Christine Borland & Brody Condon: Circles Of Focus
Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow
www.cca-glasgow.com
0141 352 4911
Until May 17
By pure coincidence, there is a circular theme doing the rounds this week in art land. Across the country from Dundee, at Glasgow's CCA, Christine Borland and Brody Condon's Circles Of Focus project sets up its stall from today. Borland, a Glasgow School of Art-trained Turner Prize nominee in 1997, has long been immersed in research processes and medical institutions. Since 2011, she has collaborated with Brody Condon on Circles Of Focus, which sets out to examine human body donation as a tool for artistic research and practice.
It may sound grisly, but the pair have a reputation for bringing rigour and beauty to the most unlikely subject matter. In this interactive exhibition, pit-fired ceramic sculptures, performance documentation and legal paperwork installed in the gallery will function as a proposal to potential body donors whom the artists have worked with over the past two years.
Borland and Condon have worked with an Orkney-based potter and archaeologist to create sculptural works from large amounts of earth shipped from the islands. This raw material has been made into workable clay through a laborious process involving the addition of fat, sand and animal hair, then pit-fired in mounds as they would have been in Neolithic times. The pieces mesh the historical and contemporary relationships with materials that are encountered in funerary as well as everyday rituals.
Condon explains: "The work with clay began after spending time with a local experimental archaeologist in Orkney focused on the reconstruction of Neolithic pots, and later with similar jar coffin experts in Korea. We were intrigued that, over many thousands of years, similar clay shapes and forms evolved across the globe. The contemporary recreation process of these vessels, based on excavated fragments, combined with current digital construction methods, has determined the development of our sculptures."
A series of events surrounding the exhibition and details of performances will be announced in April. See website for details.
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