Material Intelligence
A response to the exhibition by ALISON McTAGGART
Alison McTaggart is a research scientist
It always excites me going into Kettle's yard and especially late on this Friday afternoon when I have the place pretty much to myself. I love the space of the gallery and yet its intimacy. The new show today 'Material Intelligence' is, I gather as I go in, something about 'a dialogue with the ordinary stuff of life'.
I don't find it all accessible but overall I find the exhibition striking and humorous. Wade Guyton's Xs, as the first things you see, are the only art works involving paint on canvas, I love these for their simple graphic quality though their intended message is more complex. I laugh out loud at the silver flower of inside-out crisp packets punched with holes, though I can't quite work out who the artist is. I presume it connects to the broken liquefying mirror just around the corner and the scattered artefacts which you almost tread on, a rather playful response to the genteel controlled atmosphere of the House.
The wonderful Calderesque mobile which fills the lower gallery is made from cut up Jacobsen chairs the artist has bought quite cheaply on eBay and this makes me gasp somewhat as I think of my friend who collects these icons of style.
The video pieces and sculpture of wineglasses, plastic bucket, rubber gloves and tennis balls by Matt Calderwood, about testing material strength, are ingenious and amusing but I wonder about what is art? For me it is something that I have an emotional response to and want to look at again and again and somehow these works don't fit those criteria, but then in some ways maybe they do, I am certainly challenged and made to think and the endless diversity of what interests artists and how they express their ideas is just so fascinating.
Moving through the gallery I'm very taken by Karla Black's suspended sculpture of cellophane, sellotape, moisturizing cream, toothpaste, clingfilm, soap, Cif and nail varnish, using these everyday materials to create something much more extraordinary. Are the rather random pieces of red cellophane and blue tape stuck to the wall her pieces too? When I go through into the high gallery I decide they are probably Tony Feher's. This room is amazing. Maybe because it's a bright afternoon the natural light illuminates his water filled bottles and these reflect the small pieces of fluorescent pink tape he has arranged on the walls so that the effect is almost blinding after the relative dimness of the rest of the gallery. Each bottle is suspended on its string in a wonderful rhythm and I am tempted to set them swinging. It certainly is the 'Singing room' and I really don't want to leave.