Art reviews: Suzanne Lacy | Say No! | Gareth Fisher

Say No!: Art, Activism and Feminist Refusal, Wardlaw Museum, St Andrews ★★★★

Gareth Fisher: Sculpture in Plaster 1980-2024, Summerhall, Edinburgh ★★★★

Suzanne Lacy is the doyenne of socially engaged practice. The Los Angeles-based artist trained under the formative influences of leading feminist artist Judy Chicago and Allan Kaprow, regarded the father of the “happening”, developing her own practice which explores themes like poverty, race, immigration and women’s rights.

Lacy’s work from her 2016 Dublin project, The School for Revolutionary Girls, featured in last year’s triumphant show Outside the Circle at Cooper Gallery. However, this, her first solo show in Scotland, focusses on a work she made in New York in 2013, with Brooklyn Museum and arts organisation Creative Time.

Between the Door and the Street began with a six-month engagement with 40 activist organisations in the city and culminated in a one-day action in which around 400 (mostly) women engaged in staged but unscripted conversations around aspects of feminism today on the “stoops” of houses in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. The public became “listening voyeurs” as they wandered from stoop to stoop to hear the fat being chewed on race, gender, identity, poverty, labour and violence against women. Live music and street food created a festival atmosphere.

Planning was key, with logistics and aesthetic considerations prioritised alongside content. Yellow ribbons delineated the area of the project, the participants wore yellow scarves and pots of yellow flowers decorated each stoop. Lacy managed to create a visual identity which didn’t compromise the project’s integrity. She also grasped instinctively that multiple voices and perspectives would create a more complex, nuanced portrait of the issues at stake.

Examples of the questions used as prompts appear as text works in the lower gallery (in yellow, of course). And they’re good questions, pointed and pertinent but still capable of generating wide-ranging discussion: Does gender matter? Whose labour is invisible? Are race and class related? Is your body politicised? Some - can we break the gender binary? is healthcare gendered? - seem even more pertinent now than in 2013.

A well-made three-channel film in the upper gallery documents the event, showing women of all ages and backgrounds, from earnest to animated. Socially engaged art sometimes struggles to make the leap into a gallery setting, yet it must if it’s to be taken seriously as art and reach a wider audience. Lacy makes the leap look easy.

That’s why we’re still visiting a gallery 12 years later to hear these women having conversations on Brooklyn stoops. That and the fact that the issues they’re discussing are as alive as they’ve ever been. For the lucky students of Duncan of Jordanstone - and anyone else who’s interested - it’s a chance to see a textbook example of socially engaged art practice, by one of the best in the business.

Refusal has long been a powerful tool of feminist activism and Say No!, at the Wardlaw Museum, St Andrews, combines archival gems with work by contemporary artists who are responding to those histories. The first of the three sections, Refusing Exploitation, features a tapestry and textile sculpture by Argentine artist Mercedes Azpilicueta, inspired by the potato riots in Amsterdam in 1917, and projects by Fiona Jardine and Petra Bauer made in collaboration with sex workers’ organisation SCOT-PEP.

Refusing Violence begins with posters created using the photography of Franki Raffles (whose archive is in the collection at St Andrews) for the Zero Tolerance campaign in the 1990s, takes in documentation of trans rights protests by Sweatmother and paintings by American artist Ellen Lesperance, inspired by the protest knitwear made and worn by the women at Greenham Common.

The final section, Refusing Limits, opens up the subject still further, transforming the concept of refusal into something open and outward-looking. It features Alberta Whittle’s 2021 film, A Black Footprint is a Beautiful Thing, in which the shipworm becomes an metaphor for subversive power and anti-imperialism, Josie KO’s sculpture, My Lady with the Mekle Lippis, and photographs by Arpita Shah from her Nalini series, exploring the migration stories of her ancestors.

The curators of Say No! cover a great deal of ground in a modest-sized room, touching on feminist history from the Suffragettes to Black Lives Matter and beyond, and drawing threads of connection through time and on into the future.

It’s great to see Summerhall open again under the banner of charity Summerhall Arts, with art on display and the promise of more to come. While the offering at present is modest, it’s high calibre, with Gareth Fisher, Professor of Sculpture at Duncan of Jordanstone and President of the RSA, occupying the Lab Gallery with a kind of retrospective.

Fisher has worked in wood, bronze, aluminium and stone but the continuous thread in his practice is plaster, and the glass cases of the Lab Gallery make suitable receptacles for a collection of these fragile works going back five decades. These are clearly more than maquettes or models used to cast in another material, they are works in their own right, rich with ideas and often responding to current events.

Nuclear Head (1980) is a masked visage from the height of the arms race, while Trabant Heading West (1990) explores the exodus from East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Several works feel ahead of their time: Fossil Rig (1987) was made when North Sea oil was beginning to boom, but anticipates a time when the relics of oil exploration have outlived their useful purpose.

Sprouting Head (1983) was inspired by seeing the Benin bronzes, and questions their displacement to Western museums, a hot topic 40 years on, while the last work in the show, More Helmet Than Head (1983) was inspired by press images from the Iran hostage crisis. It’s an example of how sculpture can abstract something just enough that the horrific becomes, if not palatable, then at least possible to look at.

Fisher is clearly interested in plaster’s qualities as a material: sometimes he gives it an alabaster smoothness, at other times exposes its guttural roughness. He seems to enjoy putting its fragility to the test, with delicate works like Fronds and the plant forms on Sea Stack. The most recent work here is Fibonacci Column, made from fragments of plaster from his studio, a formally precise work speckled with a range of colours.

There is a range of styles here, from formally spare works like Vertebrae to agglomerative pieces like Lady and the Fan, which incorporates fragments of porcelain figures, metal scraps and the eponymous fan. In works like Bus Bomb Skeleton and Glacial Melt, he explores the insides of the sculptures too, using strategically placed lights to illuminate voids within.

A bigger show would place the plaster pieces amongst his other sculptural work, and that would be helpful, but for those not familiar with his work this is an intriguing introduction to an artist whose work can be precise, playful, formally rigorous and frequently unflinching.

Suzanne Lacy until 12 April; Say No! until 11 May; Gareth Fisher until 9 April