Julie Roberts: Child Natura Sensus: Mairi Gillies When Thomas Barnardo set out to rescue neglected children from the streets of London, he brought a photographer with him. A picture was taken of every dirty, ragged child he picked up, and later paired with an “after” shot of the shiny, clean, transformed child taken into care. Around 55,000 of these photographs were taken between 1874 and 1905, despite a lawsuit which accused Barnardo of contriving certain shots in a studio setting to exaggerate the tattered state of his waifs and strays. Artist Julie Roberts spent time in children’s homes when she was younger, but if her new work is autobiographical, it has been heading in this direction for the past two decades. The painter began her career with images of medical apparatus, menacing symbols of institutional power. This was followed by dead bodies and dolls, all there to be stared at, manipulated, dissected, owned. Then, living, breathing women appeared, stuck in a predictable pattern of laundry and potato-peeling. Now it’s the children’s turn. A prolific Roberts has filled the Talbot Rice with new paintings and drawings of girls and boys, displaced from their homes and families in the 1940s. Many are evacuees and refugees. Some are surprisingly cheerful, such as those posing nicely, hair combed, in the provocatively-named Feral Child series. You wonder whether these can be “before” or “after” shots, ala Dr Barnardo, perhaps recalling the charity’s provocative recent claim that 45% of British people regard children as “feral”. Roberts’s distinctive style, a constant push and pull between decoration and repulsion, adds to the mixed message here. In most of her new works Roberts creates a physical or psychological void where mummy or daddy should be. Three boys sit silently around a dinner table in Meat And Two Veg, a gaping hole where the viewer might sit, and in Human Material, a young boy washes his own back in the bath. These children are alone in a crowd, internalising their feelings and desires as they live and work under constant surveillance, and on their best behaviour. But just when you think you’re getting her point, Roberts, as usual, complicates it. Staying Together is a double portrait of a brother and sister holding hands, cute and, on the surface at least, untroubled. The Children’s Army series depicts, on the whole, happy-go-lucky children caught up in the war effort. The exhibition finishes on an optimistic note. Edna (British Evacuee) is a portrait, like many others in the show, of a girl in standard-issue wartime clothes and haircut. But her gaze is commanding; she will control her own destiny. As if to prove that bleached, tiled walls will never extinguish this girl’s personality, hand-painted flowers rampage across the gallery wall behind her. At hidden New Town gallery-cum-pilates studio Atticsalt, flowers traverse the wall too, but it’s more of a tightly-scored ballet than a rampage. For Natura Sensus, Edinburgh artist Mairi Gillies has preserved 45 plants and flowers and arranged them in order of colour. This gentle spectrum is contained neatly in 45 hinged wooden boxes, their lids echoing their contents, in delicate pencil and bold colour fields. Each box is like a holy reliquary, its treasure gilded and precious, suspended for all time between life and death. If the commodified approach makes you uneasy, it should. This is Gillies’s point: for her, horticulture lays too much emphasis on appropriation and display. It’s a difficult tightrope to walk; the artist may pull off a masterful critique of horticultural consumerism, but at the same time she offers 45 beautiful little boxes for sale at a reasonable price. Somewhere over the colour spectrum there must be a little pot of gold that even anti-consumerists must earn. |