Karla Black focuses on translating studio-based material experiments into site-specific, gallery-based installations. The Scottish artist’s sculptural practice, for which she received a Turner Prize nomination in 2011, is concerned with the basic physicality of materials: from standard art-making supplies such as pigment and plaster to cosmetic items like lip-liner and concealer. Her practice involves an iterative process of personally installing, adapting, and re-working sculptures in the gallery space itself, which in this case spans a long corridor and four connected rooms in IMMA’s south east wing. Black’s work – ranging from plaster-cast tree trunks to polythene wraiths – is convincingly made, but the awkward curatorial decisions made regarding its installation ultimately lead to an underwhelming experience overall.
Prospects, a new work consisting of plaster-cast tree trunks erected one metre apart in a long cuboid row of soil is installed in the corridor. Sprouting out of this geometric earth, the 20 plaster columns each feature a cellophane canopy. The piece is made using pencil, lip liner, eyeliner pencil, and concealer, though the most prominent aspect of the work is its unreserved use of loosely applied spray-paint. Painted patches of colour lie sporadically along the soil’s surface; the bumps and crevices of the mud and pebbles become more flattened out by these spray-painted segments. Resembling small plots of grass and flowers, the colours resemble a videogame texture map laid across this polygonal slab of dirt, as though it had been generated into the museum as one would a row of blocks in Minecraft.
Black uses an array of pale hues in the painted plaster tree trunks and canopies. Sky blue, faint yellow, olive green, and pink rows of spray paint line each stump. The clustered splatterings of paint run along the trunks and up into the surrounding cellophane canopies, each connected by vine-like reams of clear sellotape.
The interesting aspects of the work – its materials and construction – are compromised by its cramped installation in the corridor of IMMA’s south east wing. In a situation where the slightest brushing past would cause a shockwave of rustling cellophane, the audience is imposed upon by the fragility and closeness of the work, yet it feels less like a considered decision made by the curator or the artist, but instead an unfortunate side effect of the limited space it was installed in. It is hard to get a proper impression of the work as it exists in these tight surroundings. In contrast to the room-based works which function quite well as a series in succession, Prospects is difficult to comprehend due to its inadequate and awkward positioning.
Sidestepping Prospects leads you into a connected series of four rooms. The first room holds Likeness, a sculptural installation made from a polythene sheet, powder paint, plaster powder, and thread. In Likeness, Black begins to introduce the subtle vocabulary of her material-based sculptural interventions. Covered in a near invisible powder residue like a used dust-cover, the polythene sheet’s form is dictated by the threads suspending it in place; parts of the sheet are tied into knotty clumps.
In the second room To Hand builds upon these ideas, introducing new colours and more complex forms of knotting into a similarly levitated polythene sheet sculpture. The first glints of colour emerge in some attached sleeves of polythene that are tied onto the larger sheet like bunting; the subdued reds, greens, yellows, and violets hum faintly in unison. In the eerie ambience of the gallery’s murmuring air-conditioning system, the piece hangs desolately at the centre of the room; it stirs only in the air displaced by my approach.
Being the smallest of the three polythene apparitions, Until’s structure is bodily, like some ominous levitating abdomen. Its centrally located knots are clotted up, while the overlapping material intertwines intestinally. Like the works in the preceding rooms, Until is also hung at eye level, but is less strictly aligned with the room’s centre (a subtle change which is surprisingly affecting). Perhaps the most worked piece in the show, its forms and shapes are intricate, but there is an underlying simplicity to Black’s incomprehensible method of binding and reattaching. The cluttered shapes in Until appear puzzling in a playful way like the absentminded clusters of knots you tie when you know you won’t need to undo them.
In contrast with Black’s purely abstract polythene works in the preceding rooms, the fourth room offers three hung objects which each resemble cheerful groups of cloud against a blue sky, interspersed by flesh coloured globs. Additional, Missed Window, and Fed are all made from two connected pieces of sugar paper stuffed with cotton and painted with oil and body paints. Hanging from the ceiling by thin arms of glistening ribbon, each haphazardly constructed cloud-bag bursts at the seams with bulging cotton that spills out and around the edges. Though these light-hearted works are full of character they are tonally awkward in the context of the show. Elsewhere in the show there is playful work, but it is a form of playfulness that stems from the objects’ making; this contrasts with the outwardly bright and fluffy pieces in the fourth room which are playful in their blue-sky representations, but not in their physical making.
The installation of Black’s work in the south east wing of IMMA is peculiar. The work installed in each room appears to function sequentially (as well as in reverse order due to the single entrance/exit), yet the viewer is required to step past the hallway work in order to access it. The coherence of the room’s installations are undermined by the ill-fitted nature of Prospects in the parallel corridor. As Black’s first solo show in Ireland, it’s worth seeing, but her experimental site-specific practice relies on well-suited surrounds, and the space provided in IMMA’s south east wing is not the most ideal space for this kind of work.
Words: Aidan Wall
