Hiding in Full View is promoted as a collaboration between Alison Watt and poet Don Paterson, with a little help from the photographs of Francesca Woodman.
Paterson’s text is embossed on the Ingleby walls, interspersed with Watt’s monochrome paintings and a selection of Woodman’s images. Paterson’s opening line, ‘We don’t exist; we only dream we’re here. This means we never die. We disappear’, seems an unsubtle emphasis on Watt’s preoccupation with human presence and absence. However, other selections from his texts, such as ‘All rooms will hide you, if you stand just so. Ghosts know this. That’s really all they know’, manifest as an apt contribution to the surrounding works, and eloquent fragments of poetry in their own right.
Since 1997, Watt has painted swathes of fabric, which elude to sexuality and the imprints and interstices of human contact. They are meticulously rendered, and rely upon a mimetic attitude towards representation. However, under closer inspection they reveal an almost clumsy nature; their exquisite qualities are displaced by the revelation of a primitive methodology. For a painter whose impact relies on a painstaking commitment to representation, it feels like a magic trick coming undone.
As a whole, the exhibition feels repetitive and laboured. Paterson’s texts are beguiling, but set aside Watt’s paintings, their potential quiet beauty becomes contrived. Similarly, while Watt’s paintings can be serene in the right environment, here their repetition results in a sense of vapidity. Woodman’s photography only seems to aggravate this, as an irrelevant contribution to an already overworked idea. There are hints of subtle intimacy within the collaborations, but they are drowned out by the awkward shouting of an exhibition that wants to be very quiet.
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