plexiglass sheets), multiple book objects, and works made by typewriter. This major exhibition at Tate Modern was the first ever international retrospective of her work, surveying her career from the 1950s to her last complete series in 1987, and displayed 279 works across 14 rooms.

It was an impressive exhibition, but there seemed to be two Mira Schendels on show with two different aesthetics: one concerned with form, colour and geometric abstraction (the paintings), the other an early Conceptualist producing works rendered in minimal monochrome (the ‘formless’ monotypes and language-based works). Schendel was well read in phenomenology and Zen Buddhism, but she had two major ‘contradictory’ mentors – the nineteenth-century theologian John Henry Newman and Ludwig Wittgenstein – and to my mind they are representative of the different aesthetics. Her interest in language produced far more interesting work than her interest in Catholicism, and it is her early-Conceptual textbased work on which her reputation will stand.

It’s tempting to read this work from a Derridean perspective, but Schendel saw herself as ‘activating the void,’ whereas Derrida rejected the void of Buddhism, claiming that any theory of nothingness buys into a theory of presence. Entering the space which displayed Schendel’s best-known work – the Monotypes, Droguinhas (Little Nothings) and Graphic Objects – was, however, exactly like entering a labyrinth of ciphers, of floating signifiers and traces of traces. All this work was produced in the mid- to late-Sixties and featured her signature use of ultra-fine, almost translucent Japanese rice paper. (One of her methods was to lay the rice paper on sheets of glass sprinkled with talc and ink or oil and draw on the paper with her fingernail.)

The Monotypes are delicate drawings of lines, circles, and text in different languages including German, Portuguese, English, French and Croatian. In The Task of the Translator (1923), Walter Benjamin wrote that, ‘just as a tangent touches a circle fleetingly and only at a single point, and just as the contact, not the point, prescribes the law in accord with which the tangent pursues its path into the infinite, in the same way a translation touches the original fleetingly and only at the infinitely small point of meaning, in order to follow its own path in accord with the law of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic development.’ Schendel must have read this essay; her line drawings are tangents which touch circles fleetingly and pursue paths into the ‘infinite’…

Of the text-based Monotypes, one series featured terms familiar from Heidegger –Umwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt and Zeit. This latter was my favourite, with the ‘t’ continuing down the page like a line of black blood. Another series on display was a response to Stockhausen’s Song of the Youths, from which she derived a set of key words – Fire becomes FEUER fucco fire FEU feuer FUOCCO. The Droguinhas are soft sculptures she created by binding multiple sheets of rice paper into thickly compressed ropes, then knotting them into loose chains which, heaped on the floor or suspended, looked like a vast unwritten novel. This work and the two Untitled works from the series Little Trains, where blank pages were hung in a line on cotton thread, anticipate the later work of Eva Hesse, with her skeins of knotted rope and hanging blank panels of translucent latex.

The series of twelve Graphic Objects, for me the pièce de résistance of this exhibition, are larger and busier than the Monotypes. They are comprised of layers of rice paper with Letraset transfer lettering, handwritten letters of the alphabet, and arbitrary marks spattered across them. Hung from the ceiling in a transparent acrylic laminate, they can be viewed from either side, the text in reverse becoming ‘anti-text’. Peculiarly, and perhaps because some of the multiple marks reminded me of copses of trees, these made me think of landscapes; viewing them was like being ‘in the middle of the high forest of language itself’ (to quote Benjamin again). Questioning not just what we see but also how we see and understand it, these works address assigned meanings and modes of interpretation as they apply to the written or printed word. No doubt Schendel was thinking of the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations: ‘It would never have occurred to us to think that we felt the influence of letters upon us when reading, if we had not compared the case of letters with arbitrary marks.’

Schendel continued with the use of letters of the alphabet, using Letraset lettering, in smaller, more intimate works on paper, and also began in the early 1970s to do drawings made with a typewriter that use letters and numbers in their composition. These were on display along with multiple books and circular text works resembling the mandalas Ferdinand Kriwet made in the Sixties. Language in all of this work resists immediate reading, becoming instead a pliable medium – dissected, recombined and transformed into patterns, shapes and objects.

