Katy Dove: New Commissioned Work
Until April 8; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh

Scotland’s reputation for animation is on the rise. With Balloch-born animator Sharon Colman in the running for an Oscar next week, and a healthy number of feature-length animations now in production, Scotland’s pint-sized industry is punching above its weight.

Not for the first time either. We might not have a history of block-busting success, but no-one can question Scotland’s artistic animation credentials: one of animation's most celebrated pioneers, Norman McLaren, was born here.

From Glasgow School of Art in the 1930s to his last film in 1983, McLaren never tired of exploring the connection between sound and the moving image. Like many painters of his time, he sought ways of translating jazz into a visual language, setting abstract shapes, lines and colours bopping and boogie-ing about the big screen. McLaren would often paint directly onto the celluloid, and even onto the film’s sound track, so that the image itself became a synthetic sound.

Conscious of McLaren’s legacy, I have in the past been uneasy about the work of Glasgow-based artist Katy Dove. Her playful forays into the realm of sound and moving doodles seemed nothing more than a crude shadow of those daring experiments of 60 years ago.

Now that three of Dove’s most recent films are screening at the Talbot Rice Gallery, I’ve revised my opinion. In her first Scottish solo show since 2002, Dove has found her own voice.

Originally a psychology graduate, automatic drawing for Dove is about more than just pretty doodles. The German neurologist Heinrich Kluver identified a number of “form constants” in the 1920s, during experiments with mescaline. He listed some basic, universal patterns such as concentric circles which are the instinctive product of our unconscious minds.

Dove doesn’t consciously reproduce Kluver’s constants, but her automatic drawings, put together with absent-minded fragments of sound, convey a meandering state of mind. In her newest film, A Who?, meaningless painted shapes glide past and through each other on the screen. It’s like watching clouds bulge and swell in the sky. Faces, bodies, and undulating landscapes steal past, but in a gentle trance, you can’t think fast enough to fix them in your mind.

This isn’t animation in the purest sense; Dove has only once attempted to draw a film frame by frame. Here, she has composited the constituent parts on a computer, scanning them first from paintings. Where in the past her choreography has been relatively basic, A Who? introduces a new subtlety in the organic movement of the parts.

Dove painted directly onto film in Amanda, resulting in rich, luscious colours evoking those hallucinatory experiments of Kluver. Closer to home, the film shares a psychedelic aesthetic with the light shows put on by Boyle Family for Soft Machine in the late 1960s. The third film, Gondla, with its more cautious, jittery movements, evokes the automatic drawings of Catalan Surrealist Joan Miro, and indeed the overall style of Dove’s work rests comfortably around the mid-20th century mark.

The Talbot Rice is beautifully kitted out to show the three films, and upstairs, the works’ constituent parts are on show: automatic drawings, unassuming paintings and prints. The similarity to Hayley Tompkins’s intuitive watercolours is inescapable. But in Dove’s work, the magic is in the sum of the parts; showing the parts individually just drags that magic back into the realms of the mundane.

Of all the films’ elements, Dove’s greatest forté is sound. As with McLaren, her sound and picture are deeply intertwined. A Who? comes with a wonderful concoction of the artist’s murmurings, breathy flute noises, and trickling waters. Its nonchalant, atonal quality matches the unpolished jauntiness of the visuals, both made with the lightest possible touch.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 26.02.06