The Union Gallery's new exhibition – 'The Animals are Coming' – is an ecclectic assembly of works, unified chiefly by quality and the taste of gallery owners Bob Dawkins and Alison Auldjo. There are indeed animals in many of the offerings, but animals treated or alluded to in so many different ways that they do not coalesce around any particular theme.
This is not a criticism – the variety and surprising originality of the exhibition's constituents are delightful; even when some paintings have shown here before, their appearance in new places amid new neighbours makes renewing their acquaintance rather like meeting them for the first time. What follow are this reviewer's favourites – others will have their own.
Jean Hall's vivid geishas – especially 'Solitude with Irises' – are rendered with exquisite control of form and lavish colour. They could hardly be more different to the adjacently displayed works by Cathy Campbell: deceptively simple, much looser still lives painted in subtle combinations of red and blue and olive green (see 'Blue Flower Bowl' above). Olivia Irvine returns with more domestic mysteries featuring moments in the lives or imaginations of children. 'Peter Never Lived Here' is the title of one work picturing the bedroom she shared with her sister as a girl. An open cupboard door invites questions, and depicts the home the two girls once hoped to provide for a pet rabbit.
[img_assist|nid=1344|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=200|height=182]Drummond Mayo's 'The Goldfish' is a large and beautiful blending of lilacs and golds in which the real, figurative world appears to have turned liquid. By contrast, Suzanne Kemplay's 'Green Still Life' (right) is almost too real for comfort. There is a mesmerising, slightly creepy feel to the accuracy with which it is rendered, and to the very slight, disconcerting ways in which it diverges from absolute literalism: the bird is too static, the glass vase minutely asymmetrical, the brushes could never quite lie at that angle on the surface. I found it hard to drag my eyes from this motionless but unsettling composition.
And then there is 'The Hunt', an installation by Hannah Haworth (see pdf below) who graduated earlier this year from Edinburgh College of Art specialising in sculpture. Five, beautifully knitted huskies pull an empty wooden sledge. Half-pullovers, half-dogs, they allude to an Innuit story about a man tracking a missing woman into the vast interior. As he continued, one of her footprints became wolf while the other remained human. Haworth's work (below) depicts a moment of metamorphosis, of strange becoming or return. Who will buy it, who will have room for it I don't know, but it is a stunning piece and for Auldjo and Dawkins was the outstanding exhibit in this year's graduation show.
Whatever your taste, there's something here to please. 'The Animals are Coming' runs at 45 Broughton Street until 12 January 2011. AM
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