CRITIC’S CHOICE

RENEE So’s work might have undercurrents of darkness, but it’s simultaneously joyous, deeply researched and evocative.

Next month, the Hong Kong born, Melbourne bred, London based artist brings her interest in ancient craft forms and figurative representation to Cample Line for her first solo show in Scotland – long overdue - her idiosyncratic clay figurines and knitted and woven wall pieces referencing ancient depictions of women from Pre-Columbian art to Ancient Egyptian and bringing them in to the contemporary world.

In early works, men’s historical position of power is referenced by what So sees as historic symbols of that power – the boot, the beard – her staring, knitted, top-hatted figures doubleheaded on either side of their beaded beards like playing card kings.

Women, now, are the crux, emerging from the booted past, similarly reduced, three-legged vessels, a Venus army of fertility symbols that refuse the cliché, that want to know why, mythologised and reimagined, hands on hips.

So is fascinated with craft and technique, learning to weave for a recent mid-pandemic exhibition inspired by the Bauhaus at the De La Warr Pavilion, and for this Cample Line exhibition, embracing Pojagi, the Korean, domestic, highly practical yet beautiful patchwork repair technique. T

here is tiling too, similarly historically inspired, and throughout, wit and history, craft with art, all bound up in tactile objects and indistinct ritual anchored in the fog of prehistory, the nature of perception – historical and contemporary - and a judicious application of imagination.

Renee So: Effigies and Elginisms, Cample Line, Cample Mill, Cample, near Thornhill, Dumfriesshire, 01848 331000 www.campleline.org.uk 2 Apr – 19 Jun, Thurs – Sun, 11am - 4pm