Ingleby at ART SG 2023: A presentation of work by two artists from Scotland, Katie Paterson and Callum Innes.

Over the past decade KATIE PATERSON has become renowned for her work at the nexus of art and science, combining a romantic sensibility with conceptual precision, deep research and coolly minimalist presentation. Her work collapses the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and space and frequently relies on collaboration with expert astronomers, geologists, botanists and biologists.

CALLUM INNES on the other hand is a painter, working alone in his studios in Edinburgh and Oslo, who has over the past 30 years become known for his self-invented language of abstraction. It is a unique approach in which pigments are layered onto canvas and then removed with washes of turpentine. The play between additive and subtractive processes means that the potential for uncertainty, and a kind of human fragility, is ever present.

At first glance, their work seems quite different; yet this opportunity to show them together provides a chance to tease out the connections between two artists whose work shares the properties of being conceptually driven, meticulously realised, yet profoundly human. At the heart of both their practice lies our relationship with the sublime – an essentially romantic inclination to attempt to understand the insignificance of our place in the cosmic scheme – to contemplate infinity or extinction.

An hourglass is different from other traditional time measures. The sundial shows time's constant cycles, as does a clock face. Myth shows time as an infinite, self-replenishing thing: the Greek sun god Helios drives his horse-drawn chariot across the sky each day and the horses are refreshed by night. The river is a universal symbol of time-passing and crucially it flows and runs but does not run out. Unlike these, the hourglass carries a warning: time is short and can run out. Contemporary symbolism casts the hourglass in a circle as the symbol of extinction, wherein the circle represents the world, with the stylized X as the hourglass, the two together showing how time is running out for so many species. Creatures are forced into extinction at the fastest rate ever, the life-spirit of this mosaic world being plunged into starving darkness. It would sadden the very sun.

[Jay Griffiths ‘The Moment in an Hourglass’ in Requiem, Cornerhouse, 2022, p.7]

The contemplation of infinity, or put simply, human insignificance in the face of nature connects also to the lineage of abstraction in which Innes’s work belongs. It goes back to the argument between Rothko and Reinhardt - “there’s no such thing as a good painting about nothing” said Rothko – “there’s no such thing as a good painting about something” responded Reinhardt.

This balance between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ is at the heart of Innes’s work. As the critic Richard Cork has written: “hovering all the time between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ his paintings are intensely physical in their engagement with the tactile reality of the world and, at the same time, impregnated with an awareness of mortal limits.”

Taken as a whole, Katie Paterson’s work forms a constellation, a strategic map of the physical universe. In addition to signals emitted by human beings, she records, decodes, and translates visually the infinite number of available physical languages: the language of minerals, plants fossils and light. It is an opera whose subject is the history of the universe. Just when, for the first time in human history, the planet has been mapped to the last millimetre, Paterson’s art pushes back the limits of what is known and what can be seen.

[Nicolas Bourriaud in Katie Paterson, Kerber Verlag, 2016, p.6]

A lifelong series, the Ideas are works that may or may not come into being. These short haiku-like sentences take shape in the imagination of whoever reads the words, and so become an expression of the idea itself. The ideas are realised in editions of 3, waterjet-cut in Sterling silver.