THE older I get, the more I realise there's nothing permanent about bricks and mortar. Cottages are demolished to make way for housing estates, tower blocks are flattened in a day in the name of urban renewal. Familiar landscapes change so quickly an
d decisively we can barely conjure up a picture of what was there before.
It is the same with people. Compare an individual with a photograph taken 30 years before, and there may be few familiar features. At the same time, the present overlays itself on the past, the edges become blurred.
These are ideas sensitively explored in Nicky Bird's commission for Stills, the first part of a project that will continue until 2009. Bird has sought out communities in Scotland which have changed physically beyond all recognition, and enlisted local people within those communities to be her collaborators.
Each image in the show is a digital montage which takes a family photograph from decades past and superimposes it on a present-day phototaken at exactly the same spot. Partially transparent, the old photos blend into the new. The gang of kids at the park or the family gathered at the door are faces from the past, but we are unsure if that tree is from "then" or "now".
Three family groups, dating from 1929 to 1957, are pictured in front of a miner's cottage in Dalmellington, Ayrshire. The cottage still stands, but the people shift and change like ghosts. The kids pictured in Ardler, Dundee, in the early 1980s will be parents now themselves, though the last "multi" tower block was felled only in 2007, to make room for neat brick semis.
Things are more eerie in photographs from Craigmark and Lethanhill, mining villages in Ayrshire, which have all but disappeared. Only a windswept moor exists where the village school once stood, or where a family was pictured proudly in front of their pigeon loft. Within living memory, traces have been all but erased from the landscape.
Bird's initial inspiration for the project was Morrison's Haven, Prestongrange, an early industrial estate closed in the 1960s. Traces of the harbour, colliery and brickworks remain, but you have to seek them out. The drying green, shown in a snap from the 1930s with its lines of neat white garments billowing in the wind, is now scrubland, a bulldozer suggesting more changes to come.
The personal nature of the photographs might have excluded the viewer, but in this context it has the effect of inviting us in, to recall our own memories.
They tell us about cultural change – drying greens and phoneboxes replaced by tumble dryers and mobile phones – but in a more profound sense still, they tell us where we have come from. Bricks and mortar may quickly vanish without trace, but we carry inside us memories of past homes, and the people in them.
Bird's work sensitively teases out these ideas.
Painter Janice McNab is known for painting series of inanimate objects – airline seats, flotation tanks, curtained windows – in a way that takes us beyond the objects into the realm of imagination and ideas. For several years now, she has been working on chocolate boxes.
For an artist, the chocolate box comes with obvious baggage. Landscape, in particular, is burdened by its history as a decorative form, often sentimentalised, of which the "chocolate box painting" may be the worst example. By painting large-scale works inspired by the moulded plastic trays inside chocolate boxes, McNab is engaging with that history, but what she is doing also goes beyond this. No one goes to this much trouble just to make a point. Clearly, the plastic trays, the way they reflect light and pool darkness, are taking her somewhere as an artist.
In her paintings, the contours of plastic become fantastical landscapes, full of precipitous ridges, lakes and sometimes tiny human figures, tourists, or intrepid explorers in this alien landscape.
In her choice of colours, and the way she blends them, she steps away from realism, creating a palette of blues, pinks and mauves for her landscape of the imagination. Sometimes, she employs reflections to great effect.
There is plenty here to remind us that McNab is a clever, thoughtful painter, whether or not we share her fascination with her subject.
&149 Nicky Bird runs until 20 July; Janice McNab until 12 July
