Dissonance + Harmony’ is Hanna ten Doornkaat’s current exhibition with &gallery in Edinburgh. Though the German-born mixed media artist has participated in group exhibitions with the gallery before, this is her first solo show. Featuring a total of 47 pieces of her work, the exhibition is part of Hanna’s ongoing investigation into mark making as a concept. If we are to take drawing as the process of mark making and erasing, then Hanna’s work explores this process in a way that gets us thinking differently about lines and the spaces in between them.

Almost every piece in the exhibition shares a layer of obsessively repeated marks, predominantly in graphite or ink: line after line after line; square after square after square; scribble after scribble after scribble. Amidst this repetition my eyes fell victim to commonplace tricks of the optical illusory trade, my retina manifesting their own blurs and formations on the surfaces of the artwork. Expanses of repetition are layered over, under and between other aspects (of colour, texture, words) to create dense and intricate palimpsests. Layers intercept and interrupt each other in a compact and constant dialogue between instances of revealing and concealing.

Simple-looking at a superficial glance, the intricacies of Hanna’s work become clear when you get close: a shift occurs when you relinquish time to and distance from these objects. Formally they are industrial-looking – such frequent and precise repetition of straight and parallel lines resonates with the familiar churn of machine manufacturing processes, the rigid and controlled production lines that underpin repetitive industrial scale production. But closer observation reveals the inconsistencies and imperfections that are the happenings of human hands, slippages that belong to manual rather than machine-automated processes. The end of a line is out of sync by a millimetre; there are dents on the board with depth that varies to match the pressure of Hanna’s hand. Small details betray artistic labour, and the obsessive repetitions of lines and shapes inherit an air of care and attention that machine-produced objects and patterns can never take on.

The title of the exhibition, ‘dissonance + harmony’, speaks to Hanna’s pursuit of a balance between the two in her work. In a 2018 interview, Hanna told Young Space that ‘what fascinates and also frustrates me is the speed and amount of imagery on social media and what this does to us subconsciously. I often don’t know where my inspiration might have come from, and this has made me introduce the lines in my work as a reference to speed and transition.’ The proliferation of lines and shapes has a white-noise effect, demonstrating just how interchangeable the two can be. White noise contains all the audible frequencies. People listen to it to help them sleep because it has a masking effect on noises that might affect light sleepers. In the same way, the obsessive, laborious process of layering marks is masked by an initial semblance of machine-like order and regimen. In this exhibition, lines and their in-betweens marry to the same end.

Hanna’s practice mimics the overstimulation that characterises existing within and adjacent to a global internet, though the harmony she achieves feels more measured and established than any experience I’ve personally managed to have with cyberspace. My favourite piece in the exhibition is called ‘self portrait (me)’. A rectangle of space is carved out amidst a barrage of white scribbles that mimics TV static, an immediately recognisable visual counterpart to white noise. Inside the rectangle, the word ‘SOLITUDE’ sits snugly in vinyl lettering. The word holds its shape harshly, as a magnet might in a sea of iron fillings, solid but densely surrounded. The piece and its title made me think about my own subjectivity. It made me want to carve out a neat space of my own, just for me – a shelter from life’s noise and static.

Dissonance + Harmony is showing at &gallery until 29th September.

Words by Alice Keeling

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