Damian Ortega: States of Time
Fruitmarket Gallery
Edinburgh
until 23rd October
www.fruitmarket.co.uk
MEXICAN artist Damian Ortega is currently into clay. You can see it, fashioned, moulded, formed, pinched, in this idiosyncratic, labour-intensive show at the Fruitmarket. The sculptor, a former political cartoonist who made his international name when he disassembled a VW Beetle and hung the disparate parts like a mobile from the ceiling of the Mexican pavilion at the Venice Biennale, plays with his material, experimenting, persisting, until he gets a result.
The idiosyncratic Broken Sac is a lumpen, cyst-like piece of hollow clay with an entry hole – or exit – surrounded by curls of lumpen clay excavated from the interior by the sculptor using two super-sized clay-working tools displayed on a nearby wall. Nearby, a series of clay brick sculptures show what looks to be the creation of a river valley by erosion. Small lumps of clay, pinched on to string hanging from the air look like the leftovers of ceramic creation, a miniature clay asteroid belt suspended in the air.
Upstairs, more asteroids, more clay. Ortega’s Abrasive Objects, a series of 143 clay reproductions of human tools from all points of our history, are displayed under glass like museum exhibits, ghostly white, shadows of the originals, recreating by hand objects which are designed for creating by hand. Further on, a series of glazed Icebergs, although you’d be hard pushed to call them that without prior knowledge, their organic construction, covered in meltwater glaze, betraying the hand of a human creator in the attempt to reproduce the manner in which something has been created by nature. On then, to the Lava Waves, unglazed clay waves that range from Hokusai-esque to Portobello-lite. “Some work, some don’t,” the gallery assistant tells me Ortega told her. “But he keeps them in anyway.” It is the process and the attempt which counts – the miss-hits tell us as much as the hits.
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