There was a beautiful installation in one of the rooms called Still Waves of Probability, made for the 10th São Paulo Biennale in 1969, composed of hundreds of thin, almost transparent fibres that hung from the ceiling and doubled-back to form a small whirl, so that the floor teemed with eddies. Apart from that, the rest of Schendel’s work left me cold. Her early paintings were still lifes, interiors and asymmetric compositions influenced by artists such as Giorgio Morandi and Paul Klee. She then moved on to more architectonic compositions that are poised between geometric abstraction and figuration. When she finally came back to painting in the 1980s she created a series of tempera and gold leaf works which were vandalised at their first exhibition, apparently having been misinterpreted as expressions of decorative luxury or a reference to religious art.

In The Century, Badiou describes the art of the twentieth century as a sombre art. At its best, Schendel’s is a sombre art. She may not be ‘one of the most important artists of the twentieth century’ (Tanya Barson, the Tate curator), but she more than deserves her place in the history of language and text-based work.

Within a lavender-walled space In the same city, under the same sky (2012 onwards) was televised across a multitude of screens, relaying the experiences of female immigrants displaced to foreign lands. An eclectic assortment of modern and old-fashioned domestic seating in the space comfortably accommodated the audience, while bric-a-brac furniture and table-tops supporting monitors configured segregated ‘viewing areas’ vaguely reminiscent of corporate ‘pods’. This seemingly welcoming veneer was, however, at odds with the unfolding encounter, which was unsettling and fraught with numerous barriers to the viewing experience, eroding any possibility of connecting with the women portrayed in the films. With no headphones provided, the noise level in the space was overwhelmingly, as chattering voices in unfamiliar languages overlapped and competed with one another. In the act of zoning in on individual films, further distractions were presented by their visual form. Each woman’s monologue was translated using scrolling subtitles, which sped horizontally across the bottom of screens in a ‘breaking-news’ fashion, making it difficult to engage with the text while simultaneously trying to gauge the speakers’ emotions.

Accounts of women from Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq and other places outlined the reasons they had left their native countries and the inadequacies of their current lives. Increasingly, it became difficult to reconcile the women’s spoken words with their affluent home settings, which featured in the films almost as stage-sets, cluttered with soft furnishings, teacups and other domestic ‘props’. As one woman appeared to read from an autocue, questions arose regarding the authenticity of these accounts. It transpired that the women depicted on screen were enacting monologues of female immigrants who currently inhabit the same city, providing dislocated and second-hand accounts of trauma that seemed to resist an immediate or transparent reading. In preserving the anonymity of these immigrant women, who are never directly seen or heard in the films, Konik further highlights their political precarity and unrecognised status, presenting them as a voiceless and superfluous ‘other’. Transmitting their stories through western women in indigenous languages allowed their different lives to momentarily collide, warranting some reflection on how immigrant stories are reported and consumed through the global news media. In leaving their war-torn homelands, these women now battle depression, poverty and the constant threat of deportation, while trying to create better lives for their children, with one stating ‘women suffer the most’.

While In the same city, under the same sky tackles the inherent complexities of representation regarding the immigrant experience – characterised by displacement, alienation and a general fear about the future – Transparency (2004) is an encounter with the loneliness of old age, featuring four elderly Germans as they confront their lives and impending death. Four video projections were arranged across three walls of a darkened room. The space benefitted from the provision of headphones for three of the works, although the repetitive wailing of an elderly woman in the fourth film proved harrowing in contrast to the others, who vied silently for my attention above their subtitles. Filmed within the domestic interiors of their own homes, some post-production editing conjured the effect of each person appearing alongside mirror images of themselves. Such ‘intellectual montage’ devices draw on a canon of film theory, encompassing Soviet Montage and wider Avant-garde film practices from the 1920s onwards. As a counter to straightforward narrative production, montage offers a dialectic space which juxtaposes conflicting realities, thus implicating the viewer in unsettling scenarios.

