Ciara Phillips: Undoing It @ Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow

The term ‘immersive’ has grown a little tired with overuse. Too often, it is used as a synonym for the pairing of visual works with audio works. Although such approaches certainly have immersive potential, they’re not immersive by default. Ciara Phillips’ Undoing It at GoMA, however, generously presents visuals alone as a potential immersive experience.

With a Turner Prize nomination and the 2020 Queen Sonja Print Award under her belt, Phillips’ Undoing It brings excitement, particularly given the Canadian-Irish artist previously lived and worked in Glasgow for almost two decades. In woodcuts, etchings, and screenprints, Phillips scrutinises and celebrates the creative process with an undeniable dynamism.

Such immersive brilliance is largely owing to the body-printed mono-print across each and every wall of the show. The first room is dark and heavy, while the second, corridor-like room lifts in tone as we pass through it. In the third room, the walls brighten and the monoprint’s dynamism is fully realised in off-white. Occasionally, a fingerprint or footprint appears within the curves, dots, and lines. This physicality is palpable, Phillips’ body carrying the audience through the three rooms. The body – Phillips’ body, any body – is inseparable from the art, its making, or its response.

Aside from a couple of conservatively sized works, Phillips’ prints rightfully enjoy a large-scale canvas. A single-coloured woodcut – purple, magenta, green, orange – is screen printed across each paper and canvas expanse; we’re invited to lose ourselves between the curves of each wood marking.

Ciara Phillips. Image courtesy of GOMA.

Undeniably, some instances hold a clichéd air – a crescent moon, a noted “*Silence*” in the work of the same name. Despite this, the show largely lacks pretence, welcoming any and all audiences to its warm embrace.

In Gradient and ANNO 2020, Phillips’ sketches and notes gain centre stage. In this, the show goes beyond the sole act of thinking-through-making, promised by the exhibition copy; rather, Phillips offers thinking-as-making, coupling mental and physical labour as equals. A repetition rings, quietly, throughout: the same plait, note, or strip of paper angled just-so, return and re-return within the show. The obsessive cycles of the creative process come into full force. Alongside this, instances of Phillips’ previous work – such as the fringed paper print of It Starts Here and Goes All the Way (2018) featuring in ‘Any time there is a surface [...]’ – re-appear intermittently. With Phillips, making is a continuous act, ever unmaking and remaking itself.

The two largest woodcut works within the show – ‘Any time there is a surface [...]’ and I tell my students – contain a handful of images abstracted, whether through an intimately close shot, the technique of collage, or, seemingly, an X-ray lens. The works are in dialogue with each other not merely in their form but also, in ideology. An image upon the former depicts a woman wearing a t-shirt reading 'APATHY KILLS'; an image upon the latter depicts a hand holding an image with a sign reading 'EMPATHY IS A POLITICAL ISSUE.' Indeed, a certain pathos permeates the show; sharp, papered edges are met with broad, rushed strokes and must-said utterances. Undoing It asks for – and demands – an emotional response.

In their communion with one another, Phillips’ prints reject a certain stagnancy and take pleasure in the push and pull of creation. This intimacy is critical in the show’s success. Likewise, the audience’s movement is encouraged. From within a silver rectangle in I tell my students, Phillips’ face emerges, in/visible from certain standing points. Her prints refuse a singularity; rather, they move, shape, and appear as we do. To participate in this is truly an immersive act.

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Undoing It, Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Glasgow, until 26 Oct, open daily