Closed Enough, an exhibition at Vane Gallery, Gateshead, embraces the restrictions of bringing artworks from one island to another. Convened by Joe Keys and Una Björg Magnúsdóttir it includes nine artists based in or associated with Iceland who have brought their work to Tyneside in luggage, in one instance by post, with a few additional objects being bought or made in the week the artists spent installing and preparing the show. Attending the preview I note the scale of the works. Most are small, unsurprising given their constraints.
Brák Jónsdóttir explains to me how her sculpture ‘Reel’, (2023) placed on the floor in the centre of the gallery, was made in a way that its metal and stuffed Spandex components could be broken down to fit in a Fjallraven backpack. At our feet, standing at 35x35x25cm it has the presence of a small creature. Upon closer inspection, the long orange Spandex tube wound round the sculpture’s metal core and flanked at either end with circular plates looks like a functional garden hose, and yet also like innards. The stand’s decorative elements read as digitally rendered liquid shapes made solid.
Logi Leó Gunnarsson’s ‘Untitled ‘without meaning’, (2023) on the wall behind ‘Reel’, could easily fit into a backpack’s laptop section. The work is a non-inscribed sampler of small engraved plaques, the kind that a key cutting and sign engraving shop would have on display bearing example texts. The plates here show the serious collection – black, copper, brass, white and silver on a grey background – contrasting with the fun, colourful palette of its partner work on the opposite wall. The blankness of the plates undercuts the flourishes at their edges. The result is everyday ‘found’ minimalism, or corner-store colour field.
I enjoy the word play of Joe Keys’ ‘Stations of the Cross’, (2022), two separately displayed series each made up of seven 10x30cm maple framed laser prints bearing variations of a phrase. My dyslexic brain which constantly repeats and turns over phrases to find their meanings relates, and I appreciate the slowed pace of reading that the works’ spacing invites. ‘Sign on the cross’ becomes ‘A signed cross’ becomes ‘Sign with a cross’ becomes ‘A sign with a cross’… I wonder if this interest in word play reflects the daily acts of translation required of a person who knows and works in multiple languages, as most of the artists in this show do.
Other works extend beyond luggage proportions, like Martha Lyons Haywood’s ‘A truth about honesty’, (2023) a brass-coloured chain which hangs ceiling to floor and holds several papery white petals in delicate tension at its base, each connected to the next with a single chain link. This balance, and simple demarcation of the gallery’s height are satisfying. Close by are two other works by Haywood. On the wall at eye height is a dark green (roughly) A3 print (‘The imagination is final: we’ll find out when we get there shall we’ (2023)). Its surface is bisected horizontally by the fold which has made its image, a mirrored impression of a fern frond. Below and to the right, around knee height, are two circles of glass held in place by brass plate holders. Side by side they neatly span the width of a pillar that protrudes from the wall. The glint of the glass catches my eye from various points in the gallery, but I have to squat down near them to see they contain rose petals (‘As forever as it gets’, 2013).
Against the left hand wall of the gallery, another work by Gunnarsson, ‘Untitled’ (2023), consists of a step ladder (bought on Tyneside) rigged with electronics which intermittently emits tick-tick-tick noises. At the opening, with conversation filling the gallery, it takes a while for me to discover the origin of these sounds. Their presence feels familiar, like doors that beep and alarms that chirp in public spaces. Like these, the tick-tick-ticks fall into the background of my consciousness as an unlocatable irritation. The object seems to be silent whenever I get close to confirm it as the source. At one point I wonder if it might be responding to my movements. There is something about the stepladder as an everyday object (particularly for people involved in exhibition making) which makes it an ideal vessel to encapsulate the feeling of glitch this work gives me. My body remembers all the times I have caught one with my foot when moving its cumbersome form and sent it clanging.
Amanda Riffo’s three works ‘Clandestine 1 / 2 and 3’ (2023), specifically embrace the situation of transporting objects which inevitably get knocked around in the process. Her elegantly carved, less than palm-sized charcoal sculptures are placed on small white shelves at different points in the gallery. Next to each is a single A4 document held in place by metal binder rings attached to the wall. The identical documents are each titled ‘GEOMETRICAL REGISTRATION FORM’ and with a manner similar to a goods registration form ask the sculptures to articulate themselves as geometric entities. The sculptures have completed the forms with flecks and scuffs made in transit. The dry humour of this interaction, its combined formality and absurdity reminds me of the dimensional existentialism of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884 novella ‘Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions’. Below each display is a granite patterned vinyl floor tile. I feel frustrated by these, initially because they seem to form barriers to me looking closer but on reflection, I realise, it’s because the speed at which they reveal themselves as flat substitute stone feels too quick compared to the charcoal sculptures and their completed paperwork.
Collectively the works reveal a pulled-in scale of attention which goes beyond a response to the practical considerations of travel. Like in Ingibjörg Sigurjónsdóttir’s ‘Speechless’, (2023) which consists of three jagged-edged plaster sculptures. In the catalogue, documented in grayscale, their black and white details read as monumental, like cliffs. Here in the gallery on their hollow, hip-height, unpainted MDF plinth they appear modest. Their subtle presence points elsewhere, to the intricately patterned ceiling panel above and the high windows behind, which reveal a slice of the contrasting architectures of Gateshead’s approach to the Tyne Bridge. On the wall behind and to the left is another series by Sigurjónsdóttir. Four A4 sheets of paper each bearing a smaller than palm size form made from what appears to be intricately rendered pencil marks. They are actually made by single blows of large graphite sticks.