My attention turned to ‘Doris’ (b. 1911), who occupied the compact frame with her chimerical twin. Engaged unnervingly in a dual dialogue, the two differently- dressed ‘sisters’, overlapped, interrupted and mimicked each other’s speech patterns as lifelong companions might do. Following some life reflections, Doris concedes bleakly that she is ‘much too old to still be happy to be alive’. Upon the revelation that ‘now I sit and wait for the departure’, we acknowledge that she is completely alone. Elsewhere, ‘Mr Brozy’ (b. 1915), who is wheelchair bound and in need of full time care in a nursing home, states wearily that ‘God wants it that way…but the time has been so long’.
While being momentarily touched by these people’s lives, the viewer feels compelled to assess their own role, whether as detached observer, victim or co-conspirator in such palpable human suffering. Ultimately, guilt gives way to the conclusion that compassion, although necessary, is completely exhausting. Difficult and draining on so many levels, this exhibition did provide some rewards, found in unexpected places. ‘Tadeusz’ appears in his apartment on a mound of hoarded junk. His reflected self is juxtaposed upside-down below, rummaging, searching and sorting through the detritus, but not making any headway. Following the death of his mother 37 years ago, Tadeusz suffered with depression and other disorders, and began to collect things. ‘Collecting things is very popular all over the word’ he explained, seeming conscious of the difference between the orderly, systematic collecting of funds and libraries, and his own neurotic hoarding. His compulsion extends to books and other ‘bibliophilic things’, with a quest for knowledge encompassing philosophy, psychology and the arts. As the apartment ‘kept filling up’, most of his belongings and furniture were rendered inaccessible. ‘I had reached a point of alienation, as the Materialists call it’ he concedes. Such a philosophical reference – suitably denoting a reality defined in terms of physical matter – attests to the fact that Tadeusz is smart, articulate and has clarity about his chaotic situation, yet seems powerless to change it.

Far from uplifting, Far away, so near… offered a challenging set of propositions for a persistent viewer. Konik’s alienation of the audience through technical and conceptual mechanisms serves to robustly underscore the inherent complexities of her human subjects and our relationship to them. The viewer’s ongoing negotiation of these barriers (noise, unfamiliar languages, text and intense ‘human interest’ stories) becomes symptomatic of our daily tendency to ‘block things out’, ignoring the weary and ‘unwanted’ people in society, and the prospect that one day we might become one of them. Such ongoing denial clearly produces a far-reaching lack of compassion, diminishing our capacity to address whether a place of collective solace can ever be found, liberated from human neuroses.

As manifold as their contributions may be, what all of these practitioners share in art historiography is their having been overshadowed by their male counterparts, either as muses, lovers, epigones, or all three. Gray’s now-canonical house E1027 was long thought to be the work of star architect Le Corbusier, a jealous admirer of her work who painted—stark naked no less—garish cubist murals on the building’s walls after she had moved out of the premises. Höch’s contributions were famously consigned to sandwich-and-coffee conjuring in one dominant historical account of Dada (now frequently maligned for it). Carrington was known as the lover of dada-surrealist Max Ernst who painted ‘private’ pictures on the side. Oppenheim was the stunningly beautiful nude in surrealist photographs, Ernst’s lover, and renowned for a single, infamous, fur-covered teacup.

Revising history not just to recuperate or redeem but to incorporate the proliferation of artistic tactics and contributions, ranging from resistant embodiment to avant-garde tapestries, begins to illuminate the particular historical complications of being a woman and an artist in the early twentieth century. Indeed, a certain anxiety or defensiveness tends to accompany exhibitions and catalogues of Oppenheim’s art because many of her works appear either to recoup the triumph of the teacup (a problematic success for Oppenheim, as she repeatedly avowed) – fur covers gloves, festoons beer steins, swaddles masks, is awkwardly affixed to knives—or cede to a personal vocabulary of assemblages, drawings, and paintings that often lack either conviction or the productive tensions that allow works to resonate powerfully in the circumstantial beholder. Though informed by feminism, psychoanalysis and Jungian frameworks, Oppenheim’s enigmatic and searching works do not reliably issue the frisson or psychic charge that makes the work of Louise Bourgeois or Rosemarie Trockel – artists who use similar tactics – so consistently compelling. Though when Oppenheim hits the mark, the work is by turns mordantly witty, trenchantly observed, and engrossingly disturbing.

