Elizabeth Corkery @ Telfer Gallery

Elizabeth Corkery’s exhibition plays on the surrounding warm coloured MDF floor and other building materials that are exposed in the Telfer gallery, that is without either ceiling tiles or even blue flooring underlay. Matching the colour of the floor, slipping between what’s here and what’s represented, brown framer’s tape is gridded in the pattern of the Kibble Palace of Glasgow’s West End Botanics. Working with the materials of picture-framing, there’s a sense of scene-setting and the spatial illusions of stage scenery.

In the middle of the room, there are the two sculptural works, Wardian Cases. Unfamiliar objects now, wardian cases are usually simple glass cases that maintain plants within an artificial atmospheric environment. At first sight, these small plywood sculptures look more like simplified and small-scale replicas of more, ecclesiastical architecture. So shrunken and made from light wood, they humbly quote something much more monumental in scale.

A kind of model-making continues with the screenprints on MDF. These are stacked with equal-sized woodblock separating one from the other. With the same screen print at every level, the image of the almost overgrown garden is neatly arranged, just as organised as the halftone pattern from which the image is constructed. The process of their making and their constructed presentation frustrates any simple reading of the image. With so many multiples of each screenprinted image, any purchase on a representational illusion is loosened as pictorial elements become repeated motifs.

While these works loosen their own purchase on anything like an authentic reality, they simultaneously refer to the warm brown of the exposed floor or to the grid which has been stripped of its ceiling panels. Even the Telfer’s unassuming space becomes a site of artifice, and so interiors in general, all as constructed and artificial environments as inside a Wardian Case.

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