Sorcha Dallas

Thresholds, monuments and associated graveyard symbols such as skeletons and crosses appear in the recent pencil drawings, wall paintings and sculptures of Fiona Jardine. There is a lucid and direct quality to her two dimensional works, in which cleanly outlined skeletons pose on white walls, or meticulous pencil marks inscribe the shape of plant forms growing over sepulchral crosses and arches. In contrast, the densely worked surfaces of her faux monumental sculptures have an intentional corporeality. Jardine makes minimal forms like a cylinder, a cube or a door lumpen, encasing them in amorphous drooling strands, 70’s style gothic tendrils or decorative panels of pleats and patterns. These pieces are often fashioned from physically light materials such as papier mache and expanded polystyrene and partially acquire their air of weightiness through their outer coating of brown or black gloss paint. The unctuous shine of these sculptures reinforces the spareness of her drawn work, equivalent to a bracelet of bright hair encircling a skeletal wrist.*

*Sarah Lowndes

Jardine’s latent interest in mediaeval aesthetics connects the high modernism of T. S. Eliot with the imagery of the green man; the litanies of Francis Rabelais with the grotesques of Brett Easton Ellis. In ‘Moltke’s Eye’, her sculptural and photographic propositions link Francis Bacon’s interiors and the droll designs of Weiner Werkstatte artist Dagobert Peche to short stories by David Foster Wallace and the absurdist theatre of Wiltod Gombrowicz. The curtained and papered rooms which result are multivalent - part foyer, part altar – and collapse historical contingency into liminal space. Jardine gained a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee in 1998 and a MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2003. Recent exhibitions include ‘Sweeney’ (solo) at Intermedia Gallery, Glasgow in 2005 and the group exhibitions ‘April is the Cruellest Month’, Transmission, Glasgow and ‘Madame la Baronne’ at Centre d’art Mira Phalaina / Maison Poulaire, Montreuil, France, both 2006. Jardine has just completed a residency at The Pumphouse Gallery, London. She lives and works in Glasgow.

UNTIL THE 19TH MAY

Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm or by appointment