0 Stephen Sutcliffe: Outwork

THIS INTERVIEW WITH STEPHEN SUTCLIFFE APPEARED IN THE HERALD'S SATURDAY ARTS SUPPLEMENT ON 4/05/13

Stephen Sutcliffe: Outwork

Tramway 2

25 Albert Drive, Glasgow

0845 330 3501
www.tramway.org
Tramway 2
Until June 30

Meeting Stephen Sutcliffe in his top floor tenement flat overlooking Alexandra Park in Glasgow’s east end on a fresh spring morning feels like I have stepped into one of his film collages. In fact, I expect to see excerpts from our interview – perhaps a grainy scan of these words you are reading now – cut into a future project.

He has form in this respect. For years, Sutcliffe has been collecting the ‘Tell us what you think’ cards from galleries. 

In his collage-based film, Outwork, which he has reconfigured as a three-screen installation for a new exhibition at Glasgow's Tramway which opens today, Sutcliffe has placed out-takes from 1981 comedy, The Cannonball Run, starring Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, Sammy Davis Junior and Roger Moore, within the frame of a selection of said ‘Tell us’ cards.

It gives a knockabout feel to Outwork, which by his own admission is a mix of high and low culture; like much of his work to date. Harrogate-born Sutcliffe, who studied drawing and painting at Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art (DoJCA) as a mature student before moving to Glasgow where he gained an MFA from Glasgow school of Art, is now a major figure in the world of contemporary art films. 

His work has been shown at Tate Britain and the Whitechapel Gallery in London and he was even invited in 2010, in partnership with the Serpentine Gallery, to design for luxury knitwear brand, Pringle, along with the likes of Turner prize nominee, David Shrigley, celebrated Scots polymath Alasdair Gray and actress, Tilda Swinton.

Outwork, winner of the third Margaret Tait Award, takes its name from an essay by French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, in which he questions the necessity of literary prefaces.

This is classic Sutcliffe territory. He brings a geekish fascination with high culture, in the shape of high priest-types such as Derrida, English poet Christopher Logue, German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and influential sociologist Erving Hoffman, and blends it with his own cultural reference points gleaned from a 70s and 80s childhood spent watching too much television.

Sutcliffe, who worked as a cashier in a bank until the age of 25, claims he didn’t read at all until he left school. For someone whose flat is awash with books, as well as videos, this is quite a statement

“Jaws was one of one of first books I read,” he explains. “After I’d left school, my granny got a box of books from the library and it was in there. I don’t think I realised that it was a book before it was a film, even though I’d watched it several times by then.”

Reading Jaws, quite literally, opened the floodgates for Sutcliffe. “A friend of mine says he got into high culture through pop music, but I always think I got into it through television,” he explains.

While Sutcliffe worked in the bank by day, he was reading voraciously by night. He also started painting with a school friend who had gone to art school in Hull. “He was so cool,” he recalls. “It made me want to go to art school too.”
He applied to do a foundation course at Batley School of Art in West Yorkshire and from there, applied to study in Dundee, because he says he had read that outside London, the Scottish art colleges were the best.

“I think my enthusiasm got in,” he laughs. “I talked and talked. I’m not the most technically adept. I always felt I was running to catch up.”

Sutcliffe is perhaps being falsely modest as he received a first class honours degree from DoJCA. He stayed in Dundee for a few years after graduating, working with the artist-led group, Generator Projects, before moving to Glasgow in 2000 to study on the prestigious Master of Fine Arts course at GSA.

For this new exhibition at Tramway, Sutcliffe Outwork is an installation for multiple screens, including new animated sequences and exerts from previous films as a form of subtle notation to the film.

As he admits, you don’t really have to know about the background to a Sutcliffe film for it to ‘work’ as a viewer. I would say – having now talked to him at length about his high/low culture magpie approach to making his work – that it helps.

Sutcliffe is like the guy you meet in the pub with whom you have a laugh over some old Monty Python sketch, or the merits of Charlie’s Angels versus Starsky and Hutch, before moving on to him telling you about a seemingly intellectual book which sounds – for all its academic weight – like it should be your next book at bedtime.

“I like stuff that is problematic,” he says. “Perfect works are really boring. Stuff which is universally accepted as being great, I find quite annoying. I always describe myself as a collage artist, not a filmmaker because there are different films in same frame.

