Reviews

NEW GRADUATES (Inverness Museum and Art Gallery, until 5 September 2009)

Eilidh Thomson’s meditations on abandoned interior spaces are also characterised by human action, absence and the “passage of time”. A series of untitled digital photographs on canvas (I, II and III) present a triptych of neglected interiors in which windows provide the central focus within and without.

In the first, light diffused from an opaque window settles our attention on a box discarded and littered with bird droppings in the corner of a decaying room. The smell of mould and dust is almost palpable, quietly evocative in its bleak and resolute silence. The central image of a broken window with a view to skeletal trees outside contains the chill of autumn/winter and the suggestion of a human act of violence.

Fragments of glass upon the floor, almost spilling into the viewer’s space glint in the dim light, red-rimmed with traces of blood. This scant introduction of colour is so slight that in the context of the whole image it is barely noticeable – it feels however, quite deliberately present. The third image of a cobweb veiled window of frosted glass reveals cycles of growth and decay through a single pane removed from the window frame filled with the texture of life outside. Thomson draws our attention to interior corners that we routinely overlook in daily life and encourages us to look again.

Georgina Coburn 2009