Lauren Gault, bone stone voice alone, 2025, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA). Photo by Ruth Clark.
bone stone voice alone Lauren Gault
Curated by May Rosenthal Sloan
Dundee Contemporary Arts
152 Nethergate, Dundee
25 October 2025 – 18 January 2026
Review by Caitlin Merrett King
As ever with exhibitions by Glasgow based artist Lauren Gault, there are a million things to look at. I don’t mean to sound nonchalant – I love this. I love exhibitions where there are so many little bits you have to look at, and it makes you stay to try to take all this in, or at least asks you to, if you have the time, or maybe come back again and notice some other new element, have a new experience. It is rich and gorgeous, a banquet or, more raw than this – all the elements of a complex recipe laid out.
I enter Lauren’s bright and vast exhibition, bone stone voice alone, which expands across all the recently renovated galleries at Dundee Contemporary Arts. The exhibition is about voice and land, specifically investigating the local area of Tayside, and calling on the myth of Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses – the exhibition title recounting Echo’s progression from human body to singular voice, banished to a cave recalling the last words she hears for eternity as punishment for talking too much. I hear a piercing sound coming from the corridor connecting galleries one and two. Collected and manipulated sounds, developed in collaboration with composer Richy Carey (who Gault previously worked with on her exhibition, Samhla at Atlas Arts, Isle of Skye in 2022) and played using ‘exciters’ that produce sounds in response to the surface of the materials they are placed on, planted across the exhibition, create an intermittent polyphonic experience that grounds me into the physicality of the show — the sounds muddle with those from the visitor assistants’ radios, voices upon voices.
Gallery one contains several ‘truth windows’ displaying glittering chunks of Scottish Achnaba Stone and Bluehills psammite, suggesting a geology that could exist below the gallery floor, or samples of the surrounding Tayside landscape. The stones are peppered with graffiti-like carvings reminiscent of those in the nearby Wemyss Caves that are covered in ancient Pictish carvings and more contemporary graffiti. These carvings are repeated across the exhibition in the two small ancillary galleries – into a slab of sandstone (typical of the buildings in Dundee) that braces a corner of the darker space, carved with shifting motifs of clipart-like ovals and hearts, and the words, ‘amore’, ‘more’, ‘clamore’ – a flickering semantic gag, like a teenager’s notebook scrawls, an echo upon an echo. The words are carved in a very specific Metronic typography, reminiscent of that used on branding for agricultural mineral blocks, a familiar image to Gault who comes from a farming family. The other typeface used in the exhibition is a Grotesque, a word which derives from ‘grottesca’, the italian word for cave – a typically Gault-ian hyper-focused and delicious detail.
Entering gallery two, a large text comes into view, screenprinted directly onto the wall using fine stone dust (a byproduct of stone cutting) in collaboration with the DCA Print Studio – ‘GOODBYE deinos sauros’ is also printed in the Metronic and grotesque types. The slogan defines a paleontological angle but it also winks. Notably, as part of the gallery’s typical artist choice screenings, Gault has, alongside Herzog’s ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ (2010) selected the childhood classic, ‘The Land Before Time’ (1988). ‘GOODBYE deinos sauros’ also calls immediately to the giant, skeletal Q5m loader arms and Unigrip bale handlers present in galleries one and two. Whilst at first glance, they might appear to be excavation machinery, the equipment is actually used for holding and lifting, and Gault employs them for their suggestion of encircling or protecting – she tells me that she refers to the machinery sculptures as ‘throats and necks’. A neat reference also to the repeated symbol of the hyroid bone that appears throughout the exhibitions. The hyroid is a small u-shaped bone that is the only bone in the body not connected to any other bone. It floats in the throat supporting the tongue, aiding swallowing and processing sound.
It is this scene within gallery two that completely envelopes me. The mechanical dinosaurs graze on a large low, also u-shaped, platform covered in quilted packing blankets and moulded paper using the Japanese technique Takuhon – a lush, grey topography. Everything is swathing and elegant. Oblong glass forms half full and empty punctuate the scene and catch the low autumnal light pouring down through the gallery’s huge skylights. A large stretch of light grey marle jersey is punctuated with three hemmed holes, like a garment for three heads, and further round the back of the platform, camouflaged, made from packing blanket material, are a brilliant pair of unlined jackets.
Within this exhibition is a conversation about people and with people, both present and absent: who is allowed to speak about and for the land? Gault’s response is polyvocal, having collaborated with many multidisciplinary practitioners and experts to develop and make the works for this exhibition. From quilting experts to manufacturers of scientific glassware to academics from the University of Dundee, as well as continuing a collaboration with Professor Katharine Earnshaw, a Classicist from the University of Exeter who also worked on the project at Atlas Arts, Gault’s authorship as an artist her is complicated – she’s asking questions within her practice that she knows she can’t, and doesn’t want to, answer alone.
This position makes the work difficult to register – as I gushed earlier, it is a million things, it is a million people, and a million years. It opens up and it doesn’t answer an audience but continues to ask questions, acknowledging the ever-shifting nature of research that is embedded within Scottish landscape, and the silenced and underrepresented voices of those who have worked, and continue to work on it and for it. bone stone voice alone uses linguistic and material repetitions to develop a rich visual language, but it does not repeat, it expands. Gault does all this whilst showing her working out too — the exhibition guide tells us everything, the materials list gives more detail than you might expect, the processes are made visible. It is so bountiful.