Karla Black

Preview - 9 January

For her second solo exhibition at the gallery, Glasgow based artist Karla Black will spend six days working on-site to produce a group of sculptures made from materials such as body moisturising creams, chalk dust, cotton wool, sellotape, vaseline, paint and egg shells.

Black describes her works as, “almost painting, performance or installation while actually, and quite definitely, being sculpture”. These sculptures and their titles, form a struggle between material experience and language, where the former wins first priority. They are rooted in Kleinian psychoanalysis: direct, behavioural connections to the physical world that hold a tangible knowledge impossible to equal in words but still partially, while certainly inadequately, translatable. Words are important here when used in their rightful, secondary place, where the conscious mind enters the work, after the unconscious has already created the bulk of its physicality.

There is a combination of different categories of materials that have often been perceived as male and female. The traditional art-making material sit alongside and merge with more domestic, bodily or personal materials, such as make-up, toiletries, and cleaning products.

In addition the work is caught between thoughtless gesture and an obsessive attempt at beauty. Karla Black describes her sculptures as being both compromises and protests at the same time. It is a frustration that what the work wants to be is actually impossible in reality. There is a wish for a totally natural occurrence, or a person’s physical encounter with nature; for the work to seem to have made itself and then hover unsupported in the ether: pure raw material, colour and sensation.

A paragraph taken from ‘The Waves’ by Virginia Wolf, in which the thoughts of the character Bernard are laid out, says something about the position from which these sculptures are made:

‘How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of notepaper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably. Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining, then enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great clouds always changing , and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch.’

Born in 1972, Karla Black’s recent exhibitions include solos at West London Projects, London; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and group exhibitions Wollust-the presence of absence, Columbus Art Foundation, Leipzig; Strange Solution, Art Now, Tate Britain, London (all 2008). Forthcoming projects include solo exhibitions at Migros Museum, Zurich; Modern Art Oxford and Inverleith House, Edinburgh and group shows at Kunstverein Freiburg and Kunsthalle Andratz (all 2009).

Karla Black