Studies for a Shield after Battle
Patriothall Gallery
Edinburgh

CHARLOTTE CULLEN makes work from steel and aluminium. It has sharp corners, torn edges and a bleak industrial monochrome and the rough surfaces on her assembly Studies for a Shield after Battle bear the traces of assault.

From the metal plates she makes prints — when pressed into paper, the identity of the battle reveals itself and at the centre of the show are two sequences of three small prints, each whispering the sources of her work.

Marrow I, II and III are like the random messages scratched into a school desk or a battered bus stop. It is not the content of the words that speak, so much as the invocation of a conflicted adolescence.

While the fantasy of ancestral battles lurks behind the work, the real ones are those of alienation, gender identity and social conflict and you feel her empathy with the agonies of the ordinary, universal teenager.

Following the Ghost I, II and III extends this fascination with arbitrary mark-making into the very material of steel. Her own delicate rainfall of micro scratches liberates the expressive grey tones and softness of the industrial material, as though it had its own tale of battle to tell and its own sombre relationship to trauma.

The material is a metaphor for the human body and the show teases out these complementary inside stories, one human and the other elemental. It then dares to explore them as three-dimensional presences.

The first steps towards a surprisingly joyous assertion of a queer aesthetics, these scratched and war-torn sheets of metal — carriers of unexpected intimations of inner life and memory — arise, balance themselves and find ways to stand up together and suggest purpose and motion.

It is refreshingly genderless, a far cry from the sanctimonious narcissism of Anthony Gormley’s endless repetitions of his own naked body, and it recalls the post-minimalist school of which the short-lived American sculptress Eva Hesse was the leading light.

But Cullen has reconfigured the aesthetic into another culture, another experience of class and our own historical moment.

It greets the needs of the present without sentimentality and with clear eyes. The show expresses a burgeoning confidence in its own unexpected and mysterious beauty.

This is a new community of queer subjects that are becoming sure of themselves and beginning to dance. A shame they only had the briefest of showings last weekend.