- Venue
- Modern Art Oxford
- Location
Robert Clark, on Karla Black’s recent exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, commented, “Plastic sheeting might be cheap, throwaway… yet it can also be stretched across a room to form a curtain of beautiful evanescence.”
Black’s sculptures at Modern Art Oxford exhibit an economy of material, of form and of colour. Deliberate, beautiful and restrained, the Glasgow-based artist’s work is comprised of simple gestures with real power. At once delicate, formless and monumental, her pieces are comprised of everyday materials such as cellophane, sugar paper, moisturiser and chalk dust isolated from their usual context and inserted into a new one. As such, Black’s work shifts between various points of reference, various themes and ideas, with language playing a crucial role in the titles of the sculptures and the list of materials which make up each one.
The first piece the viewer encounters within the exhibition is a large but fragile transparent plastic screen or curtain painted with a fringe of palest pink. This piece frames one’s view of the whole of this room, placed directly in front of the viewer upon entering the space from a staircase. ‘Made to Wait’ serves to partially screen the room, to block the viewer in one way, but to focus one’s view on what lies beyond, like a lens. The title of this work seems to describe its function, as the viewer is required to circumnavigate the piece to reach the next.
Walking clockwise through the space around the screen, a field of pale pink powder covers the floor. A higher mound of powder sits crumbling in the far left-hand corner of the field. The powder is difficult to identify but is reminiscent of several things, flour, icing sugar, talcum powder? The sculpture is entitled ‘Platonic Solid’ and its colours shift between various pink and white tints, with areas of more saturated sky blue breaking through the thinner layers on the floor. This blue is picked up by the large constructed form which blocks the view beyond this first room. The blue form ‘Nothing is a Must’ is made from sugar paper, and stands, fragile and monumental, like an iceberg or giant bag of sugar on the edge of the field. The paper is chalked, its surface covered with particles which are held in dialogue with the field of powder on the floor.
The next room one encounters is a transitional space, with only a single work contained inside. All Black’s works in this exhibition are undeniably beautiful. That is, except for the piece positioned in this middle room: ‘For Use’ a yellow-green sculpture comprised of paint, rumpled transparent plastic and petroleum jelly. It looks unnervingly like a used tissue and indeed its title seems to echo this sentiment.
The third room appears less considered than the first. The works here are more densely displayed, with less breathing space between them. For me, this was less effective, the smaller, more domestic scale of the sculptures here being less suited to their material and shape. Black’s specific aesthetic choices continue throughout this section of the exhibition but some finesse is lacking here; there are too many voices trying to speak separately without cohesion, and are less memorable as a result.
However, there is no exit through this third room. Instead the viewer has to retrace their steps back through the first two rooms. This time, one takes the most economical route past the field ‘Platonic Solid’, travelling along the length of it from the other side of the room. The movement of the viewer towards the staircase causes a second curtain-like form (perhaps initially overlooked) called ‘Named and Gated’ hung partially across the staircase to blow in the breeze. The sound and movement of this transparent curtain is particularly beautiful, made as it is of swathes of polythene, knotted and strung up like a ship’s sail. Within it, are further particles of blue chalk dust, which link back to the blues in the other sculptures in this first room. The viewer is given a second chance to experience the sculptures because of the sole entrance/exit of the exhibition.
The last view of the exhibition one has is the lingering presence of the field of chalk dust, which appears to rise up to eye level as the viewer descends the staircase. Black carefully orchestrates or choreographs the movement within the space in relationship with the viewer, designating specific pathways around the space. She sets up shifting vantage points which create and recreate experiences within the exhibition. These give time for reflection and reconsideration of the works as non-autonomous sculptural objects.
Black’s sculptural practice references femininity, memory, childhood, the age-old artistic themes of landscape, still-life and the body. However, none of these themes are explicit but are more subtly woven into the fabric of her work, providing a complexity of intent and content. The work’s mutability results in shifts between subjects and ideas such as these, but does not seek to fully address any of them. Colour and form serve similar purposes. Tiny hints of colour in twisted polythene or dusted onto paper are described as ‘only just’ colours by the artist, similar to the choice of powder and paper to create forms which are ‘only just sculpture.’
She utilises familiar-seeming forms and materials isolated from their usual context and repositioned, making them hard to identify, disjointed from place and time. The exhibition guide contains a list of materials which make up each of Black’s work: cellophane, hair gel, lipstick, chalk and toothpaste. These operate, to my mind, like the materials of film maker Jennifer West. West’s use of language within the titles of her films is at once visceral, luscious, repulsive and everyday, and are used as descriptions of both content and process: the origins of the marks made on her celluloid strips. Both West and Black’s materials have their own resonant power and set of associations but in both cases, many of the materials are virtually undetectable upon viewing the work. Substances such as concealer, sellotape or athlete’s foot powder are near impossible to identify, their only explicit appearance being within the work label or title.
Skye Sherwin has described Black as dealing with the “armour of women” but the artist herself is keen to distance herself from such feminist concerns, despite her predilection for using materials which can be very easily connected to these ideas. Her works are not delicate in a feminine way, but in an essentially structural way. Black’s works occupy their given space and hold their own presence within it, self-supporting but seemingly vulnerable. They are not sentimental or saccharine but monumental forms using the language of the everyday. For me, her sculptures are beautiful and deliberate but are neither overtly feminine nor masculine. Her gestures are minimal and luxurious, ambitious and humble. The sculptures are placed to frame, challenge and provoke, and successfully so.
