A case of too much baggage

Click to follow
ES Entertainment
These days it's not enough to be an artist - you ought to be a historian, a naturalist, an anthropologist and an ethnographer as well.

You can make beautiful objects - but only if they're backed up by documentation (lots of it), research, wall texts, hand-outs, flipcharts - anything to prove that it's not just visual. Heaven forbid that your audience should mistake your work for brainless decoration. Annotate and authenticate at all costs.

Unfortunately, this is the prevalent feeling on looking at Christine Borland's work. Her objects are never allowed to speak for themselves because she makes them carry such heavy baggage. They're torn in two directions at once: education versus entertainment.

For example, the first piece in the exhibition is a large mobile, made with slivers of coloured agate like slices of exotic fruit. But this is no ordinary mobile. It's a family tree, taken from a case study published in the 1930s by the Galton Institute of Eugenics showing the spread of Huntington's disease through five generations. Fair enough, but this reference is laboriously thrashed out over a rambling wall text that takes up more space than the mobile.

The same complaint can be levelled at her Ecbotic Garden. Beautifully wonky glass phials hang from the ceiling, filled with the bleached-out remains of wild plants preserved in alcohol. They look like tears or eggs. But this is not enough. This ecbotic (meaning "to induce abortion") vegetation all derives from the planting list of a 16th-century Physic Garden in Glasgow. This work is so laden with serious information that you feel guilty admitting that it's beautiful.

Borland would be better as a maverick TV producer. Her eye for quirky facts, odd phenomena and medical marvels could make a riveting and informative TV series, deftly intertwining documentary with politics and visual culture.

A hint of how such a series might look is the video Nephilla Mania. Here Bor-land zooms in on an enormous and revolting weaver spider: its toadstoolcoloured torso bobs up and down as tensile silk is wound from its bottom. It is exquisitely filmed; the subject is obscene and fascinating.

Now imagine her written commentary narrated over the top - and bingo, it's a winner.