Emma Hart’s sculptures are known for making a racket; or rather, for seeming like they ought to. Bringing the surreal, cartoonish style of Philip Guston into three-dimensional space, she often creates works that jut out into galleries at head height, their bold, simple, colourful forms suggesting mouths, loudspeakers, speech bubbles or other graphic markers of vocal noise.  
All this hullabaloo is to do with class for Hart, who last year co-curated group show Poor Things at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket, exploring themes of working-class identity in contemporary art. In a recent artist’s statement she notes, ‘if you come from a working-class background and are trying to be somebody in this middle-class artworld . . . your speech acts to produce yourself, and probably gives you away.’ Unbowed, her sculptures seek out confrontations with the viewer, opting them into awkward interactions, making them complicit in uneven power dynamics, or sometimes just inviting them to join in the din.

Hart’s current exhibition at Hospitalfield arts centre in Arbroath consists of four gurning, cheering and crying faces dispersed across the neat back lawn. Establishing a nicely irreverent contrast with the Scots-baronial pile before them, they nonetheless pay homage to their built environment, in particular to the four sundials protruding from the red sandstone tower above. Hart’s faces are sundials too: big, shiny, bowl-shaped ceramic ones, their shadow-casting gnomons repurposed as pointy noses that jut upwards at the viewer from waist-height plinths.

The four works (‘Out Of Time’, ‘Borrowed Time’, ‘No Time’ and ‘Nice Time’) pass wry comment on the compartmentalisation and incremental chipping away of free time in modern consumer culture, and the ways in which we try to steal it back. ‘Out Of Time’ holds its fingers to its O-shaped mouth in panic, while for ‘No Time’, the hours and minutes around the clockface’s edge are replaced by a long, circular litany of noes: wherever the shadow points, time is up. ‘Borrowed Time’ is two-faced, the opposing sides of its visages competing to soak up the sunlight, like ego-ridden artworld aficionados. ‘Nice Time’, meanwhile, consists of an acid-house smiley face surrounded by a psychedelic mane of multi-coloured tongues. Speaking to Hart’s interest in rave culture, it alludes to both the liberatory potential and drab escapism of drug use and nightlife.
Class is the great taboo of our current, identity-obsessed arts scene. Hart confronts the subject here with humour and a jostling spirit of dissent. The visitor might only wish there were more to see, more faces to read.
Emma Hart: Big Time, Hospitalfield, Arbroath, until Thursday 31 October.