Art reviews: We Are Here, Botanics, Edinburgh | Walter Price & Hayley Tompkins, Modern Institute, Glasgow

Walter Price: Pearl Lines, Modern Institute, Glasgow ***

Hayley Tompkins: After A Long Sleep, It Woke Up, Modern Institute, Glasgow ***

The range of ways artists approach ecological issues in their creative practice is something we’re going to see a lot more of as Inverleith House continues its transformation into Climate House. Meanwhile, the burgeoning creative programme at the Botanic Gardens continues with this film showcase from the British Council and Lux, now showing in the exhibition space at the John Hope Gateway.

One of several themed showcases designed for international touring, it has already travelled to a number of countries in advance of this, its UK premiere. Curator Tendai John Mutambu brings together four different films in an hour-long programme which demonstrate a range of approaches to a subject which is as different as their approaches to film-making itself.

Louis Henderson’s All That Is Solid is perhaps the most polemic of the four. Henderson seeks to puncture the myth that contemporary technology is ephemeral, floating harmlessly in the ether. The Cloud, in fact, exists in miles of cabling and acres of motherboards in “data centres” around the world, and the technology we use every day has a clear environmental cost, both in its manufacture and in disposing of it when it become obsolete.

Building a film which layers multiple computer “windows” on the screen, he collages footage from Agbogbloshie in Ghana, a kind of mass electronics graveyard, voiceovers from Apple’s launch of iCloud, and images from colonial history and Ghana’s illegal gold-mining. The point is all too clear: technology has a cost, and no less so when we export the problem to another, poorer continent.

Ben Rivers’ film Urth uses a science-fiction narrative to explore themes of utopia and dystopia. Filmed in Biosphere 2 in Arizona, the vast complex of greenhouses built for research into closed environmental systems, it charts the log of the last remaining team member of one fictional experiment, a graduate intern, who has had to resort to eating the bodies of her dead colleagues.

Mark von Schlegell’s text feels overburdened with big ideas, even without the cannibalism: while monitoring decreasing oxygen levels, the protagonist muses on whether earth itself is a closed system, whether she is the observer or the observed, and whether climate destruction beyond the biosphere means she is humanity’s last survivor. But the film is, nonetheless, highly atmospheric, with real moments of beauty in its language.

Uriel Orlow’s Muthi is an exploration of South African traditional medicine, from the gathering and selling of plants to the large-scale processing of “herbal” products. Shooting as a fly-on-the-wall without commentary, he presents some of the complexities of a traditional medical system co-existing in the modern world.

Like Orlow’s film, Charlotte Prodger’s LHB, made in 2017 on a residency at Berwick Visual Arts, isn’t directly environmental. Prodger, who won the Turner Prize in 2018 and represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale the following year, works impressionistically, bringing together her spoken narrative of thoughts and memories with images which connect associatively: here, largely Torness Nuclear Power Station, filmed from a series of trains, and footage of women squatting to urinate in a range of rural locations.

Her fascination with following the progress online of hikers on Pacific Crest Trail, the gruelling 2,600 mile route on the West Coast of North America, led her to the question: “Where the f*** are all the queers?” The words and images come together to ask questions about how access to wilderness spaces might be affected by gender or sexual orientation, and how such territory might be claimed or reclaimed.

Meanwhile, Glasgow’s Modern Institute is hosting two contemporary painters who are both engaged in exploring what it means to paint in the 21st century (the shows are closed to the public at the moment due to covid-19 tier 4 restrictions, but are available to view online).

New York-based Walter Price has had the interior of the Aird’s Lane space painted black, the better to showcase the bright colours of his paintings. Price has a style which sits between abstraction and figuration, making work sitting somewhere on the spectrum between cartooning and abstract expressionism.

A group of drawings in the Aird’s Lane Brick Space show us where he starts from. They are largely figurative – people, animals, cartoon characters, in marker pen and coloured pencils. As the ideas shift into paint, they become stranger, mainly because of the bold addition of colours. Each painting tends to have its colour field: Florida man is predominantly orange, whereas Blew (get it?) is painted entirely in shades of blue. There is a tendency to paint flat fields of individual colour, rather than to mix colours on a palette.

There is no doubt that these pictures have some relationship to experience, narrative, popular culture: objects and images reccur, from rowing boats to armchairs. But Price plays with perspective, with titles, with notions of indoors and outdoors. He draws on a range of sources, from surrealism to the Cartoon Network, and siphons them all through a paintbox of colours, but doesn’t leave us many clues about what we are to make of them.

In the Osborne Street space, Hayley Tompkins steps away from any such references. She is working on a larger scale than I’ve previously seen, and with a fierce energy. These six paintings are pure abstracts in bold fluorescent colours which feel like a record of a dynamic experimental process in which spontaneity tussles with painterly control, and often wins.

As in Price’s work, each painting seems to operate within its own field of colours – Purple Passage, Yellow Politic, Pinkest Mesh War – with the complements and contrasts worked out on the painting’s surface. Susan Sontag’s comment that “Art is not only about something; it is something” feels relevant. They seem to record a struggle not only with control versus spontaneity but with the notion of the painting as a finished, resolved object. The dynamic interaction of artist, paint and surface feels very much as though it is still going on.

*We Are Here: Future Ecologies, until 28 February, visitors must book a free timeslot for entry to the Botanic Gardens on www.rbge.org.uk; Walter Price and Hayley Tompkins until 16 January, currently online at www.themoderninstitute.com

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