Edinburgh Art Festival reviews: Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony | Hamish Halley | Louise Gibson & more
A thoughtful new film from Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony reminds us that place is not neutral, writes Susan Mansfield
Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony: who will be remembered here, EAF Pavilion Edinburgh ★★★★★
Hamish Halley: please keep, The People’s Story Museum, Edinburgh ★★★★
Louise Gibson: Beachheads, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop ★★★
Ring of Truth, Blackie House Library and Museum ★★★
Peter Kennard, Palestine Museum, 13A Dundas Street, Edinburgh ★★★★
In the past, Edinburgh Art Festival had something of a reputation for opening up unusual spaces around the city as venues for its commissioned programme. Now, the focus has shifted towards events and performances, like Raven Chacon’s extraordinary Voiceless Mass, performed in St Giles Cathedral on 9 August.
However, the festival is hosting one major exhibited work, the film who will be remembered here by Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony, which is being shown at the EAF Pavilion, a former office building on Leith Street currently repurposed by the organisation Outer Spaces into studio space for artists. Funded in part by the Scottish Government’s Festivals EXPO Fund, this is a strong piece of work with high production values.
The format is simple: four queer writers are filmed delivering monologues they have written at Historic Environment Scotland sites. Robert Softley Gale is at Biggar Gasworks, Robbie Macleòid at Fort George, Harry Josephine Giles at Dun Telve and Dun Troddan Brochs in Argyll, Bea Webster at Machrie Moor Standing Stones on the Isle of Arran. Each uses a different language of Scotland: English, Gaelic, Scots and BSL.
Taken together, their thoughtful, considered responses cast new light on the landscape of Scotland’s past, from the prehistoric to the post-industrial. They remind us that place is not neutral; for much the same reasons that the victors tend to write the history books, so buildings and landscape can be weighted towards one kind of story, thereby excluding others.
The monologues are beautifully filmed and there is enough space around them to allow each to have its proper impact. And while the focus of the film is on queer spaces, it opens up other questions as well. What does it mean to be a wheelchair user in a space in which only the able-bodied were allowed to work? Or to be a Gael inside the military stronghold built by the British government to control the Highlands in the days of the Jacobite rebellions? It’s a reminder that art - if it’s good enough - can open up beyond specific concerns to address a wider audience.
Meanwhile, Platform, the EAF showcase for emerging artists, has morphed into an 18-month Early Career Residency. The first recipient, Hamish Halley, is exhibiting in an attic room at the People’s Story Museum on the Canongate. Having worked in a range of other media, Halley turns to film in this show with a thoughtful 20-minute piece, please keep.
He interlaces two stories: the moving of Perth Museum’s natural history collection as part of its recent refurbishment, and his family’s clearing of his grandparents’ house. The house contained a quantity of nature books, and the soundtrack of the film is made up of readings about ponds, insects and birds, punctuated by incidental conversation between family members.
Images of stuffed wild animals and empty museum cases are woven into footage of the house-clearance. The two stories begin to talk to one another about what we keep and why, what is remembered and how we make sense of the past.
Materials can often be said to have memory, and that’s certainly true of the recycled metal in Louise Gibson’s exhibition, Beachheads, at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. These abstract sculptures are made from repurposed metal objects, always in pairs: two baths, two car doors, two filing cabinets, two radiators, two metal wheelie bins. They have been crushed or folded, filled with pieces of dyed textile or scaffolding mesh, so that the soft materials appear to be squeezed out of the hard, reduced forms.
Gibson is working with formal sculptural considerations - colour, shape, texture, weight. Often, the pieces are propped up on, impaled on or suspended from steel bars. The existing objects are transformed or repurposed, survivors of the constant cycle of manufacture and obsolescence which props up consumer capitalism.
And yet there is also a sense in which that transformation is fluid and ongoing. Material properties are held open to question: textiles are hardened with resin, hard metal is crushed. When the exhibition is over, will they be recycled too? Will the cycle of change go on?
Understanding - or failing to understand - an object’s history is central to Ring of Truth, a playful exhibition at Blackie House Library and Museum, home to the extensive historical collection of American scholar Bill Zachs, and now a registered Scottish charity.
The starting point for this show is a series of manuscript fragments once believed to be Coptic musical notation from the fourth or fifth century. Recent investigations revealed that they are much more modern: early 20th-century paint on 15th-century vellum. Yet this seems to create more questions than it answers: are they fakes, or were they created with another purpose in mind?
This lack of information creates a space in which artists can work. A group of musicians have produced an album, Sun God Fraud Squad, and artists Alan Grieve and Eddie Summerton have collaborated on what Grieve calls “a Coptic media wall” with miniature effigies attached to it in hand-made duty-free plastic bags. Life-size versions of the same effigies were used to make a film at a car racing track. It’s all well made, subversive, a touch irreverent.
At the other end of the room, Julie Johnstone’s works on paper are calm and formally rigorous. Drawing on the geometrical shapes used in the manuscripts, she makes precise, quiet forms with clean lines. Among these are placed objects and books from Zachs’ collection: Egyptian figurines, early books on Scottish music, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s (H)our Lady sundial, a 3D printed dodo skull. It’s a quirky and surprising show, at times as mysterious as the manuscripts themselves.
Meanwhile, at the Palestine Museum, which opened earlier this year on Dundas Street to showcase Palestinian art from around the world, Peter Kennard weighs in with a set of Palestine-themed photomontages.
Kennard, who has been creating defiantly political images for more than 50 years, isn’t known for beating about the bush, and he doesn’t do that here. An emaciated body wears a headdress of missiles, an American flag bleeds on to a Palestinian one, an arm wearing Israeli insignia cuts away the tubes giving life to a malnourished baby.
An hourglass has a skull in the top half, in the bottom - along with most of the sand - is a Palestinian flag. The phrase “Never again” is written on a chalkboard, but the word “Never” is being erased. It’s not subtle, but plenty of people would agree that Palestine has run out of time for subtlety. It’s art which hits you like a punch in the guts, and my hunch is that is no less than the artist intends.
Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony, Hamish Halley and Ring of Truth run until 24 August; Louise Gibson and Peter Kennard until 31 August.
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