Art reviews: Everlyn Nicodemus | Holly Davey | pass shadow, whisper shade

Holly Davey: The Unforgetting, Fruitmarket Gallery, Glasgow ★★★★

pass shadow, whisper shade, Collective, Edinburgh ★★★

“Discovery” is hardly the right word to use about an artist who has been working steadily for more than four decades. Nevertheless, as a major retrospective is revealed at the National Galleries of Scotland’s Modern One, Everlyn Nicodemus is a discovery.

Born in Tanzania in 1954, she lived in Sweden, France, Germany and Belgium before settling in Edinburgh in 2008. It was only in 2022 when she received the Freelands Award, which supports underrepresented women artists, that she appeared on the radar of the art world in the UK. Perhaps predictably, she is now much sought after. The award led directly to the planning of this exhibition which focuses on her painting.

The earliest work here is After the Birth (1980), painted on bark cloth. It is at once recognisably African and very assured, in a visual language which draws on European modernism. It is also intimate and nuanced, perhaps based on personal experience. The woman and the infant seem part of the same harmonious shape, yet the woman hides her face with her hand; this is more complex than simple maternal bliss. 

From the get-go, Nicodemus’ work has been concerned with women’s experience, such as reproductive rights and violence against women. A painting called The Rape (1984) was sparked by a proposal in Sweden to criminalise fully rape within marriage. To make her Woman in the World project, she spent time with communities of women in Denmark, Tanzania and Kolkatta. 

Often, she made work inspired by her own life, her long marriage to Swedish art historian Kristian Romare, her family. She and Him (1987) is a fond, sensual double portait of herself and her husband, nude, cropped to hide their faces.

However, as a black woman, and a woman in a mixed race marriage, she suffered painfully from racism in the Europe of the 1970s and 1980s which precipated a breakdown. Battling what would later be diagnosed as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, she made groups of dense, detailed drawings, then a major series of paintings, Silent Strength, expressing her growing resilience and recovery.

The crowning achievement of that period is The Wedding, a series of 84 large-scale paintings made in the early 1990s, with their own personal symbolic language about men and women, life and death, trauma and survival. (“The marriage between dreams and nightmares, that is life,” she once wrote). Ten of them are in this show.

The Freelands Award enabled her to paint again after a hiatus which lasted from 1994 to 2022, though she had continued to work in other media. The zenith of the exhibition is a new painting series, Lazarus Jacaranda, made in the last two years. Worked in dark colours on an orange-red ground, these large-scale paintings echo the drama of an African sunset, resplendent on dark blue walls.

In them, Nicodemus draws on the images and stories of Christianity, which she first learned in the strict Tanzanian Lutheran Church, now triumphantly reworking them for her own purposes (the series begins with Portrait of the Artist as a Bishop). Painting, for Nicodemus, has been an act of defiance and of healing. Now she has made it an act of resurrection too.

The style and concerns of her painting have remained remarkably consistent through 40 years, and if this is all she did, it would be considerable. In fact, there is perhaps as much work again in textiles, relief sculptures and assemblages, not included here. The National Galleries of Scotland made the decision to go deep with the paintings, but that means there are significant gaps in Nicodemus’ story. The glimpses we are afforded of these suggests that we are only beginning to understand the remarkable range and extent of her work.

Recovering the stories of women artists from the past is at the heart of Holly Davey’s project for the Fruitmarket Gallery’s warehouse space, The Unforgetting, following an invitation to make a work for the gallery’s 50th anniversary year based on engaging with its archive.

Davey discovered a sculpture show at the Fruitmarket in 1975 in which all the participants were male, but most trained at Edinburgh College of Art where further digging revealed an important female teacher, the sculptor Ann Henderson. The central recurring motif of the show is an abstracted drawing of Little Bather II, a work by Henderson in the collection of the City Art Centre.

In all, Davey found a total of 354 women who have been exhibited at the Fruitmarket, from Jill Smith in 1975 (who was reinstated in the archive in 2022 after it was discovered she had been missed out), through Kiki Smith, Marina Abramovic, Louise Bourgeois, and many others whose names are a little less well known. A sound work features their names read chronologically, with equivalent silences left for the names of the men, while a metronome ticks off the years. There is an impressive structure in wood, the kind of scaffold which might support a monumental sculpture, and a series of 354 hand-made clay figures, inspired by drawings of Henderson’s Little Bather, a silent congregation of witnesses.

There’s a difference, Davey says, between remembering and unforgetting. The latter is more intentional, an act of reclamation from the past, of looking in seemingly empty spaces until they give up their secrets.

The Fruitmarket is not the only Edinburgh gallery with a birthday this year: Collective has turned 40, and now concludes its anniversary year with a group show, pass shadow, whisper shade, by the six artists on the current Satellites Programme for emerging talent. The title comes from an Irish proverb and has overtones of being in another’s shadow and being sheltered, contrasting aspects of how artists relate to what has gone before them.

Josie KO is clear, as ever, about her aim to recover black women from the shadows of British history. Here, she references William Dunbar’s poem from the early 16th century, “Of Ane Black-Moir”, about an African woman performing in a royal theatrical tournament. The phrase “Mekle lippis” (big lips) appears on a trio of banners outside the building, and a quilt inside, which is the backdrop for a slowly spinning sculpted figure.

Hannan Jones’ Hiraeth: Pandy Lane is a 16mm film which attempts to dramatise a family legend, the story of her grandfather’s attempt to buy a suit through a clandestine lettuce-harvesting enterprise. It’s whimsical, perhaps to the point of incredulity, but it’s quite bewitching too, with its soundtrack performed by the Rhubaba Choir. 

The other works are harder to engage with. Rowan Markson makes use of piano stools and music-book holders, though the work isn’t really about sound (but his musical transcription of his father attempting to play Bach from memory is well worth seeing). Clarinda Tse’s installation seems to have something to do with her grandfather and Chinese fortune-telling.

Katherine Fay Allan’s Gastromancy is a 25-minute film which connects living with undiagnosed gastrointestinal illness to haunting and folkloric ritual. Emelia Kerr Beale’s installation is part of an ongoing research project relating to the textile industry and the Luddites.

Everlyn Nicodemus until 25 May 2025; Holly Davey until 17 November; pass shadow, whisper shade until 22 December