- Venue
- Suburban Pavilion
- Location
- Scotland
Edinburgh-based visual artist presents a new body of small-scale drawings in a quiet language of stillness and study. Rendered on postcards, which reflect on a recent residency she undertook in Iceland, they articulate travel and destination, elswhereness, unfamiliar eerie terrain and fierce nature. They are juxtaposition diagrams, full of excellent craft, minutiae of detail, an assured pencil that links her practice and the surface of paper as an illusory mindful theatre to works by artists like Alan Michael, Lucy Skaer or Kate Davis.
Extracted clumps of foliage are deliberately isolated and composed near to blue cellular forms, a couple in silhouette portray a disquieting intimacy, while an ink drawing of a doorway leading to a street mimic an illustration from a gothic 1950s ghost story. Small organic forms are repeated and turned, reassessed and duplicate across the installation of 40 or so equally arranged postcards. They evidence an exploration of the internal world with an external world: full of extremes and contradictions: ice and boiling pools, solid rock and steam, minerals, heavy elements, with weightless suspensions, slowness and rush. Across a map of small happenings, a growing gesture, automatic movements and fleeting associations, scatterings of tiny blue beads near broken shells in muted colours, is an environment of visual magnetism, the works pull you toward themselves, requiring closer, very close inspection.
Sinclair’s practice includes her Back garden Biennale, Suburban Pavilion endeavors and 7 @ 7, which all place discourses on contemporary art in a suburban space, remarkable for their social consequences, the bringing together of contrasting voices in accessible places. They are given, their discreet and intellectually stimulating qualities, evidence of a kind of conduct and manner within Edinburgh’s visual arts scene.
There is a sense of the collector here, of bringing the exotic from elsewhere home, in illustrative form, or in samples. Sinclair’s drawing work has a scientific or ontological quality to it, it has the aesthetic on occasion of Outsider Art, or the works, usually illustrative and precise drawings of artists with Asperger’s Syndrome. It also brings to mind a technical draughtsman quality, a line that speaks of a more traditional art school education, or measurement, anatomy, and life classes set against the contemporary, the ideas of visual culture now. The work gauges and assesses forms of present and quantifiable realities, repetitions, categories, and patterns while setting these truths like an event, through disruption, change, grading, shadow and erasing into new habitations. On Sinclair’s frequencies, these materials, details and objects become remarkable, or extraordinary or brand new.
