Céline Condorelli: Thinking through Skin

Talbot Rice Gallery is currently home to After Work (until 1 October) the first survey exhibition of Céline Condorelli. Throughout her practice, Condorelli has remained committed to the arrangement of space, connecting the gallery to the world outside and the labour of production and industrialisation. Methods of display, reception and transmission are all integral, with the exhibition split between white cube spaces and a 19th-century gallery. The dichotomy of the two zones, with one dark and the other light, creates a meditative viewing experience.

The darker of the rooms, fittingly housed in the gallery’s former natural history museum, are displays of Condorelli’s research that are set within the gallery’s bays. Encasing colour studies of experiments like Synthetic Chromatophore, Pink on beautifully buckled cellulose membrane with layers of copper sulphate and yellow potassium ferrocyanide. The colour created by the reactant solution appears to dip into the support, nestling itself into the fibres of the sheet.

These colour experiments were undertaken from instructions of German chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge’s The Formative Tendency of Substances. In the other vitrines are collections of research, including maquettes and items from Condorelli’s own collection. On the ground floor of this room, influenced by the language of the Chromatophore studies, is an installation titled Thinking through Skin. This body of work gathers stimulus from cephalopods’ innate ability to reflect the landscape through their skin. Cephalopods achieve this by pliable pigment-filled sacs that are called chromotophores, much like the title of Condorelli’s colour experiments. This installation investigates the possibilities of colour and image construction, with a focus on the natural.

Thinking through Skin comprises of a double-sided animated curtain of vegetable dyed cotton titled Reflective Aural Study. The deep blues and purples of the sheet are histological in appearance, with the clicking of the moving track resonating with the enveloping audio.

Occupying the central part of the gallery floor is a draped dye and polyester sub print that folds and dips over a scaffolding support. Specks of light glint through the weave of the material with the polyester having a slight sheen to it. Denominated as Mimetic Aural Study, the installation is interspersed by fossilised ferns, a large megalodon tooth, a film piece by Grace Ndiritu and a sculpture by Isa Genzken.

This installation is accompanied by a sound piece by Hannah Catherine Jones titled PORTAL (in Memoriam). The sound embodies the rhythmic qualities of light and image which are viewed throughout the space. The beholder is felt to be transported into the otherworld, a world in which the senses are heightened and observation is focused. The details of Sterile — Revital Cohen and Tuur van Balen— an albino goldfish encased in resin appear in multitudes, from a parallax within the block to a shadow of the fish on the fringe.

This is a space for contemplation, one in which to think of the body's relation to the natural world and our place within it. To quote from Ben Rivers’ Urth, a film work encased by Condorelli’s animated curtain: ‘[…] a mirror from which we may behold our rational and beautiful girders — our exoskeletal skin […]’.

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Céline Condorelli / After Work, Talbot Rice Gallery until 1 Oct

This piece was commissioned as part of Edinburgh Art Festival's Emerging Writers programme; scroll on to read more from writers in the programme