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Forgetting helps us live in a depleted world
Things die twice. First, when they are gone, and a second time when we forget them. The second forgetting is more painful because the past never really leaves. It remains in ghost form: dormant not dead, waiting to erupt in dreams, poetry or paint. We can try to forget, dropping things into the oublier, a dungeon of memory. Lost things go in: felled woods and disappeared paths, letters, horses, and our own embryo-lives - and they are hard to retrieve. They are there because forgetting helps us live in a depleted world, but it is stronger to remember. It builds a better future. This is one of the roles of artists: to remember and help us navigate.
Kilmorack’s next exhibitions show work by two of the great rememberers - Ade Adesina and Robert McAulay. Adesina remembers personal things: the Baobag trees and de-wilding of his childhood in Nigeria. He also remembers the universal and threatened. He lino-cuts Atlantean worlds: submerged but dry. Layers of memory meet here like a giant time-train station terminus in a Wonderland of memory. Not letting these things die and showing us what is important is the power of Adesina’s work.
Robert McAulay’s colourful and textured paintings are about memory to. For the twenty years I have exhibited McAulay’s work in Kilmorack, he has created one small body of related works, and then moved on to the next. They are like a set of novellas, illustrating one dream-recollection before moving on to another. In these works, a remembered thing from McAulay’s past hides in undergrowth, the mist or trees. It might be an abandoned cooker or a car which was once important to its owner; or it could be a ghostly building or the estate of McAulay’s childhood. These are memories that can be pushed under the surface but accepting them is better. It is a way to understand ourselves.
Images that linger with an artist, and rise to the surface, are often painted. James Newton Adams paints the she-shed, a Couple on the Beach or Meeting the Parents. These are mini-stories around a remembered image. ‘This is what I’ve seen,’ they say. ‘This is the world and don’t let it fade.’
Sam Cartman’s landscapes are memories distilled down to shape and colour. He remembers the geometry and vibrations of landscape and chooses to forget the surplus and confusing. This is what gives his work power: his ability to decide what to leave in or to keep out. We all do this, but in Sam Cartman’s paintings it is done knowingly and with Euclidean precision.
How far back can we remember? Steve Dilworth’s work takes us into deep time: the memories of the ancient Harris stone he carves, a vile of deep water captured from the bottom of the Minch, wood that has floated across the Atlantic to the Outer Hebrides, or the dried body of a small bird. These all have memories. His work embodies their recalled presences as power objects in the same way our ancestors may have worn a tooth around their necks or a lock of hair. Remembering the past is power. Forgetting it is death.
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ADE ADESINA
New Leaves 13 November - 5 December 2020 Kilmorack Gallery is excited to present new leaves, an exhibition of linocuts and etchings by Ade Adesina. These are incredible works, a global song for the early twenty-first century. -
ROBERT MCAULAY
Revisiting the Estate 13 November - 5 December 2020 Revisiting the Estate is an exhibition of new work by Scottish artist Robert McAulay. In this exhibition McAulay explores his youth growing up in Glasgow. He is a master of the poetic use of paint, colour and composition. This exhibition is in Kilmorack Gallery November 2020. -
Sam Cartman
Sam Cartman is a Scottish landscape artist known for his bold paintings of wild Scotland, combined with echoes of human habitation and industry. Daring planes of colour, scratched and drawn marks define his carefully honed, dynamic and supremely balanced compositions. In the world of contemporary Scottish painting his work truly stands on its own. -
Steve Dilworth
STEVE DILWORTH's use of found and once living materials has been breaking new ground since the late 1970s. Based on the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides, his work begins with the spark of raw material. Crafted from the inside out, his distinctive work connects with the natural world and the collective unconscious. -
James Newton Adams
James Newton Adams' simplified forms and aerial perspective give a dream-like quality to the work, evocative of childhood memory. There is playfulness and melancholy in equal measure in James Newton Adams's work, child-like simplicity combined with adult consciousness in his fluid and adept handling of materials.
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The Art of Remembering
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