Lauren Gault: bone stone voice alone
bone stone voice alone is a newly commissioned body of work by artist Lauren Gault, curated by May Rosenthal Sloan. The exhibition marks Gault’s first major solo exhibition in a Scottish gallery for over a decade. Gault studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, spending her first, formative years as an artist in the city of Dundee.
Working across sculpture, print, sound and moving image, Gault will use the mythological figure of Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphosis to investigate the land of Tayside and beyond. As a being who was punished for talking too much and ultimately subjected to an existence in which her voice could only repeat the last words spoken to her, Echo becomes a metaphor for censorship of speech. Collaborating with people across a range of disciplines and experience, from specialist stonemasons and manufacturers of scientific glassware to quilting experts and suppliers of industrial machinery, Gault will create a series of works that draw on multilayered histories of Scotland's land and the unheard, undervalued or silenced voices of those who work on it.
Throughout her career, Gault has undertaken ambitious, site-specific projects underpinned by rich, collaborative research investigating the locality of the land and culture where she is working. At DCA, she will create a gallery-wide installation, using Scottish stone, water and artefacts related to the geological, paleontological and archaeological makeup of the region. Across the galleries, viewers will encounter a range of sculptural elements, sound and video works. A series of horizontal planes, with layers of intricately stitched fabric, built-up paper pulp and half-hidden symbols, shapes and objects will bear disembodied bits of land-working machinery, emerging like the fossilised remains of industrial dinosaurs, their shiny hydraulic limbs pointing to new, possible futures. Scottish granite and sandstone, scarred with layers of graffiti and suggestive of the richly marked walls of Wemyss Caves just along the coast, will appear through ‘truth windows’ as though excavated from the walls of the building itself.
For this exhibition, Gault has worked with a range of partner organisations to consider the land through its histories and objects. These include a collection of charmstones and amulets held at the National Museum of Scotland that were believed to have healing and future-telling properties and were used in treating animals or in relation to the land itself. Working with academics at the University of Dundee, Gault has explored new ways of considering bones, stones and charms, using cutting edge Photon Counting Detector Computed Tomography (PCD CT) scanning technologies at the school of Medicine to examine their energetic makeup, then using this to develop new sculptural forms through working with the School of Science and Engineering. These works consider scientific knowledge alongside the folkloric, resisting the traditional hierarchy of knowledge. The exhibition also draws on an ongoing research collaboration with Professor Katharine Earnshaw, a Classicist from the University of Exeter, with whom she previously worked on the Atlas Arts-commissioned project Samhla on the Isle of Skye.
Gault has also undertaken a production residency in DCA Print Studio, producing new works for the exhibition. These will include a large, experimental wall piece, printed using stone ‘slurry’, a biproduct of stone manufacturing processes, as well as an intricate set of Japanese Takuhon prints, whose ghostly 3d forms take the shape of fossils, bones and stones around which they have been made.
A publication to accompany the exhibition will be launched in autumn 2025.
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