Pioneer astronomer is star of the show

The links between Australia and Scotland are legion and complex. Ever since it was established as a colony in 1788, the Scots were quick to develop opportunities in business, science and government in the new continent.

One pioneer was Major-General Sir Thomas Brisbane, who hailed from Largs and was the governor of New South Wales from 1821-25. As well as being an able military officer and politician, Brisbane was a keen astronomer and built the colony’s first observatory at Parramatta, near Sydney, in 1822.

The Sydney-based artist Kate Scardifield, who trained in tapestry, has taken Brisbane’s astronomical career as her starting point in a series of interventions and investigations linking the two countries.

Last year, Scardifield worked as a resident researcher with a number of Scottish regional museum collections. Here, she looks at Fife’s deep cultural and industrial legacy, which she links to Largs and Brisbane, via a central motif of a large brass circle. The “mural circle” originally carried a telescope which was mounted on a wall and aligned from north to south to allow more accurate, calibrated astronomical observation.

Here, in a looped video work, the circle is suspended in isolation, where it revolves endlessly. The circular motif extends across various other installations and assemblies of objects, such as “Kate’s Tabletop”, where it is situated next to objects from the Fife collection, and others, made by Scardifield. Small moulds taken from her fingers, hands and arms punctuate the display of rope making and weaving equipment, emphasising their tactile memory.

Although some of the language used by Scardifield may seem overly academic or impenetrable — she talks of “reappraising the objects and their personal histories” and “the conceptual rationale for this project is of each collection as its own celestial configuration” — her underlying motivation is purposeful and inquiring. She does this by presenting objects in new contexts and by juxtaposing them in configurations that wrong foot the viewer’s expectations. It’s a welcome complement to the traditionally structured museum displays elsewhere in the same building.

An autobiographical narrative extends through the work and alludes to the artist’s late father who came from England and was a keen sailor. A number of silk and linen banners, dyed with eucalyptus, reference nautical signal flags. As with most of Scardifield’s work, deep metaphorical layering is never far away and she points to the banners as a way of signalling across time and space.

Scardifield’s work is innovative and thoughtful, balancing the aesthetic and conceptual content, although the force of her narrative is diminished by an over-intellectualised commentary and terminology which is more obfuscatory than illuminating.

Until March 3, 2018