Navigating Stevenson: Digital Artworks by Sara Gadd

National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2003
48 pp.; illus. Paper, $n.p.
ISBN: 1-903278 41 4
Web site: http://www.saragadd.com

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

Sara Gadd, of Great Britain's Falmouth College of the Arts, created the "Hydropathic" series in 2001. Her camera investigated Craiglockhart, a therapeutic spa of healing waters that was requisitioned during World War I as an oasis for officers suffering shell-shock. At that time Craiglockhart published its own literary magazine The Hydra to which both Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon contributed war poetry while patients. Gadd's photographs evoked a quiet, liquid place, and swimmers' bodies can be partially glimpsed sliding through its pools.

Her 2003 project "Navigating Stevenson", based on National Library of Scotland archives of Robert Lewis Stevenson's travels, is crisp and well realized, yet chilling and disturbing in its loneliness. Conceptually problematic, it subverts Stevenson's populous milieu with its reconstructed 3D digital architectural models of his world. The archival photos upon which she based her work make the viewer realize how vital human company was to Stevenson in his lifelong struggle fighting frailty and bedridden isolation. Gadd takes a photo where Stevenson was enjoying the comraderie of men while spearfishing and revises it to leave only an empty, shiny boat. The wooden pole church containing the thrones from which the island king and queen ruled is turned into an icy building in which jostled chairs represent the drunkenness the rulers fought and railed against. Sepia photographs captured the quality of the tropical architecture's natural materials, but Gadd reworks the thatch to look like metal knife blades. A charmingly painted ship's figurehead rescued from a wreck and surrounded by locals becomes a featureless chrome hood ornament on a bare, glassy porch.

Sara Gadd is skilled at the creation of digital worlds and uses an all-over monochrome color in each image effectively and evocatively. Yet each piece feels unfinished, a frequent dilemma of the 3D digital medium. This reviewer wants to navigate in real time through all the spaces she created for "Navigating Stevenson". Virtual realities are too often presented as ends in themselves, whereas they may ultimately prove most useful as navigable "skins" to a wealth of multimedia information. Gadd's "Navigating Stevenson" could come to fruition in networked cyberspace, each tableau serving as the spatial interface to Stevenson's writings, secondary research materials, and even the catalog essays by Duncan Forbes, Elaine Grieg, and James Lawson now residing between the exhibition catalog's soft covers.

Until then, it is curious and disconcerting that a storyteller of lads' adventures among seafaring men and craven brigands, a writer able to investigate the dual nature of many humans in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is given by artist Sara Gadd an unforgiving, depopulated world. "The Feast of the Opening of the Road of the Loving Heart" was a grand party Stevenson gave on a porch full of Samoan chiefs, all happily drinking and sharing with the author bowls of alcoholic, peppery kava, and the surviving photograph makes it look like a lot of fun. Gadd's image of the smooth, shadowy, empty porch, and empty carved bowl, doesn't.