Art seen: Portraits of native plants

'Flowering harakeke' by Allan Batt

It is no surprise that Michael Morley's latest exhibit is experimental and uses music as its basis.

This subject has been the artist's forte for many years as a musician and as an artist.

What is surprising is how well this latest piece works, and how well Morley has suffused it with layers of cross-modal meaning, from vision to music to touch to vision and back to music.

Freed of the confines of smaller size, Morley has written large across the gallery wall.

His work, comprised of concentric patterns, is aesthetically pleasing in itself.

Like roundels for a psychedelic air force, it is reminiscent of the hard-edged abstractions of Stella and Noland, and requires no subtext to be effective.

Morley has, however, applied plenty of subtext.

The discs are old 45 rpm records, muted by paint.

The pattern is not an abstraction, but rather a sentence in Braille rendered too large to be read by touch and only interpretable by the sighted.

The message's indictment of art and artists ("we are all prostitutes") and the title of the exhibition are both taken from late '70s punk rock -the loudest, brashest music rendered serene in the art museum context.

This interplay of sound, vision and touch provides its own cryptic message for the viewer to interpret.

Yi-Ming Lin's exhibition at the Moray is the artist's first for several years, but it is worth the wait.

The works are ceramics created from paper clay strengthened with occasionally visible wire mesh.

Despite this, they have the feel, appearance, and psychological weight of solid metal, the green verdigris-like patination giving the impression of corroded iron.

The horse is a constant motif in many of the pieces, and the strength of the texture is reflected in the strength and wildness of the animals.

The pieces are inspired by both European and east Asian art, and the combination of these influences is nowhere more apparent than in Still life with bottle and glass, which references both Cezanne and traditional Chinese paintings.

Two pieces stand out.

Interestingly, these are among the larger works - the artist's heavily textured style better suits items where it is allowed full rein (no pun intended).

Of these two items, one is a pair of large standing blocks which form jagged square frames from which emerge horses and Chinese characters.

The other piece is an impressive large vase decorated with wild steeds which seem to be breaking free of the confines of the vessel.

Alan Batt is currently exhibiting a series of large portraits of native plants at The Artist's Room.

I use the term portrait rather than still life, for these plants are depicted as individuals, and in such a way that their presence is almost that of individual personalities.

The nine pieces, each built up painstakingly from thin glazes of oil paint, have a photorealistic quality, largely due to the clever use of narrow depth of field.

As with close-up photographs, the backgrounds are blurred, creating drifting washes of light and shade against which the finely detailed plants stand out boldly.

The works are readily comparable to recent local exhibitions by Mary Mulholland.

There is one major difference, however.

Whereas Mulholland's blooms tend to be placed against an almost claustrophobic, three-dimensional darkness, in Batt's work there is an airy lightness to the space the plants occupy.

In both of these artists' paintings, composition is as important a factor in the presentation as the precision of the depiction, and Batt's work utilises both colour and surface area well, leading the eye across the canvas with bold living diagonals of plant.