Anna Barriball
Until October 28, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

When the British Art Show opened a year ago it offered a bewildering variety of work from dozens of happening artists across the land. Among them was a young woman called Anna Barriball, whose gentle sprinkling of video, photographs and sculpture provided pause for thought amongst the high-energy babble.

Ever since then I have looked forward to the London-based artist’s first solo show in Scotland, at Edinburgh’s Ingleby gallery. Mostly, it doesn’t disappoint.

The Inglebys are principally known for their love of austere, minimalist surfaces, but recently, they’ve started to reveal a fondness for the soft centre. Barriball, with her lived-in materials and her homely surfaces, brings an unprecedented degree of warmth into the space.

Following in the footsteps of Arte Povera artists of the 1960s and 1970s, Barriball uses second-hand found materials to make many of her artworks. Old, anonymous family photographs form the basis for works exploring time, and crinkled, tatty ribbons make up a lofty, vertical sculpture.

Though Barriball turns her attention directly on the material rather than its past uses, the air is thick with the ghosts of people whose lives were entwined with this stuff before the tide of time swept them apart. Each artwork is like a message in a bottle, which has travelled an unknown distance across the oceans, in an unknown time.

But if these are carriers of information, the message is now defunct. Old slides contain only fragments of their original images, their surfaces deformed by multi-coloured chemical reactions. Some are projected on the walls, others are bound together in a silent sculpture echoing the Carl André which occupied the same space just weeks ago.

Seven sheets of glass, removed from old picture frames, are stacked against the wall, no longer a medium to be looked through; now the thing to be looked at. But the more Barriball asserts the pure materiality of a thing, the more it fights back. She has chosen emotionally loaded objects; the patina of their human histories refuses to be ignored.

The most powerful piece in the show is a series of eight tiny windows, each picked out of a found photograph. They are utterly dislocated, both spacially and temporally. The tantalising reflections, shadows and lights on the window panes offer a tiny glimpse into a private world, as if randomly entered through a special Ingleby worm-hole.

Windows I-VIII is worth singling out because it is unique. Almost every other work in the show creates a worrying sense of déjà vu. In more ways than one, Barriball treads perilously close to the work of Boyle Family, with their ”include everything” approach. With her densely worked wallpaper rubbings, she veers close to Louise Hopkins, and a number of works bear more than a slight resemblance to Arte Povera classics.

Barriball’s saving grace is the gentle dialogue she sets up between the works. Consistent in their themes, and lyrical in their effect, they come together to create a gentle, thoughtful space for contemplation; one that’s in itself unique.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 24.09.06