Today I was lucky enough to catch the Travelling Gallery in Bristo Square – a gallery in a bus travelling round Scotland and bringing contemporary art to both urban and rural communities. The exhibition was Klook-Klook; seven artists exploring the junctures between natural worlds, where animals and humans meet. The first image was a Charles Avery drawing I recognised from his Islanders collection I saw at The National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh a few years ago, then in the ‘Walking in my Mind’ exhibition at the Hayward last year. I can never quite decide whether I like Avery’s work. The idea of tying oneself to one subject terrifies me – a safety net that can turn into an entrapment perhaps. There was one artist however who’s work I was fascinated by... Ashley Nieuwenhuizen. I went home and googled her and remembered where I had seen it before. Two years ago I had a job at the RSA as a gallery assistant for the New Work Scotland show. Day in day out I sat next to a work, picking up the small taxidermy mouse each morning to turn the light on inside the tea cup it sat, watching a film of a girl gagging on a horse tail as she tried to ingest it. This was Nieuwenhuizen. Her new photographic work has little of the grotesque quality Is aw at the RSA, no gagging and chomping but maintains an unsettling-ness or uncanny-ness unique to Nieuwhuizen’s work. For example in Limbo, where a young boy sits on a fallen tree, the angle of his shoulder blade is mirrored in the gold birds wing he holds clamped underneath.
http://www.myspace.com/morphbody
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