Karla Black (2014) Story of a Sensible Length [Polythene, plaster powder, powder paint and thread. ] image Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.
Karla Black’s
continuous process of creation and continual investigation into materials seems
to start with loose experimentation of materials through ideas which often
become redundant. Black’s creative drives push forward the creation of work
which once physically engulfed in raw transformed materials, we navigate the
works which fail to be totally tangible – they are finite, just like us.
Physical
properties are manipulated, the art shop neglected and the chemist raided for
toothpaste, soap and nail varnish. Pause. These aren’t some misconstrued
material feminist comment, they are materials embedded in transitional states,
they are the material world and they illicit our commercial desires to touch,
to hold to desire. Black mines these materials for their inherent material
substance and physical pull towards the touch of the human hand – of which
remains visible.
Blacks’
sculptures are stretched and pulled away from paintings flattened in two
dimensions into tangible pieces forced into reality. Our physical experience of the work is
centred on the limits of materiality as the sculptures step into our dimension
of existence: and ask us to step into theirs – to investigate in a field of
painted colour.
The limitations
of working in a specific discipline can be frustrating unless exploited, Black
explores the confines of sculpture and finds inside a mechanism to free colour
from painted forms. Composition is uninhibited as the sculptures are allowed to
hand in space like suspended thoughts and moments of energy frozen in corporeal
positions. Freed from homogeneity, Black’s sculptures verge on the spontaneous,
they are raw creative moments which challenge permanence.
Black works
out of her own desires and unconscious, her work is not just pure gesture and
is far from the self-indulgent abstract expressionist work of the 60s. Aesthetics
are considered in an abstract sense, but they are worked into, again and again.
Relationships between form and colour bring about the sensibility of a painter
into sculpture, the process of painting is the sculpture, painting forms in
space.
Ultimately
Black’s works are powerfully fragile and strong propositions to start a
conversation we all can join in.
New work by Karla
Black is currently on display as part of a multi-venue exhibition at the Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art, the Scottish National Gallery and the Scottish
National Portrait gallery as part of; Generation: 25 years of contemporary art
in Scotland until the 2nd November, 2014.
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