There’s something remarkably pat and self-assured, something of the orderly chatelaine, in Chapel (rose), Fiona Kinsella’s current solo exhibition at transit gallery. Her sculptural cakes are a familiar enough sight to even a recently-returned Hamiltonian like myself - her massive sheet-cake at this past spring’s TH&B exhibition was wonderfully huge - but here they are joined by new efforts in oil painting, inspired by her travels in Scotland.

Fiona Kinsella, chapel (rose), Installation View

Surface pleasures aside, Kinsella has pulled off a considerable feat here with a hushed, clean-edged presentation that still manages to stick uncomfortably in your teeth like a hard boiled sweet from your grandmother’s candy dish. The white right angles of frames and plinths that would typically grant the viewer a safe distance work well in Kinsella’s favour here, their quiet presence lending a contemporary spirituality to the proceedings.

Fiona Kinsella, (cake) dove (white niche) (angel), Mixed media, 2008

In this context, her cakes function as miniature momento mori, their royal icing sheaths reminiscent of marble tombs. By their associations with food, however, they carry the potential to rot and evoke the food-sacrifices of ancient belief systems, a fetishism reinforced by Kinsella’s use of animal skulls and human hair as decorative touches. The presence of these objects within a primarily Victorian aesthetic of Christian values speaks to an underlying syncretism in this chapel and a non-denominational notion of the sacred passing fluidly between cultures and rituals.

Fiona Kinsella, (50 lbs) chapel (rose) (white & red) (of sweet sleep), Oil on canvas, 24″x24″, 2008

Although these paintings are burdened by the sorts of titles that make an art writer wince for all those brackets, there remains something refreshingly basic and primordial about what Kinsella is doing with her paint here, treating it as a sculptural clay to build dense surfaces of whorls and peaks that coalesce into bird’s beaks as readily as they do the roses of the artist’s intent. That initial fascination with the materiality of the paint itself, common enough among first-time oil painters and those returning to the medium after a long absence, easily supersedes the subject; floral forms emerge in part from the glucose-rich viscosity of paint, then disappear back into their like-coloured surrondings, creating a constant ephemeral shift.

Fiona Kinsella, (32 lbs) chapel (rose) (of light, or girl) (detail), Oil on canvas, 18″x24″, 2008

Given the gloss and flourish with which Kinsella handles the medium, her chapel (rose) paintings are fully coherent companions to her sculptural practice, and read more effectively on her own terms than they do as part of any attempt to cast them within a painterly narrative. For that reason, the exhibition brief describing these works as a feminine appropriation of the “macho” attributes of paint left me more than a little cold for reasons beyond my jaw-gnashing impatience with any form of criticism that continues to ascribe knee-jerk masculinity to a practice as diverse as oil painting. I respect an art that can address a history of femininity on its own terms far more than a feminine art that embattles itself with masculinity for purely provocative motives, and Kinsella reads as the former rather than the latter. As a sculptor (and I am happy to perceive her as such, paintings or not), she is feminine without agenda, spiritual without religion, and still manages to place the viewer on the razor-edge of uncertainty without having to play from inside a political bag of tricks. That, in itself, is her best accomplishment as an artist.

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