Thornhill, Scotland
“The Unearthed,” Anderson Borba’s current exhibition of totemic wooden sculptures (on view through May 31, 2026), gives a strong sense of things being brought to the surface, of something hidden being revealed. Shows at Cample Line’s small gallery in rural Dumfriesshire—formerly part of a row of millworkers cottages—often feel connected in some way to the surrounding landscape of farmland and countryside, and Borba’s work resonates with a fitting kind of organic mysticism and pagan spirituality. While the natural world and our interaction with it are integral to the sculptures, Borba adds elements of personal experience to the mix, including the rituals of Umbanda (a syncretic religion unique to Brazil), contemporary urban culture (he lives between London and São Paulo), and his identity as a queer man. It is an evocative and occasionally unsettling combination.
Made predominantly from found wood, the sculptures are variously carved, gouged, burned, glued, painted, and lacquered. Many incorporate busy, colorful collages of images cut from magazines and pasted into cuts, crevices, and the inside of carved holes or wrapped around blocks of wood. Sometimes stones are added. Cloak (2026), suspended from two wires attached to a ceiling beam, is made of many variously sized blocks, textured with small notches and linked together with wire. Some have strips of magazine images glued on them, others are charred and painted. While the title suggests an item of clothing or an act of concealment, there’s something slightly cartoonish going on in the way that Cloak hangs and unfurls onto the floor; it resembles a lolling tongue in a “Tom & Jerry” animation, but with the visceral fleshiness of a Philip Guston painting.
Positioned nearby, a group of six slim, almost-but-not-quite figurative works stand as if in conversation. Gathered perhaps for a ceremony of some sort, these part-burnt, part-painted forms appear solemn but proud, both ancient and contemporary, with nods to Brazilian craft traditions and 20th-century Modernist masters like Brancusi, Hepworth, and Giacometti. Their titles reference African oral traditions (Griot, 2026), insect life (Dragonfly, 2026; Mosquito, 2025), our relationship with the natural world (Balancing Act, 2024), and environmental and cultural dissonance (Awakening: The Rite of Spring, 2026). Griot has a “face” made from stones embedded into a smooth “head”; the slender Mosquito features two small, Hepworth-like piercings. These fragile-looking yet statuesque objects are mysterious and powerful.
Some works directly reference contemporary life and identity. Selfie (2024) consists of a short horizontal section of tree trunk with a thin branch extending upward into the air. A piece of wood attached to the end of the branch is carved to resemble a phone screen. The punningly titled Maskulinity (2026) features a light-colored, upright timber post of the kind that might be used for a fence. Near the top, two rough eye holes are positioned on either side of a squared edge. Around the back, a section of the post has been carved into an almost chaotic mix of colored, textured, and burnt shapes of different sizes. As the title suggests, what is being unearthed seems to be the messy, fluid reality behind society’s definitions of maleness. Elsewhere, what Borba is casting light on is more ambiguous—and more intriguing because of it.
