Peering into underbelly of murky woods proves powerful

There is something disquieting about Clare Woods’s large oil paintings. The more you look the more powerful the feeling of something sinister and partially obscured lurking somewhere beneath the large swirls of blues, blacks, yellows and purples. Sometimes, here and there, it’s possible to pick out partial forms — the human body, under duress, in extremis — a torso, a leg, a head.

These shapes and images are never wholly resolved. As you move closer to the huge aluminium panels on which the paint is applied, often in thin layers, where the brushstrokes are stark and keenly visible, you lose sight of the pre-dominant image (or what you imagined it might have been) and become lost in the loops and energy of the paint.

At first glance the imagery seems simple, simplistic even, baffling and obscure. When Woods first came to prominence around the turn of the millennium (she was born in 1972 and showed at DCA in 2001) her work was based on photographs of the wooded landscape on the Welsh-English border where she lived and worked. Such landscape is often viewed as kindly and benevolent. But Woods wanted to explore the ambiguity of such landscapes and she painted not what she saw but feelings from deep in her psyche.

The results were disturbing and unsettling. The forest contains danger, as folklore and legend so often illustrate. It is the same process that informs these works. Scattered around her studio are newspaper and magazine cuttings often showing the aftermath of violence. One series documents the London bombings in 2005. Another shows Canadian soldiers gassed in the First World War, bandaged like mummies.

Is Woods taking ugliness and brutality and transforming it into something more palatable? Or is she extending specific events into commentaries on violence, pain and cruelty? Perhaps she is doing both.

These sparsely placed works dominate the white, voluminous space of the DCA galleries. They take the mind to some dark places, leaving impressions, rather than a keenly focused narrative and, because of this, are all the more powerful.

Until September 10. Tel: 01382 909 900