Exhibition: Material evidence

Liz Rideal: new work Ferens Art Gallery, Hull The Face in the Desert NMPFTV, Bradford

Look at Liz Rideal's Arras suite blue and Arras suite yellow (both of 1997) in Hull, and you may find yourself struck by a strange sense of deja vu. This could be because the works look like eiderdowns - albeit luxurious ones, being clearly quilted from an expensive sort of silk - although there is something else about them that seems oddly familiar. Look again and you will see that Rideal's quilts are not actually made of silk at all, but of photographs of silk: more specifically (and very much more prosaically), of photographs of silk taken in a photo- booth - 1,624 of them altogether, or 406 strips of four, glued together and laminated to form collages. Each strip taking five minutes to develop, the Arras suites represent, at the very minimum, 34 straight hours of indescribable tedium for Rideal: sitting in a booth, throwing skein after skein of silk into the air, in the hope that the camera will catch it at an angle she can use in her work. Do not even think about the sacks full of loose change she must have had to take into the booth with her.

Actually, you can set your minds at rest on the last score. The company that makes photo-booths has lent Rideal one, gratis. None the less, a kind of wilful difficulty does seem to be part of the artist's chosen working method. Why? Well, you might want to think of Rideal's photographic arrases in terms of a rather more conventional mode of art, namely of the classical painting of drapery in oil on canvas. Where classical painters used brush-strokes to reproduce the image of cloth on cloth, Rideal - who is fascinated by the painted drapery of Van Dyck - stitches together innumerable photographs of silk to make collages that are both of and about images of drapery. You might also like to think about these works as subversive.

Rideal teaches at the National Portrait Gallery and confesses herself irritated by the elitism of traditional ideas of portraiture: that is to say, as a body of work that consists largely of expensively-made representations of the royal, rich and famous. The photo-booth, by contrast, represents portraiture on an altogether more demotic level, "loaded", in Rideal's trenchant phrase, "with all the emotions of train stations and snogging and oh-God-I've-got-to-get-my-passport-picture; anger, panic and fantastic joy". Her pictures of silk and chiffon bring the aesthetics of classicism to the station concourse, producing images that are ironic, and yet have a considerable, if melancholy, beauty of their own.

But you can't help feeling that there is something else at work in the all-too-visible tedium of Rideal's chosen working method. Whatever their incidental beauty, works like the Arras suites, Black Cascade (1997) and Criss cross (1998) are not merely finicky, but actually about finickiness. Rideal's own view is that her pictures "have more to do with abstract expressionism than they have to do with sewing", but the infinite close- work of her cloth portraits does call to mind Rozsika Parker's influential book, The Subversive Stitch, which analyses needlework as a force for the social containment of Victorian women.

The subjects of Rideal's work - silk, swishing hair, her dead grandmother's slippers - all have strong associations of womanliness about them, a quality which the Ferens Gallery has exploited by allowing Rideal to show her pictures with an adjoining exhibition of women's portraits entitled "Girls, Girls, Girls". The link is an apt one, for Rideal's images are also portraits of womanhood: sometimes literally, as in the picture of her grandmother, made up of endless photo-booth shots of the artist's own hands; occasionally allusively, as in the Hitchcockian Green Veil (1997), inspired by the death of artist Helen Chadwick; but always womanly in the fastidiousness of their making.

Biography of an apparently more straightforward kind is to be found in The Face in the Desert, a photographic installation by the Berlin artist, Joachim Schmidt, in a pedestrian underpass leading to Bradford's National Museum of Film, Photography and Television. It may be possible to think of a less enticing venue for the showing of art, but it would take time: the reason, presumably, for Bradford Council's civic enthusiasm for the scheme.

If its members had hoped for something of a cheering nature from Schmidt, though, they must be sorely disappointed. Mining the "People: Miscellaneous" section of the Museum's vast archive of photographs from the now-defunct Daily Herald (latterly the Sun), the German artist has projected an ever- changing gallery of black-and-white images of unknown citizenry upon the walls of the underpass. The optimistic official interpretation of this is that it will suggest to its users the uplifting idea that everyone can have his or her 15 minutes of fame. Since most of the nonentities chosen by Schmidt achieved theirs for reasons which are far from encouraging - a small boy kidnapped and murdered, a woman whose house was destroyed by an aeroplane, a debutante arrested for shoplifting - one wonders at the likely moral effect of his work on the good people of Bradford.

More to the point, Schmidt's installation is not so much powerful as haunting. The endless, anonymous, silently projected images have the feel of Jerusalem's Holocaust Museum about them. Since the act of walking through the beams of projected light unavoidably adds your own silhouette to those on the wall, the effect is depressingly immediate: here, the dead faces seems to say, is the fate that awaits you all. Add to this the fact that these images are shown in a space which is both gloomy and underground and the effect is positively sepulchral. As civic art goes, The Face in the Desert certainly breaks the Henry-Moore-in-the-shopping-plaza mould. Whether daily users of Schmidt's underpass will be duly thankful for this is another matter.

`Liz Rideal: new work': Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (01482 613902) to 13 June. `The Face in the Desert': NMPFT, Bradford (01274 202030).