Elizabeth Ogilvie: Bodies of Water
Until February 12; Dundee Contemporary Arts

Fife-based artist Elizabeth Ogilvie has moved closer and closer to the fundamentals of water over the course of her career. It used to be her subject, drawn in line and paint on big metal sheets, but these days the water is her canvas and her paint.

For at least six years now, Ogilvie has been bringing water into galleries and hangars, lighting its rippling surface so that its reflections caress the walls. Sometimes poetry has been suspended above it, sometimes the water has been coloured.

At Dundee Contemporary Arts, Ogilvie continues her quest to distil the essence of water, in a show which slows you down like a wander through a Japanese garden. A large black pool plays mirror to a captivating video, in which water and steam meander, trickle, swirl and eddy. Nearby, another pool casts its hypnotic reflections on the walls, agitated by showers and torrents from pipes above.

Think of Monet’s vast walls full of waterlilies, often seen as the forerunner to Mark Rothko’s allover, immersive canvases. Ogilvie’s almost colourless installation creates the same enveloping experience, but this time it’s moving. If this is abstract expressionism in flux, the artist is not so much Ogilvie as the water itself, revealing its moods in an entrancing visual dance.

Circles, waves and interference patterns ride the surface as if computer generated, the walls reflecting the rhythms back down onto the water, circle upon ripple. This is the original art of the moving image, with not a whirring reel or tape in sight. A few theatre lights and a pool of water, judiciously placed, can invoke this intricate interplay between reflection, deflection, real and mirrored.

Lying at the heart of it all is a question of time. Concentric circles radiate outwards to meet incoming waves. Their image travels at the speed of light to the wall, and bounces back again to overlap the widening circles and waves. Time has passed and the minor miracle of this pattern will never exist again; perhaps you were its only witness.

It’s philosophical meanderings such as these which float out of the pure aesthetic pleasure of watching water move. The indistinct geopolitical questions alluded to in the show’s literature just don’t penetrate, despite the plumbed-in micro-climate. Mechanically predictable showers of water are an irritation, compared with the magic in the back room, of taking a small stick from its slot, and painting your own fleeting masterpiece in the water at your feet.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 15.01.06