From The Valley: Emily Beckmann, Emma Hamilton, Bea Drysdale
Until March 25; The Changing Room, Stirling

If flower arrangements, tissue paper sculptures and textiles all sound a bit girlie to you, don’t be taken in. The three women in The Changing Room’s new show are not, artistically speaking, shrinking violets.

You might remember hearing in 2004 about the winner of the Jerwood Photography Prize, who fashioned beautiful bouquets out of meat and offal. Alongside two of those celebrated prints from 2004, Emma Hamilton presents a brand new series of photographs in this show.

Born into a family of butchers, the young artist has a unique approach to animal organs. Slicing, folding and stitching them with care, she combines them with synthetic leaves and stems to create sumptuous posies of flowers. The resulting photographs, rich and austere, resemble finely detailed Dutch flower paintings of the 17th century.

Those paintings of 350 years ago were more than just pretty pictures. They were memento mori, warnings of our mortality. Each fragile petal and tiny insect was a delicate metaphor, a reminder of our transience here on earth. In 2004 Hamilton replaced that metaphor with actual flesh and blood.

Where the Dutch still lifes offer purity and innocence, Hamilton’s embody the sins of the flesh. The lustrous sheen of the blood-red rose invokes a perplexing cocktail of desire and disgust. The burning reds, greens and whites are so sharp against black that they set your teeth on edge. High-minded beauty is confused with raw meat, lust with carnivorism – a writhing basket of emotions worthy of hellfire and brimstone.

Hamilton’s new series takes the raw emotion of her previous photographs and arranges it into theatrical tableaux. A luxurious satin curtain is pulled across a cold stone niche in that combination of rich extravagance and cold poverty which the Catholic church does so well. You just know that behind the curtain lies forbidden fruit.

The second print reveals the object of desire: a spray of meaty flowers lurking behind the curtain. The third image, distinctly Shakespearean, is all about death. A skull sits in the empty niche, a cut-off sprig of dying ivy trailing over the arch. While these prints are flawless in execution, there is something of the raw intensity of Hamilton’s previous work which is lost. Metaphor is heaped on metaphor (admittedly, the Dutch were just as guilty) and alas, poor Yorick, the symbolic skull is surplus to requirements.

The second of the three artists (all of whom live in the Forth Valley) is Emily Beckmann. Her work is spread rather confusingly between this show and a concurrent exhibition, Mysteries Of The Craft, in Falkirk’s Park Gallery. Beckmann has made mysterious artefacts of days gone by, presenting them as if in a museum. The only explanation given in Stirling is a cryptic video. Unfortunately what it explains is in the Falkirk show.

The gallery space in Stirling, formerly the gents’ changing room of a Victorian department store, is a fascinating space. Converted to a quasi-white cube, it hides all sorts of secrets behind plaster walls and closed doors. Despite this great potential for archaeological tomfoolery, Beckmann’s pseudo-museological show manages to look pretty uncomfortable hanging where it is.

American artist Bea Drysdale makes up the trio with her paper sculptures, suspended from the ceilings. Mimicking the construction techniques of industrial sheet metal, Drysdale has created weird and wonderful shapes out of fragile, coloured tissue paper. Two dimensional material is used to mould three dimensional spaces, and it all hangs rather miraculously, like spider’s silk, from the gallery’s ceiling tiles.

For tissue read metal. For flowers read meat. For textiles read archaeological trickery. There’s nothing lily-livered about this show… apart from those liver lilies.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 12.03.06