By organizing Oppenheim’s works thematically rather than chronologically, the Berlin iteration of the exhibition inadvertently reinforced the sense of feeble repetitions, as not all fur-covered objects or absurd juxtapositions are equally resonant. But the motivation behind this choice was presumably to conceal the significant gap in Oppenheim’s production that ensued from a paralyzing depression and artistic crisis that gripped her from 1937-1954. Though a protective move, this strategy inadvertently aligns itself with a heroic narrative in which the artist moves from strength to strength. But that significant gap in production is illuminating in historical rather than individual terms, a social symptom not a personal failure that is worth investigating. ‘Suicides, breakdowns, and depressions haunt the histories of the women artists in the orbit of Surrealism,’ avers Abigail Solomon-Godeau in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, noting that it was an essentially male movement with a strong internal hierarchies and collective masculine mythology. Oppenheim’s experience is the story of being a female with ambition in a man’s world. The posthumous narratives of Oppenheim as a confident, sexually liberated young woman who took Paris by storm, made the men fall in love with her, and posed confidently for outré photographs by Man Ray, tell only half the story, for the inner coordinates included doubt, marginalization and subordination. As Oppenheim later described her fifteen-year psychic immobilization: ‘I felt as if millennia of discrimination against women were resting on my shoulders, as if embodied in my feelings of inferiority’.

The exhibition catalogue makes a crucial intervention, aiming to generate a serious contribution to the scholarship on Oppenheim, simultaneously deepening and expanding frameworks with which to understand her critical project. Thoughtfully argued and theoretically astute thematic essays provide indepth studies of fundamental issues in Oppenheim’s oeuvre. Heike Eipeldauer’s insightful essay ‘Meret Oppenheim’s Masquerades’, for instance, begins with a rather inauspicious 1940 portrait of Oppenheim painted by her friend Irène Zirkinden, which depicts Oppenheim arrested in reverie while applying makeup before a mirror. Eipeldauer’s deft interpretation transforms this somewhat pedestrian picture into a canny introduction to the identity politics of transformation. The gamut of masks, masquerades, make-up, jewelry, costumes, clothing choices and strategic self-presentation that wove their way through Oppenheim’s life and art for decades comprised her social artillery, argues Eipeldauer, also illuminating the tactics of Oppenheim’s supposed fallow period. These objects and practices facilitated transformations – some temporary and ephemeral, others reified through repetition – that allowed the subject to challenge personal and social limitations by putting on another skin. Oppenheim’s fascination with the mask and masquerade represents what Reinhard Oleschanski has called a ‘hypothesis of another form of existence’, enabling Oppenheim to playfully cope with the parochialism, conservatism, chauvinism and traditionalism of Switzerland, where she returned with the onset of World War II. Oppenheim’s designs reveal the strangeness of the familiar, allowing the wearer to take on a different habitus in a subversive, pleasurable way, putting levity back into the experience of difference.

If Oppenheim’s persona and portable constructions broker the experience of otherness in everyday life, her fetishistic objects, as Solomon- Godeau demonstrates in ‘Fetishism Unbound’, confront the ‘fears, fantasies and desires of the male unconscious’ head on. Central to artistic practice of the 1920s, the ‘lure of the fetish’ offered a way to investigate both the erotic and auratic charge of the object world. It is, as Solomon-Godeau observes, ‘an object good to think with’, particularly since commodity culture has made fetishists of us all. The sexualization of consumption, she notes, is already implicit in the commodity fetish. Yet strictly speaking, the fetishistic operations of desire and disavowal are only available to the male subject, according to Sigmund Freud, as the fetish symbolizes the fear of castration, allaying the anxiety of sexual difference yet pointing directly to it. Women, who are the object of fear because of their phallic lack, cannot in turn be fetishists. Oppenheim herself was well aware of the mechanisms of male fetishism: as a young, strikingly beautiful woman who was repeatedly objectified in Surrealist photography, she represented its corporeal embodiment—the erotic femme-enfant. Her tactic, Solomon-Godeau argues, was to resignify fetishism from within, imitating its operations to issue a subversive charge. Her Bon appétit Marcel! (The White Queen) of 1966 offers up a primitive female form made of baked dough, precisely placed on a napkin, arranged on a octagonal plate, presented on the grid of a chessboard, with fork and knife, ready to eat. A bony partridge spine embedded in its fleshy matter cleaves the queen into suggestively labial form, though its teeth-like ridges menace rather than entice consumption. Ambivalence is made physical: the edible woman as vagina dentata threatens lingual castration. Eat up and choke, Marcel. Chess is war.

