uamh reviews
Selected Reviews (Extracts)
Duncan Macmillan, Scotsman , 19 Jan, 2011 (four stars): There is a cave on Skye that archaeology reveals was used for religious rituals in prehistory. At the RSA in a show called Uamh/Cave, Gill Russell has made assemblages from antlers,feathers and a mysterious, luminous egg, all floating in blue light in the darkness inspired by the thought of the rituals that might have been celebrated there. Imagined prehistoric music has been provided by musicologist John Purser....
Colin Herd, Aesthtica Magazine, 11 Jan, 2011: As you enter the cave, you’re confronted by twisted blue-lit branches suspend from the ceiling all the way down to a disc on the floor, on which the branches cast a network of shadows like rivulets. ……, there’s a hollow, feathery nest-like orb encasing an illuminated blue ovum, floating like an egg on a spongy pillow. The most obvious allusion is to a womb, but the blue light is strange, more distant, even extra-terrestrial.....
……… in perhaps the most intriguing of the pieces, feathers are suspended from a blue ceiling-light above a pile of bone-like antlers resting atop a dark and muddy spherical heap. The feathers shimmer and flicker in the light at the faintest hint of movement- they could be falling from the sky or rising from the pile of antlers like smoke
Every aspect of the piece has been carefully considered. The use of organic materials gives all three sculptures an air of fragility. The sounds I was mishearing are in fact recordings made by Russell inside the stream passage in the cave of the musicologist John Purser playing ancient instruments. You pick up the muffled sounds and echoes of the cave in the unfamiliar notes and sounds of bone flutes, harmonic singing and bronze horns. One of the most interesting aspects of Russell’s installation is the way her interventions in sound and light alter the viewer’s perception of time. The piece has a timelessness that stretches back (by evoking the ancient rites performed in the cave) and outwards (by simultaneously suggesting the otherworldly and cosmic).
More pragmatically, you have to slow your perceptions as you adjust your eyes to the dark and move alertly round the room. I found myself creeping around, part nervous and part reverent, as though the low-level lighting and thumping heart-beat audio had triggered a heightened instinctual state of darkness-alert, a connection to the Mesolithic origins of the cave….
‘Uamh’ is a humbling, thought-provoking installation.
Dave Pollock, ‘Northings’, 11 Jan , 2011: The presence of life and the remains of history are evident in this imagined landscape Russell has created, but beyond that lurks the suspicion – as humanity has always tended to believe when left alone in the dark – that something else lurks here with them, unseen.....