“The essence of collage is that things sit together with shocking dissonance. When it is too complimentary, it doesn't work. I like the mix of low and high culture. I stand up for both high and low culture!”

Detail: Stephen Sutcliffe: Outwork

0 Herald Arts: Galleries @ 16/02/13

Old Montrose Winter by James Morrison, 1984, oil on board,

91x122cms. The Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation

I write a weekly column about the galleries scene in The Herald every Saturday.

This appeared on 16/02/13

James Morrison Retrospective: Land and Landscape

The Fleming Collection

13 Berkeley Street, London 

020 7042 5730

www.flemingcollection.com

Feb 19-April 6

I first saw the work of Glasgow-born painter James Morrison in my best friend’s family home outside town of Montrose in the north east of Scotland in the 1980s. 

This print of one of Morrison’s landscape paintings struck a chord because it mirrored the scene outside the huge picture window in the sitting room, which was the focal point of the house.

This epic vista stretched out over flat farming land and beyond to the Montrose Basin, part of the estuary of the South Esk which forms a tidal basin near Montrose. 

Depending on the weather and the seasons, the view changed by the minute and Morrison’s depiction of it seemed to my young and untrained eye to have captured its place in a particular moment. This land existed in deep time as well as in the present and Morrison’s imagery suggested this in spades.  

This Tuesday (Feb 19), an exhibition of his life’s work, Land and Landscape, opens at the prestigious Fleming Collection in London. The exhibition has been organised to mark the artist’s 80th birthday. Work on show ranges from 1950s pictures of his home city of Glasgow to more recent landscapes inspired by rural and coastal Scotland and trips overseas. 

It has been curated by his son, Dr John Morrison, head of the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Dr Morrison has also written a book to accompany this celebration of his father’s work.

Morrison’s paintings have been bought by the Royal Family and by J.K. Rowling, as well by museums and corporate and private collections around the world, but his origins were rooted in what his son describes as ‘the self-educated artisan class’.

Born in 1932 and raised in the family’s corporation home on the north side of the Clyde opposite Clydebank, Dr Morrison writes that his grandparents ‘commitment to education and self-improvement’ meant his father was sent to a good academic school in Hillhead Academy, with his growing interest in art fostering ‘an automatic assumption that he would train as a school teacher and not follow his father into the shipyards.’
Morrison attended Glasgow School of Art (GSA) from 1950-1954. During and just after his student years, he produced bleak, almost monochromatic, paintings of Glasgow’s blackened streets and battle-scarred tenements, some of which, such as Rottenrow: The Midgies, and Crown Terrace, are in The Fleming Collection exhibition.

Being a young aspiring artist in post war Britain – and post war Glasgow in particular – was challenging. Many art school graduates drifted into teaching through economic necessity, but Morrison was determined to make a living as a painter.

In 1957, he was a founding member of the ‘Young Glasgow Group’ alongside fellow GSA graduates including, Alasdair Gray, Anda Paterson, James Spence, Ian McCulloch and Jack Knox.

This artists’ co-operative started to break the grasp of the older, more conservative art institutions and began to encourage the private gallery scene to open up.

Morrison, however, was busy making plans to leave his home city. In 1958, increasingly uncomfortable with city life, the artist and his wife Dorothy moved to Catterline, a cliff top fishing village south of Stonehaven on the north east coast of Scotland. 

The couple had first visited Catterline in 1955 during their honeymoon. By then, it was also the part-time home of the acclaimed GSA trained painter, Joan Eardley.

The couple both secured teaching jobs in the area and Morrison began a decade or more of experimentation and analysis as he tackled the very different set of formal problems posed by landscape painting.

One of the paintings in the exhibition from this period is St Cyrus Abstract, loosely based on the landscape of a salt marsh behind coastal dunes and influenced by a combination of 1960s Op Art and Morrison’s long term interest in physics and geometry. 

In 1965, having taken up a teaching post at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Morrison and his growing family moved down the coast to Montrose, where he has lived and worked ever since. 

Sadly, his wife died in 2006, but following a six-month break from painting, he continues to work every day.

