Making sunshine: Jim Lambie’s ‘Wild Is The Wind’ at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery

Jim Lambie: Wild Is The Wind, exhibition installation view, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; image courtesy Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; photo: Luis Power

For Australian audiences who might have last encountered Jim Lambie’s work with Zobop (1999– ) – the space- and mind-warping floor installation made from pulsating lines of rainbow-coloured vinyl tape reconfigured at the MCA for Juliana Engberg’s 2014 Biennale of Sydney – the Scottish artist’s latest show at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney is a quieter, more spontaneous affair.

‘I made this yesterday,’ says Lambie on the eve of the opening of ‘Wild Is The Wind’ (on view until 23 November). Suspended from the ceiling by a string of op-shop beads is a railway sleeper, hovering above the floor at pillow height. It is ‘this deep sleep moment’, the artist explains of the central work, around which the exhibition revolves as a kind of intriguing dreamscape.

Along a high wooden beam overhead, Lambie has arrayed a line of jam jars stuffed with wads of old T-shirt fabric, resembling little pots of paint as if awaiting the artist’s brush or imagination to be dipped into. Around the walls are grids of reconfigured doors, some tequila sunrise-hued, others as if turned from the light, and in between burst sprays of coloured sunglass lenses welded into metal constellations. Lambie, who trained at the Glasgow School of Art in the early 1990s, seems to be deconstructing the optical process of perception, delineating spectacle into simpler, sparer notes. When taken together, he hopes that audiences will gain ‘a new perspective on the space’.

In keeping with his background as a deejay, Lambie has called the exhibition after the song most recently covered by David Bowie on his 1976 album Station to Station, and a sense of musical improvisation is very much alive in the show. Sitting on a small white shelf is a bunch of carrots, dripping orange paint onto the wall and floor – a single gesture also performed on the eve of the show’s opening. ‘It’s about being here and now,’ he says, his thick Glaswegian accent punctuating the air.

Beyond the Sydney show, Lambie’s career continues to buzz. He is included in Tate Liverpool’s current survey of op art, bringing Zobop into psychedelic communion with work by seminal figures like Bridget Riley, Jesús Rafael Soto and Victor Vasarely: ‘It’s nice to be in such esteemed company.’ And there are projects coming up in Dunedin and Tokyo.

But apart from a brief stint in New York early last decade, Glasgow continues to be Lambie’s artistic muse. ‘You know, the weather’s so bad that I guess the reason there’s such a vibrant music and art and literature scene is that you have to make your own sunshine,’ he says only half-jokingly. ‘So there might be an element of truth in that.’ Right now in Sydney, the Glaswegian sun strobes more softly.

Michael Fitzgerald, Sydney