Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Firstsite, Colchester
7 June – 3 August
Reviewed by: Ron Sims
Subtle developments are evolving through Marion Coutts' largest exhibition to date. Concerned with social forces and collective behaviour, Coutts reinforces her work with everyday objects and basic materials and in so doing, reflects upon the sculptures of Kounellis and Merz whose Arte Povera works included wool, wood and iron, and even a stable of live horses!
Links appear within her object-based, film and video pieces. Palace is a sculpture of two enormous wood blocks with 190 switched on light bulbs. The strangely compelling video No Evil Star – a curious palindrome title for 'rats live on' – depicts gigantic slithering, massed meal worms. Accompanied by a dramatic score, they drop from rock ledges in a collective rhythmic entity like coins in a fairground penny cascade.
Coutts' interest in ancient Roman prophecies and fortune telling is suggested by Augury # 1, a C-type print, and Assembly, a video of migrating starlings that pulsate tonally as they wheel and dip through the sky symbolising mass media communion with the spirit world. Her initial responses to this natural phenomenon are drawings, and like the precursor to Bridget Riley's optical paintings, bird flocks remain a divine inspiration.
In Everglade a disturbing parallel is drawn with the final demise of the meal worms from No Evil Star. Based on Thomas Bewick's eighteenth century woodcut landscapes, Coutts has grasped the mood as a symbol of human mortality through her beautifully filmed Romantic parkland vignettes, as figures surface and then disappear.
Some Enchanted Evening and Target Nebula return us to collective forces where wedding rings mimic star constellations, and randomly shot at targets manifest as stigmata, possibly the starting point for a larger installation in her next residency at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge in September 2003.
www.firstsite-online.org.uk
Writer detail:
Ron Sims
is a painter, printmaker, freelance writer and lecturer.
www.colchesterartsociety.co.uk
Venue detail:
Firstsite
The Coach House, East Hill House, 76 High Street, Colchester CO1 1UF
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