Digital Perceptions
Until February 18; Collins Gallery, Glasgow

For some time now I’ve been lusting after the custom-made window blinds in my local department store. You choose your image – whether it be Andy Warhol’s soup tins or a blown-up photo of a bouncing drop of water – and they print it for you on a blind of your choice. For a bit extra, they’ll even print out your own digital creation.

That’s thanks to new technology, which allows the textile industry to print one-off images, with up to 32 million colours, on wide expanses of material. Textile design used to be a case of working within a restricted range of colours, in a small repeat pattern, on a mass-produced scale. But digital inkjet printing has changed all that, and while the rest of the art world embraces mass production and industrial techniques, artists working with textiles can finally afford to head in the opposite direction.

It’s changes like these that Collins Gallery is exploring in Digital Perceptions. Taking the work of seven textile artists from both sides of the Atlantic, the exhibition asks how their art has been changed by new technology. At first glance the show looks unexpectedly similar to any other art show you might walk into – complete with sculptures, wall-hung pictures, installations and video art. But look closer, and everything is made from cloth.

If you are expecting a major leap from conventional ways of thinking about textiles, you will, on the whole, be disappointed. While there are a few stunning flashes of innovation, the response to digital opportunities is generally uninspired: instead of painting, printing or weaving the old-fashioned way, the artists have made their images in Photoshop software and fed the result into a printer or computerised loom.

Somebody needs to tell these artists that making pictures in Photoshop and printing them out no longer counts as cutting edge. There are, however, some honourable exceptions. JR Campbell, who works at Glasgow School of Art, produces quite dazzling things which hover somewhere between sculpture, apparel, and pictures.

These stretchy constructions, with legs and sleeves protruding in unexpected places, bear beautifully constructed images which are engineered to flow, uninterrupted, across structural seamlines. The 3D shape and the 2D image enjoy a two-way relationship made possible by digital design procedures.

Although the textile is separated from the digital innovation in Joan Truckenbrod’s work, she is very close to bringing them together at the sharpest edge of the cutting edge. Lightening In My Blood combines two video projections on a shimmering, silken cocoon, suspended in a small room. A hand-held trip through an old folks’ home is interwoven with salmon swimming upstream, in a Neil Gunn-like metaphor for the journey through life.

Both videos intersect on the translucent fabric, dancing on the wall behind it. Chicago-based Truckenbrod embarked on this project hoping to embed the video in the very fibre of the material, and she intends to do so in the future. This could truly transform the shape of textile art – and video art – like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 22.01.06