Carla Scott Fullerton
Every which way
28 October – 2 December 2011
Chert is delighted to embrace the autumn season in the gallery with the second solo exhibition of Glasgow based artist Carla Scott Fullerton.
Fullerton’s use of robust materials is in no means a melancholic reflection on modernist architectural legacies. The use of glass, steel, and concrete combined with forceful lines, sharp angles and mass of forms define a process that evokes a very practical relationship to architecture in both her drawings and sculptural work. By placing cut and stained glass panels so as they create angels and shadows, the artist establishes a correspondence between the pieces themselves.
Fullerton is particularly interested in architectural semiotics and how a building’s materials can express social or cultural codes as well as our interaction to the built environment. The present of Fullerton’s work is permeated by absence and otherness; only when letting in what is other than itself, can it remain what it truly is, put under erasure, leaving the architectural structure of a trope work. It’s in this phenomenological condition for the possibility of things where meaning takes on new forms and where the viewer is engaged in more precarious and unpredictable encounters with sculptural and architectural constructions. However, the material wants what it wants and by working with powerful industrial substances such as steel and concrete, the materials take on shapes of their own as the artistic intervention is found in avoiding restrictions, letting the works deliberately be imperfect. “Every Which Way” reflects on the quality and peculiarity of glass, one of the principal materials used for this exhibition. The whole project, which seems static and abstract at first sight, takes its human and convivial side through the transparancy and the playfullness of glass, both as a building structure in its relationship to the outside world.
If the problematic of meaning in architecture has been motivated by the ’emptiness’ of the built world constructed under the aegis of functional architecture, Fullerton’s work rather emphasizes the advent of semiotics in the discourse of architecture which may signify its transposition to an unknown discursive conformation.
Carla Scott Fullerton was born in Glasgow in 1980, where she lives and works.
She attended the Glasgow School of Art from 2006 to 2008 and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts. In 2008, she received a Glasgow Sculpture Studios MFA Graduate Fellowship Prize.
Recent shows include: 2011: “Industrial Aesthetics; Environmental Influences on Recent Art from Scotland.”, Times Square Gallery of Hunter College; City University of New York; “Annuale”, Edingburgh; “Immovable Parts”, together with Karin Stewart in Project room 103 in Glasgow; 2010: “Drinnen & Draussen” group exhibition, Chert, Berlin; “Lines have edges”, Glasgow International Festival, “Open Space” Art Cologne, with Chert, Berlin; 2009: “Breathless Lines” at the Glasgow Sculpture Studios ; “Cut Line”, Ten Til Ten, Glasgow; “Lines and Pours”, solo exhibition at Chert, Berlin.
Her first monographic catalogue was released in 2010 by Chert gallery, on occasion of her presentation at Open Space, Art Cologne and “Lines have edges”, Glasgow International Festival, 2010.