In contrast to the Oppenheim exhibition, the show of Leonora Carrington’s works at the Irish Museum of Modern Art thematized Carrington’s mental breakdown, devoting one room of the exhibition to the episode. This move reflects Carrington’s own continuing artistic engagement with the traumatic experience, including several artworks and a novel Down Below, which chronicled her incarceration at a mental institution in Santander. The exhibition emphasized Carrington’s abiding interest in metamorphosis and the fantastic, starting with the imaginative drawings of her youth, to suggest that Carrington’s encounter with Surrealism though her famous lover Max Ernst was but an interlude in a longstanding investment in the alchemical and the supernatural. This investment originated in Irish mythic tales imparted by her Irish mother and nanny during her English childhood and intensified in Mexico, where magical realism flourished. In contrast to the ambitious Eileen Gray exhibition shown concurrently in IMMA’s main galleries (which had no Irish catalogue), this modest exhibition of Carrington’s works was accompanied by a luxurious IMMA catalogue replete with colour reproductions and an eye-catching jacket design, whose shiny bronze surface is excised in the upper right to reveal an ovoid window onto Carrington’s 1951 painting Three Women with Crows. Though the production values are high, scholarly and editorial attention to its content would have benefited from more exacting scrutiny, beginning with the unfortunate misspelling of “Puplishers” on the title page. The essays are largely descriptive, informational and celebratory, recruiting biographical anecdote and cultural context to explain Carrington’s art. How these works might be understood to reconfigure the existing narratives of modern art and Carrington’s interventions is left to the imagination. Curator Seán Kissane’s essay ‘The Celtic Surrealist’ proposes to address this question from the outset, asking rather unreflectively, ‘But did her work have a function or was it simply “Art for Art’s sake?”’, not only suggesting that autonomous art does not have a function, not even a social or humanistic one, but also inadvertently undermining the import of his own profession. Haphazardly argued, Kissane pursues what seems to be a post-colonialist critical thread in Carrington’s work, beginning with her references to Mexican political history, continuing with invocations of Donne, Dante and the Bible, and culminating in possible Celtic interpretations of The Giantess (Guardian of the Egg) of 1947, a provocative reading which at last critically illuminates the premise of the show (and the essay title). Most critically ambitious is Alyce Mahon’s contribution, which asserts that Carrington, through recourse to the Celtic goddess, promoted the image of woman as active subject, making her unique among the women Surrealists offered up in comparison. In this paradigm, females have the power to initiate others into a personal mythic universe, though the danger here is that we find ourselves in a solipsistic preserve.

Both exhibitions and accompanying publications point the way toward a narrative of early twentieth-century female artistic production that illuminates rather than obscures the complexities of negotiating identity and art in a transitional historical period— politically, socially, and aesthetically. Analyzing the difficulties while at the same time highlighting their unique, subversive, contrary strategies and achievements brings us closer to understanding what makes the work of these practitioners interesting and exemplary today, not least because the inequities and challenges still exist.

This sense of reality come undone is associated with photomontage in general and with Höch’s work in particular, so it’s noteworthy that disjunction does not emerge as the dominant note of the Whitechapel Gallery’s exhibition of more than one hundred of the artist’s works on paper. In putting together the first major exhibition of Höch’s work in the United Kingdom, curators Dawn Ades, Daniel Hermann, and Emily Butler have looked to the full span of the artist’s career, assembling works dating from the 1910s to the 1970s. The result provides a surprising sense of continuity: The artist’s early experiments in abstraction as a student in the applied arts are elaborated upon in looser forms composing the abstractions of her post-war production, and much of this production resonates with tendencies and concerns familiar from her early career. Still, there’s a temptation to imagine a Höch I and Höch II, an interwar Höch of evolving style but ever disparate parts, and a post-war Höch who turns to colorful cohesion. The gallery space enforces this inclination by presenting Höch’s output from 1912 to 1936 on the first floor, while, following a small room with a transitional feel displaying work from 1936-1945, years the artist mostly spent in the suburbs of Berlin, output from 1945 to 1978 is on view on the second.

