Press

Pallas was a giant. Pallas Athena, well she was another kettle of fish altogether. The owl-eyed goddess of wisdom slew the giant in battle, wore his skin as a shield and somehow picked up his name along the way. As well as brains, Pallas was the goddess of war, art and crafts. She was a great weaver, but a terrifying adversary on the battlefield.

Botticelli portrayed Pallas in 1482 as exquisite, ethereal, but tough as hell. She has a centaur by the hair. Wisdom over-coming instinct. It was the last great classical subject he painted before religious fundamentalism finally got him in its equally fierce grip.

Some of this seems to be hovering around in the exhibition Pallas at Stirling’s Changing Room gallery where four young artists equally temper their instinct with intelligence. While the work seems slight at times, it is clearly deliberately so. Where it seems to revel in the gesture or expression it is just as quickly reined in or disciplined. Throughout you get a sense of a certain kind of feminine cocktail elegance: well-groomed, tough and with a hint of brittleness.

Pallas brings together Karla Black, Lorna Macintyre, Sophie Macpherson and Sally Osborn. All are Glasgow School of Art graduates. Black studied sculpture, Macintyre, environmental art and both recently were selected for EAST, the prestigious showcase for young artists in Norwich.

Sophie Macpherson, is a member of Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery, best known for her installations reminiscent of theatrical sets.

Osborn recently finished the MFA course at Glasgow and will open a solo show at the Cooper Gallery in Dundee later this month.

Pallas is a theatrical experience from the word go. Entering the Gallery through its shop-front entrance on Stirling’s Crawford Arcade you catch sight of Karla Black’s enigmatic little assembly, Perfect You, in the window. It is a series of odd little objects wrapped in tinfoil with nails for legs, a fold of clear paper filled with pale blue paint, a scoop of white plaster and a black painted paper rectangle.

The effect is unsettling. The display might be for jewellery or china, but the stuff is just so much formless gloop and guck. You try and assemble it into some kind of portrait, a blue eye, the white of bone, but then it just slips back into being odd inexplicable lumps. This effect is heightened in Black’s main installation where odd scoops of stuff in baby colours of pink and blue and yellow, sit on plinths; plaster, modeling paste made from flour and water, dyed petroleum jelly.

At the head of the stairs hangs an elegant curtain. It is sheet upon sheet of tissue paper carefully joined together and raked with yellow paint so that the tissue shrivels and ripples. This is Sally Osborn’s Fold.

Osborn has made drawings and paintings and paper cut outs for some years now, but her recent work takes painting close to sculpture. She shows a loosely-painted portrait of a female head painted on a four-ply tissue and gently pulled apart to produce both an enticing sculptural effect and an emotional lurch. A cut –glass bowl holds shrads of patterned glass soaked in paint: each fragment like a shard of classical sculpture. Where the tissue paper absorbs pigment, the glass resists.

Lorna Macintyre has produced a kind of gallery within the gallery, revealing her methods and her influences. It’s a loose wooden construction, like an armature supporting a number of images and objects: a tiny constructivist tower made from matchsticks, a seventies dreamy poster by Sarah `moon, high up is a half-obliterated picture of a ceiling fresco, perhaps, though I couldn’t quite see it properly, the Sistine Chapel.

Hanging on the wall, is the elegant cover of the historic French sewing magazine Mon Ouvrage. The words have also been painted in blue on a black piece of wood but can only be read in an adjacent mirror. Mon Ouvrage: my work. It’s a display and a confession, with an echo of Our Misfortune, the beautiful exhibition a few years back by Glasgow’s Kathy Wilkes.

Robust and sure of their place are a new series of coloured pencil drawings by Sophie Macpherson. A series of oddly flattened tableaux, drawing on the history of cabaret and dance. Frieze-like figures stroll and dance their way across the drawings in brightly coloured costumes, their bodies truncated, their heads lopped off by brutal framing. Two dancers form interlocking circles with their arms, a figure in a bright striped shift stands before a graphic backdrop of stark black trees.

There are little steps and stands and platforms, in the pictures and the figures all seem to be strolling into or out of spotlights.

Looking at them, you find yourself puzzling out their odd geometry, deciphering the shapes. You also find yourself transported: imagining yourself as a posh and carefree lady with name such as Isadora who is pretending to be a Greek goddess or, indeed, a Botticelli painting.