There is work from every period of Morrison’s long career in this retrospective. By the mid-1970s his work had, according to his son ‘undergone an elemental turn towards realism’ and in recent decades he has produced landscapes of Scotland such as Old Montrose Winter (1984), Montreathmont Forest (1990), and Summer Isles, Pat Macleod’s View (2002). All are included in the retrospective at The Fleming Collection.

Although Morrison’s principal inspiration comes from Scottish land and skies, he has travelled widely, painting in Greece, France, the Canadian High Arctic and Botswana. “All these works are anchored in 50 years of looking at and thinking about the landscape, the weather, the geology and the space,” writes his son. “These paintings, as the Glasgow images before them, offer new insight into perceptions of the everyday.”

ROUND UP

THE OBJECTS

Glasgow Sculpture Studio

The Whisky Bond, 2 Dawson Rd, Glasgow, G4 9SS

www.glasgowsculpturestudios.org

0141 353 3708
From today until April 6

This new exhibition in Glasgow presents the first chance to see the work of 2012 Turner Prize winner, Elizabeth Price, in Scotland, since she won the prestigious contemporary art gong for her film work, The Woolworths Choir of 1979, last December.
It’s also a chance to check out the splendid new home of the Glasgow Sculpture Studio in a former whisky bond in Speirs Locks in the Port Dundas area of the city.
THE OBJECTS, is a group show of work by Ulla von Brandenburg, Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Liliana Porter, Elizabeth Price and Jessica Warboys, curated by Kyla McDonald.
The work focuses on a distinctive area of interest among artists who have created ‘portraits’ or vignettes featuring inanimate sculptural objects using film and video.
Looking primarily at the ways in which the status or presence of sculptures can be conveyed or manipulated by the moving image, it considers methods in which film and video can offer the viewer a different way of looking, examining and critiquing objects.
In Ulla von Brandenburg’s The Objects 2009 (from which the exhibition takes its title), objects that might typically be used as props become the subjects. The viewer watches as the camera glides through a succession of things – a fan, a flute, a shirt, a chessboard, a rope – as they dance and disappear in turn. Despite the objects appearing to have a life of their own, the viewer is reminded of their usual motionless state when the strings required to animate them are occasionally seen.

Rip It Up
Tramway
25 Albert Drive, Glasgow
0845 330 3501
www.tramway.org

As part of Tramway’s Rip It Up season of new work taking place between January and March, one of the highlights is tomorrow’s family day, The Big Idea, which includes an afternoon of workshops, performances and installations by up and coming Scottish artists developing new work for children under 12 and their parents and carers.
The Glasgow venue will present an array of activities throughout the afternoon including The Story Den, in which children aged between 4 and 12 are invited to join Fly Arts in the magical story den and get lost in the world of traditional storytelling. They’ll also meet some weird and wonderful characters and then have fun creating their own fantastical mask.

There will also be some activity surrounding Nick Evans Solar Eyes exhibition, which was previewed on this page two weeks ago.

Part sculpture ‘theme park’ and part lost civilisation, Evans solo exhibition references Egyptian and Mayan mythology with complex geometrical patterns, bright colours and large plaster sculptures. There will be the chance to take part in drop-in exhibition activity throughout the day.
I recommend you take the time to jump into emerging artist, Lauren Gault’s thought-provoking exhibition in the Tramway 5 space. Hailing from a farming family in Northern Ireland, Gault has merged familiar sights such as ensilage bales (the big shrink wrapped hay bales you see in fields all around the country) with found and constructed objects relating to the seminal research of scientist Temple Grandin in the treatment of autism and livestock management.

Grandin, who is autistic, invented a ‘squeeze machine’ and advocated swaddling patients, or the application of extreme pressure as a proven method of relaxation and release. 

More inclined to swaddle, as opposed to ripping it up, Gault’s work puts the culture into agriculture and plays on the mind long after you leave the building. 

One of the themes of Rip It Up is visitor feedback, either via Twitter @GlasgowTramway or info@tramway.org.

Detail: Herald Arts: Galleries @ 16/02/13

0 Nick Evans at Tramway

Nick Evans... The Eyes Have It

NICK EVANS: SOLAR EYES
Tramway 2
Tramway, 25 Albert Drive, Glasgow
0845 330 3501
www.tramway.org
Until March 31

One of the joys of Tramway, the former Glasgow tram shed which is set to house the Turner Prize exhibition in 2015, is that it changes personality with each body of work which temporarily moves into the space.