In works from the early 1920s, as Höch takes off as a not uncontested participant in Berlin Dada, her montages experiment with strategies for portraying androgyny. Send-ups of cultural and political figures along with good manners, these montages also merge humans with animals, sculpture with humans, and babies with adults. Despite their distinct parts, the assertions here remain more of similarity than of difference. As Höch I advances, though, the work can be harder to grasp. Rendered against stark and striking backgrounds, sometimes placed on mesmerizing geometrical bases, the hybrid women of the series From an Ethnographic Museum posit unclear relationships between the tribal and western (often glamorous or high-heeled) imagery of which they’re comprised. In other words, the montages convey the impression of a constructed and Othered womanhood more clearly than they offer a position on questions of race or colonialism. One is left wondering where the tribal imagery benefits from the jolts and juxtapositions of montage and where it remains a polemical prop. In this vein, writing in the exhibition catalogue, Brett M. Van Hoesen’s call for deeper contextualization of Höch’s work within the legacy of Weimar colonialism is a valuable contribution to the critical discussion surrounding the exhibition.

Now that their satire no longer stings, these early works might actually count as the show’s most assuring images for the narrative pleasure entailed by their seeming readiness to be deciphered. Moving from this mode to the indirect propositions of Höch’s postwar work requires some recalibration on the part of the viewer. The momentum this shift in approach demanded was likely felt by the artist, whose titles (Dream Voyage, Space Travel, Journey into the Unknown) and imagery from the late Forties and early Fifties often concern movement and travel. Adjusting to the bright light of this changed terrain, the viewer will find an artist extending a dialogue with Surrealism and abstraction while pursuing a new relationship to knowing and truth, as well as finding softer registers for humour and satire.

Of these images, later works that reprise considerations of gender are some of the show’s most resonant. Spare in central imagery but complex in signification, The Beautiful Bottom (1959) is playful and sardonic, while Degenerate (1969) looks to the Nazi-era in its title and presents a characteristically re/ un-embodied femme fatale in a Sixties world of rhinestones and plastics. In Around a Red Mouth a set of very red lips floats above a flouncing dress that could almost pass for tiered cake. A determinedly saccharine vagina dentata emerges from the graphic spikes near the bottom of the image in combination with cut-outs of what appear to be geodes whose sedimentary pinks, whites and browns assume a genital presence. More rollicking than abrasive, the montage complicates our vision of Höch’s women by tangling the biological with the outrageously artificial.

Natural and human forms may have haunted the scissor-work of even Höch’s most abstract output. Despite her protests to the contrary, many of these works have the atmosphere of landscapes, their cut forms echoing the mountains, waves, and islands preserved in her scrapbook of mass media imagery, The Album. The ‘close looking’ these abstractions occasion, their resistance of resolution, their refusal, often, to give up their sources, and the bright absorption they inspire make them prime material for reassessments of the range of investments of a career often too narrowly identified with the dynamic but brief timeframe of Berlin Dada. They also display, with a stubborn beauty, how a lifetime of work can be found in examining a single set of questions through a kaleidoscope of shifts in form and tone.

Dorothy Cross: Connemara is the artist’s first solo show in a public gallery in the UK and it brings together old works and new, concentrating on those pieces which mine the shifting territory between land and sea. For the last number of years, Cross has been making videos and sculptural assemblages based on the scuffed relics, the skins and old bones salvaged from the shoreline around Connemara. In the context of Margate’s seamy charm, however, the works take on a heightened resonance, a pronounced, salty end-of-pier humor that leavens her absorption in the poetics of death and decay. Family (2005), for example, comprises a trio of alarmingly spiked crabs cast in bronze and placed directly on the floor, gorgeously lit from above so that their complicated shadows seem poised to skitter across the gallery. The nuclear wholesomeness of the family group of daddy, mammy and baby is sharply undermined by the insolently lolling knob sprouting from the top of ‘daddy’s’ shell, a pungent, tongue-in-cheek pun on catching crabs perhaps.

