Patricia Fleming Gallery (Glasgow, Scotland) is delighted to participate in NADA Miami. Our booth explored feminist readings of the natural landscape. Works by Barker, introduce an intimate scale and raw response, seen in her exhibition undo the knot. Halperin’s laser etched ‘books’ of 400 - 800 million year old Mica sculptures hint at our interdependent but fragile relationship to the earth, a subtle yet significant contribution to feminist environmental land art. Sekai Machache’s epic journey Light/Deep Divine Sky delivers a series of five exquisite colour photographs depicting the artist, in performance, set in the dramatic light of the remote Scottish Flow Country.
This focused presentation proposes landscape as a site of action and change, questioning art history’s dominant romanticism that sees landscape as place of escape or wonder. Working from different perspectives the artists actively insert themselves into the landscape to expose and deconstruct ideas relating to identity, mysticism, spirituality, queer experience and contemporary human narratives within the natural environment.
Barker’s work, influenced by literature, poetry and language reimagines landscape painting as sculpture. Blurring the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, through a process of decomposition of the natural environment she creates work that sits between imagined and physical spaces. In this new series of works, traces of the human figure and human-made objects are found within hazily defined landscapes. The wall-based reliefs include a combination of steel, aluminium, brass, plywood, automotive and oil paint. Unlike previous work that demanded big studio space and assistance from fabricators, these handmade works in their modest scale and intimate, sketch-like process, introduce a new rhythm to Barker’s practice.
Machache’s work brings together layers of drawing, performance, film and photography into photographic compositions that deeply interrogate the notion of self. Her practice is heavily influenced by African metaphysics and cosmology, ritual practice and performance, while her most recent project focuses on the Scottish landscape, Celtic folklore and Black Scottish Identity. Her series ‘Light/Deep Divine Sky’ shot in the Scottish Highlands, sees her outside of the studio and into the Scottish landscape. Even though she lived in Scotland her whole life, she places herself in the rural landscape for the first time, in a deliberate act to reclaim a space where minoritised bodies are not usually associated with or welcomed into. Through a process of disseminating symbolic imagery, the work surfaces concerns around slavery, colonialism and the racial profile of rural Scotland.
Halperin’s work explores the relationship between geology and daily life, moving between performance, sculpture, print, drawing and film. By connecting personal events and human histories to deep geological time, she allows for a space to think about our place within a vast continuum from a more intimate perspective. In her ‘Library’ series, she sources 400 - 800 million year old Mica from both sides of the Atlantic- Inverness-shire and New England. Personal narratives such as encountering Mica in the streets as a kid growing up in New York or symbols associated with queer activism, combined with histories embedded deep into the city and natural landscape, result in an alternative geologic library of laser-etched ‘books’ of Mica.