CRITIC’S CHOICE

Last chance to catch Lorna Macintyre’s pared-back, thoughtful work in Gallery 2 of Dundee Contemporary Arts. Macintyre takes poetry, literature or archaeological artefacts as inspiration in her exploration of the potential of material.

This exhibition, her first solo show in a major UK institution, finds its origins in a tile from Carpow Roman Fort near Abernethy, housed in the nearby McManus Galleries. The small terracotta tile bears the imprint of a dog’s paw, an animal which walked over it some 2,000 years ago as the clay was drying. It is a fleeting moment captured in a material that has lasted – and will last – for many millennia.

Macintyre, who studied environmental art at undergraduate and MFA level at Glasgow School of Art, is fascinated by processes that capture time, and the juxtaposition between something enduring and of the moment, a combination of materiality and time. It is, she says, an inherent part of the nature of photography, a core medium in her work.

That “interconnectedness” also seeps over into materials, exploring what is in the frame and what is outside it, or using the by-product of one artistic process to produce another.

Below the silk-printed photography on the wall, the cyanotypes, the digital prints, are a series of ceramic vessels – teapots, pots and so on – on the floor, on to which she has grown crystals that result from the chemicals used in the production of the cyanotypes, showing the different atmospheric conditions in her studio at any given point in a year. In the summer, the crystals grown are rangey and spikey; in the winter, bluer and smaller. A moment, a condition, captured – although not, here, forever.

Lorna Macintyre: Pieces of You are Here, Gallery 2, DCA, 152 Nethergate, Dundee, 01382 432 444, www.dca.org.uk, until Feb 24, daily 10am-6pm, Thurs 10am-8pm