Her meditations on nature and death are often bracingly unsentimental, a clear-eyed examination of the materiality of decay shot through with mordant humour. Skins (2008) places the ragged remains of rubber flippers next to casts of feet, ranging in size from tiny child to adult – simply mounted on the wall, the work is at once poignant and chilling, recalling the brilliantly sinister Tom Waits lyric ‘let marrow bone and cleaver choose/while making feet for children’s shoes’. Whale (2011) deftly improvises a Corinthian column from a suspended skeleton and rusty bucket. Even Sapiens, (2007), a tripod topped with a pair of elegantly nesting bronze skulls (one a fetus, the other an adult), takes on the almost kitschily macabre tone of the seaside freak-show.

The playfully baleful atmospherics continue with a video piece made in response to Margate’s premier Victorian tourist attraction; for Shell Grotto (2013) a camera simply pans slowly along the twisting corridors of this strange underground folly unearthed in 1835. The snaking passages, niches and chambers are inlaid with shells arranged in complex patterns – lit by gas lamps during the height of its popularity the decorated walls are now dingy and cobweb blown. The video is compellingly suspenseful, recalling at once creepy fairground rides or weirdly arid colonoscopy footage. This work is paired with Tabernacle (2013), a video installationcome- sculpture filmed on the shoreline below the artist’s Connemara home. An upturned currach becomes a chapel-like shelter or private cinema looking onto a projection of waves rushing in to a sea cave. The boat’s contents dangle down – petrol can, holy water bottles, frayed ropes, a mattock and bucket. In the dim light, standing under the ribbed vault of the boat, painted in peeling and spattered layers of wine and blue, the correspondences with anatomical structures are amplified, recalling ribs and muscle walls, while black water rushes in to fill the ventrical chamber of the cave. The above works draw parallels, or perhaps more accurately, juxtapose the specificities of Margate and Connemara, but the lasting impression is that of Cross’s sly delight in punning landscapes or external structures with the internal architecture of the body, and its inevitable decay.

The show also bleeds into a neighboring exhibition, Turner and Constable: Sketching from Nature, Works from the Tate Collection, and the conversation between the different bodies of work was reportedly important to Cross. Two of her works bookend the show: at the entrance, standing in a corner near two small chocolate brown oils, is Fox Glove I (2012) a waist high bronze cast of the plant, where hollow tips of female fingers replace the bell shaped flowers, recalling its vernacular name Lady’s Fingers. It’s a subtle work, discreetly installed, and the surreal exchange is easily missed. Bridging the two exhibition spaces is Shark Heart Submarine (2011), one of her more oblique assemblages. A paint-spattered nineteenth-century easel supports a metre-long model of a submarine, surfaced in white gold leaf. Opaque and hermetically sealed, only the exhibition notes inform us of the poetically suggestive cargo – a shark’s heart floating in alcohol in a glass jar. Rather than linking or bridging the gap between the two exhibitions, the work effectively encapsulates Cross’s distinctive response to her environment.

Two hundred years ago, Turner and his contemporaries obsessively painted and repainted views and seascapes – recording their responses to changing light and weather conditions in resinous oils or chalky watercolour. Dorothy Cross: Connemara showcases a similar fascination with place and with the natural world. Her visual language is both more direct and more lyrical, however. Harvesting, fusing and reconstructing objects washed up on the shoreline, her work references the sea only implicitly. Like a negative space drawing, the sea’s presence is inferred through her scavenging and preserving the objects around it or washed up by it. Cross’s work performs a visceral, tactile invocation of place, but also manages to transcend the specific idyll of romanticized Connemara. Instead, the artist’s taste for barbed black humor and a salty pun resonate grippingly in scruffy, urban Margate.