In front is a handmade A4 sized artist book placed on a simple plywood reading stand. The marks on the back page of Eygló Harðardóttir’s ‘Dream 1’, (2023) which I turn to first when navigating, show smears of sunset coloured pigments which have been dragged across the thick woven paper revealing its lined surface. There are deep magenta finger-width marks and thin felt tip pen squiggles in a similar shade. The page has been added to, its surface widened I imagine to take what was a separate drawing to the correct width to become the book’s cover. The sunset ombré ends in a stony colour on this left-hand appendage. The addition of white in this shade creates an opacity that allows it to sit on the surface, whilst elsewhere it obliterates some of the pen marks. This sense of the artist responding to what has been created incidentally continues throughout the book. Idiosyncratic systems emerge. As with the reading stand, the book is made with an economy of means and with a sensitivity to the ways an artwork can reveal itself to or impose itself on a viewer. I take pleasure in its moments of physical grubbiness and agree with Joe Keys who, in his exhibition tour, says about Eygló Harðardóttir’s book and painting ‘I just think they are gorgeous. I think sometimes that’s ok.’
The sense I get from many of the works, of being drawn in by something potentially easy to overlook continues when I come to Una Björg Magnúsdóttir’s ‘Substituting time’, (2023) a champagne-coloured velvet cushion with two inset buttons slumped satisfyingly against the wall below the window. On the seat section are three sets of faint, venn-diagrammed double ring marks, like the kind made by placing a hot drink on a wooden table. In the centre of one is an enamel heart-shaped decorative pin. It feels coded and cute and specific, like a secret mark about a teenage crush made in a homework diary.
Halla Einarsdóttir performs at the opening. Her video ‘Winileodas (song for a ‘friend’)’ (2023) is paused at a still featuring the luminous hands and dial of a clock. Brown bucket chairs are placed in a circle. Gradually the seats are filled and Einarsdóttir enters, placing herself on the floor in the centre. She has on green neon knee-high socks. She leans back, steadying herself slightly with her hands in a v-sit core balance, one leg at a time stretching out as she turns herself clock-like around the circle, holding the gaze of the seated audience as she speaks: ‘Repetition, not the kind that stirs rhythm, but the kind that overlaps…’ The performance is intense. Its direct address of the audience is unwavering. I don’t catch all the references. Hagiography? The names of a saint or saints? But the turning over and overlaps of words are persuasive. Meaning is made across the reiterations: ‘Words that when spoken, / move themselves closer to earth cause intrigue. / Intrigue facilitates coincidence and / coincidence might feel like a sign’. Einarsdottir’s delivery feels on the scale of theatre.
At a talk Keys gives at the gallery I discover the subject of Einarsdóttir’s longform poem is Æthelthryth, or Saint Audrey, one of the most written about saints in mediaeval literature who following her death from a throat tumour became the patron saint of throat conditions. The word tawdry, as Einarsdóttir traces through the performance, comes from St Audrey, who believed her tumour to be the result of her having worn lace necklaces in her youth. The script reveals connections between the saint and the ‘Ghost Girls’ – factory workers given deadly, jaw-eroding radium poisoning as a result of painting glow in the dark clock faces. The video writes the story again. This time combining Einarsdóttir’s reading with a haunting digitally-synthesised soundtrack as a character navigates a video game, sometimes pacing around in the prison of a giant lace choker.
Discovering this rich context makes me wonder which other layers of meaning I am missing. I also learn from Keys’ talk that the ring marks in Magnúsdóttir’s ‘Substituting time’ relate to forms commonly used in fifteenth and sixteenth century Icelandic tapestries. I don’t feel this changes the cushion’s draw, but I do feel excited in other works when I feel I understand a reference. Like with Keys’ ‘Directions for Crying’, (2023) a lace edged handkerchief with the compass points North to West embroidered at its corners, hung from ‘N’. The play on words is done here with deliberately sentimental, almost kitsch material choices. Its combination of the conceptual premise of instructions (rational) with the experience of crying (emotional) makes me think of Bas Jan Ader’s ‘I’m too Sad to Tell You’ (1971), and the hold Jan Ader had on my peers and me when I was at art school in the late 2000s when we learned the term ‘romantic conceptualism’.
When I share this observation with Keys at his talk I learn it is ‘poetic conceptualism’ which specifically flourishes in Iceland drawing on the culture’s literary heritage. Like other art gathered by this term, many of the works in Closed Enough share an approach to intervening minimally on materials and the gallery space, often with unexpected or low value art materials. Their embrace of improvisation and incident in these choices goes beyond sensibility to a shared ethic of economy. The kind which might be drawn to working within baggage weight restrictions – a big, noisy show could have been brought across in nine suitcases. Such an ethics of relations could become flattened within a singular dry aesthetic. The works in this room resist this closure by their riffing, quirking of expectations and by, sometimes willfully, withholding.
Kate Liston is an artist and writer based in Gateshead.
Closed Enough, Vane Gallery, Gateshead ran from 30 November – 16 December 2023.
This exploration is supported by Arts Council England.
Published 22.03.2024 by Lesley Guy in Explorations
2,136 words
