Art

The first thing you notice is the smell, soapy and sickly-sweet. It emanates from the cellophane and cling-film parcels lining the walls of the entrance-hallway, each filled with a mixture of moisturising cream, petroleum jelly and paint pigments – strange, vividly coloured, petrochemical packages that manage to be both rather pretty and also grossly repellent. Walk into the main space and here the smell changes register slightly, becoming sweeter, rawer, more abrasive – it’s the tang of chalk-dust coating the surfaces of several large, plastic dustsheets, giving them an ethereal, bluish tinge, as they hang in great, sagging bunches from the ceiling.

Smell is an underexploited sense in art; it’s good to see (that is, smell) an artist using it so effectively – for it nicely indicates some of the main themes in Karla Black’s work: ideas of shapelessness and formlessness, of diffusion versus containment. The anti-form artists of the late ’60s are an obvious influence, though Black amps up the sense of mess and seaminess and general ickiness.

This combination of formal concerns and emotional associations comes across best in the final installation, featuring two dense oblongs of coloured chalk-dust on the floor. The larger patch resembles an abstract expressionist canvas – something by Rothko, except done in shades of nauseatingly bright, medicinal pink and containing several torn towels and bandages to reinforce the medical connotations. And in the smaller work, there’s even the suggestion of a vague narrative, with the various objects – more towels, bits of plastic waste, a lump of some unpleasant, waxy-looking substance – all swamped in a sea of radioactive green, like something from a sci-fi movie, the detritus from some hideous scientific experiment.