Alison Auldjo: The Last Giraffe, Union Gallery, Edinburgh ****
By Susan Mansfield
Friday, 5th February 2021
The new body of work by the gallerist and painter Alison Auldjo began to take shape last spring, in the early days of the pandemic. A painting of a giraffe took on an apocalyptic quality, becoming an emblem for a world under threat not only from covid-19 but from climate change, wildfires and environmental destruction. The Last Giraffe, imbued with a quiet, long-suffering dignity, is the centrepiece of her new show.
Auldjo's paintings of animals are not enslaved to realism, but they capture the essence of a sheep, a hare, the precise way a cow holds itself or a horse lowers its head to crop grass. Her favourite subject is the donkey, perhaps the most used and abused of beasts. Her animals are not metaphors or personifications, they are entirely themselves, but they embody qualities we recognise: maternal pride, playfulness, vulnerability.
She paints fluidly, combining oils and acrylics. Some pictures are studies, but others are fully worked with finely wrought backgrounds: swans with the curve of a lake behind them and the evening lights of distant dwellings; sheep in a snowy field with the moon in the sky.
While the titles have an element of fun about them (Swan Lake, Dark Horses) these are serious pictures. They are about an animal world on the brink of catastrophe. Hares dance, kangaroos copulate, the last giraffe stands stoically quiet, and a donkey lets out an immense braying laugh, as succinct a comment as I've seen on the state of the present world. These animals have little power, but they understand our world better than we do.