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Edinburgh Art Festival - The Improbable City

There was a moment during the 2014 Edinburgh Art Festival when festival director Sorcha Carey found herself sitting above the city's old Royal High School, where work by Amar Kanwar and Shilpa Gupta was being shown inside and outside architect Thomas Hamilton's neo-classical Greek Doric creation built between 1826 and 1929. Indian curator Vidya Shivadas, who was standing beside Carey, looked out at the city's panoramic view. “Sorcha,” Carey remembers Shivadas saying. “You live in a picture postcard.” This confirmed something Carey had always thought. “Edinburgh as a city has a vocabulary of the imagination,” she says. “There's something profoundly fairytaleish about it. There's a magic castle and at times it looks like a dark kingdom.” Out of this has come The Improbable City, a series of seven public art commissions for this year's Edinburgh Art Festival featuring brand new interventions by artists including Charles Avery and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, and set to be

Graham Fagen: Scotland + Venice 2015

May 9th-November 22 nd Graham Fagen appears to be making gold when Scottish Art News comes calling at the Glasgow-based artist's home studio. Alchemy of one kind of another is certainly on Fagen's agenda as he fires up lumps of clay in the kiln in his garden shed. These rough-hewn cubes will form part of a set of works that make up Fagen's solo show which, under the auspices of Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, will represent Scotland at this year's Venice Biennale. Upstairs, the floor is lined with small bronze trees, on the branches of which will eventually hang some of the cubes currently being fired. For Venice, Fagen is planning to mount a large-scale bronze tree, which as he explains, he's “trying to take the life out of it, so it's some kind of cross between nature, architecture and function.” Fagen has previously shown in Venice in 2003 as part of Scotland's first year at the Bienale in the group show, Zenomap, as well as non-country based gr

Artist Rooms: Joseph Beuys

Timespan, Helmsdale, June 5th-September 6 th   When Richard Demarco brought Joseph Beuys to Edinburgh College of Art as part of the 1970 Edinburgh International Festival exhibition of iconoclastic contemporary German artists, Strategy: Get Arts, it fostered a relationship between Beuys and Scotland which impacted and influenced both ever after. The latest encounter comes in one of the National Galleries of Scotland's ongoing Artist Rooms series of touring shows, which puts some of Beuys' fat and felt based work into Timespan, the Helmsdale based gallery and museum which is the only public contemporary art gallery in Sutherland. Given Beuys' focus on the environment and notions of community, the connection with a relatively isolated village such as Helmsdale is clear, as Timespan curator Frances Davis explains. “For us it makes perfect sense,” Davis says. “Not just to do with the symbolic properties of fat and felt in terms of nourishment and warmth, but the eng

Katy Dove

December 1 st 1970-January 27 th 2015 It is with sadness that Scottish Art News reports the death of Glasgow-based artist and musician Katy Dove, aged forty-four. Dove's vibrant animations were invested with a sense of colour and rhythm, something she also applied to the music of Muscles of Joy, the all-female band which Dove was a key member of. Dove was born in Oxford and grew up one of five sisters in Jemimaville on the Black Isle. After studying psychology at the University of Glasgow, Dove made jewellery before gaining a scholarship to Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee in 1996. Here Dove began to explore sculpture, and introduced animation to her automatic drawings with Fantasy Freedom (1999), a ninety-second film that formed the core of her degree show. Dove went on to become part of Zenomap, Scotland's first Venice Biennale show in 2003. While recent works such as Meaning in Action (2013) continued her exploration of bodily movement,

Karen Dunbar - Happy Days

Karen Dunbar didn't know much about Samuel Beckett's work before the Tron Theatre's artistic director Andy Arnold asked her to play Winnie in Happy Days, which opens next week as part of the theatre's Mayfesto season. Now, however, she's something of an expert on a play which at first glance looks like one of the oddest ever written. “It's pretty left field,” says Dunbar, sitting in an upstairs meeting room at the Tron, all wrapped up in a warm coat and woolly hat as she sucks on an E-cigarette attached to a small cannister with the word 'zen' on the side. “I can't say I came to it as a big Beckett fan. Nah. I just said, Samuel Beckett He's a writer. Is he Irish? No, he's American. No, wait. So that would've been my answer on Who Wants to be A Millionaire? Now, of course, I could tell you what colour flannel he prefers wearing. I do enjoy studying, studying for a cause. I actually like reading random pish about nothing, anyway, so it

Nicolas Party: Boys and Pastel

Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, May 2nd-June 21st. Inside Inverleith House, Nicolas Party and a small regiment of assistants are painting every available inch of wall-space with rich blocks of colour. These will form the scenic  backdrop  to a series of new works that will make up the Swiss-born, Glasgow-trained, Brussels-based artist's first major solo show in a UK public gallery. As a former graffiti artist, Party is used to transforming the landscape, and in keeping with this, the murals will be as integral to the experience as a stage set. As the consciously effete and decidedly unmacho title of the show suggests, the characters that eventually do appear are equally theatrical and exclusively male figures. Whether seen singly or in conspiratorial pairs, with their rouged cheeks and puffed-out, exaggerated demeanour, if not for their unsmiling expressions that give them the air of ever so slightly predatory Victorian dolls come to life, Party's boys mig

Kevin Williamson - Neu! Reekie!, #UntitledOne and Why His First Publishing Venture in Fifteen Years Won't Be Dealing With Amazon

Mayday looks set to be an extra special occasion for Kevin Williamson this weekend. This has little to do with the political past of a man who, as a one time Scottish Socialist Party firebrand, was the first person to be ejected from the Scottish parliament building in Holyrood while making a protest against the Iraq war while sporting a George Bush mask. It is to do with the launch of #UntitledOne, the new poetry anthology and accompanying music compilation produced in association with Birlinn's Polygon imprint by Neu! Reekie!, the monthly poetry, music and animation night presented at assorted Edinburgh venues over the last four and a half years by Williamson in partnership with poetic whirlwind Michael Pedersen. While the former features the likes of Tom Leonard, Scotland's Makar Liz Lochhead and Douglas Dunn nestling up to Jenni Fagan, Aidan Moffat and Jock Scot, the latter sees Mercury Music Prize winners Young Fathers line up with the likes of The Sexual Objects, Momus