The first exhibition to take place in Tramway 2 since it was announced that it will playing host to the UK’s premier contemporary art award, is a solo show by Glasgow-based and trained sculptor, Nick Evans.

Evans, who was awarded one of two places on the first ever Artists’ Fellowship programme run by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Creative Scotland in 2011, has taken the ball and run with it in this ambitious exhibition.

When I took a look around Tramway 2, three days before the exhibition was due to open to the public, it was still a work-in-progress, with the sound of drilling echoing around the cavernous industrial space and the artist having dashed off somewhere in an attempt to solve a wallpaper crisis. 

Hand-made wallpaper, wall painting and carefully crafted plinths loom large in this exhibition as Evans has designed every temporary wall and room space in Tramway 2 with graphic imagery, based on motifs from ancient and lost civilisations. 

Despite their historical context, these panels and walls have a curiously contemporary feel – like zingy Pac-Men caught in a giant repeating computer programme for all eternity.

This fascination with the symmetrical imagery and belief-systems of ancient societies allied to our 21st century world, is a recurring theme in Evans work and with his strong graphic imagination he has created a magical landscape within Tramway.

The temporary walls with walk-through corridor-style entrances, give the impression of having stumbled into a psychedelic temple.

This feeling is magnified by the presence of the real stars of this show – a ‘family’ of large mainly white, but occasionally painted forms made from fibre reinforced plaster. 

Evans describes them as ‘calcified ghosts’ and there is certainly something of the goofy night about these sculptural forms – which are reminiscent of Henry Moore’s giant abstract sculptural artworks. Each one starts off being constructed in the same way, but each manages to morph into its own ‘personality’.

Evans works with three or four moulds and casts them before working the forms into different shapes.

Many of the plinths and printed backdrops for his sculptures incorporate aspects of Mayan, Egyptian and prehistoric symbolism, and help each and every one of the sculptures to exude a distinctive personality. 

Nothing to do 2013, for example, consists of two fibre reinforced plaster parts, cotton applique banner, a wooden frame holding a protect-style banner between the two forms, while Unseeing Eye 2013 sits on a steel stand and is rotated by a small motor.

There is even a section of unfinished forms, where you can see moulds stuck together; a mesh of wooden joists and sackcloth poking through the plaster of paris.

Evans takes us on a voyage of discovery through his own editing process – which in turn adds to the anthropomorphic nature of the work.

A personal favourite – and one which I can see pleasing the young crowd – is Black Eye 2013, a fibre reinforced plaster form with a rip-stop nylon inflatable emerging from its ‘mouth’ and powered by an electric fan on a timer. Once it is inflated, a giant inscrutable eye surveys you. Once deflated, the sculpture takes on a dejected air which left me smiling if a little deflated...

The title of this exhibition, Solar Eyes, refers to the ‘solar eye’ of Egyptian mythology, a dangerous and autonomous entity whose power was celebrated in temple rituals.

Many of Evans’ sculptures share in the symbolism of the prehistoric earth goddesses, also a motif in the work of Henry Moore. 

According to exhibition curator Claire Jackson, this show presents a ‘very tactile’ experience. “Nick has managed to make sculptures about sculpture, but they still have an identity of their own. He’s taken the language of western sculpture, which is informed by so many cultures and societies and invented his own visual language.

“He’s taken a lot of risks and pushed everything to the limit, but I think it works. It’s his biggest and most ambitious show to date and it’s exciting to see how it’s all come together.”

There is a warmth to Evans’ work which made me as a viewer feel a sense of ownership the minute I walked into Tramway 2. 

All these sculptural forms exude a goofy exuberance, but there is an underlying seriousness in the way they inhabit Evans’ carefully constructed neatly symmetrical contemporary – not to mention aesthetically pleasing temple.

Evans has layered the work with so many references; the belief-systems of ancient culture, methods of protest, the iniquities of the labour market and the art market, even.

This is smart art in a smart setting. I can see it being a crowd-pleaser across the age divide because children will love both the goofiness and the graphic setting, while adults will enjoy the way in which they respond to the whole shooting match. The Eyes have it.

Detail: Nick Evans at Tramway