Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
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Judy Spark, ‘River Jelly - Collema dicotomum’, installation view.
in the Fernery, St Andrews Botanic Gardens
Crawford Arts Centre, St.Andrews
2 July ' 22 August
Reviewed by: Catriona Black
Gardening is in. Between the Tate’s latest exhibition ‘Art of the Garden’, and the Crawford Arts Centre’s current offering ‘What in the World is More Beautiful?’ we are reminded that art and gardening are not so very different. Both grapple constantly with the thorny question of beauty. Both are about the creative process as well as the final product. Is nature simply the artist’s medium? Surely it’s a creative collaborator. There’s plenty of collaboration in the St Andrews exhibition, between artists, beekeepers, floral arts clubs and museums. Nature gets to collaborate too ' a colony of bees has helped to create a sculpture, and at the time of my visit the thistles and butterflies were stubbornly refusing to work together, perhaps because of creative differences.
This exhibition is a second curatorial collaboration for Glasgow–based artists Susanne N?gÄrd Nielsen and Gair Dunlop, as a development of their shared interest in the Picturesque Movement. The artists are among a group of seven showing in and around the Crawford Arts Centre, all concerned with various aspects of horticulture, landscaping, and the environment. This show demonstrates the venue’s obvious strengths: partnerships with organisations, clubs and individuals throughout Fife and beyond, extending way past the conventional art gallery audiences. Nielsen’s Mondrian flowerbed stands proudly in the local Botanic Gardens, made up of flowers which the artist secretly loved to paint, behind a public show of abstract grids and squares. The horticulturalist who helped Nielsen identify the various species of flower in Mondrian’s paintings was scathing about the artist’s choice of plants. They were not ideal specimens, he complained. That, again, is the thorny issue of beauty.
Writer detail:
Catriona Black is an animator, and art critic for the Sunday Herald.
Venue detail:
Fife Contemporary Art & Craft
Town Hall, Queens Gardens, St Andrews KY16 9TA
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