Coffee-Table Notes

Devon Projects, Huntly The fish is on the fire in the outdoor clay oven built by Kawther Luay and Fionn Duffy for the final part of their yearlong exploration of food, foraging and hospitality as collective ritual and shared artistic act. It’s a blowy but sunny Sunday afternoon at Greenmyres, a sixty-three acre site run by Huntly Development Trust ten minutes outside Huntly in Aberdeenshire. More than twenty diner participants are seated at a long table in a covered outdoor shed, having already helped prepare the food the are about to share under Luay and Duffy’s guidance, be it as chef or ceramicist.   Recognising the performative nature of the experience, Luay has cast both herself and Duffy as well as assorted ingredients as characters in their mini epic, from the milk of Act 1 and the grain of Act 2, both presented earlier in the summer, to the third and final act, fired by clay.   With the foodstuffs sourced within a fifty-mile radius, the pots they are contained in have been made

Muscle and guts are at the heart of Peter Howson’s work in this major exhibition, as one of Scotland’s most formidable and most sensitive artists squares up to his back catalogue on an epic scale. A holy trinity of self-portraits introduce each of the three floors, from Jekyll and Hyde (1995) to the Repentant of 2001, and, in his most recent study, a man etched with the lines of experience.     This points all the way back to Howson’s early images of boxers, bruisers, prostitutes and dossers, who seem to be threatening a square go with the viewer. Like the prowling beast in Tiger (2000) painted during a wildlife commission in India, many of Howson’s subjects look ready to pounce. Howson’s choices of celebrity portraits are as telling, as a toned and pneumatic ‘Madonna’ (2002) sits in repose, while a defiant but wary looking ‘Steven Berkoff’ (2002) occupies the mean streets.   On the second floor, under the umbrella title of Suffering and Salvation, Howson charts his religious awakening

Everything connects in Inverness’s fertile arts scene. Or at least that’s how it feels talking with those running the assorted visual arts institutions and spaces in what has long been regarded as the Highland capital. At the centre of this is Inverness Museum and Galleries (IMAG), the major public space that has just opened the Fleming-Wyfold Foundation supported Glasgow Girls and Boys exhibition. This runs alongside the gallery’s permanent collection of historical works.   Steeped in history as IMAG is, there is a welter of contemporary artistic activity stretching throughout the Highlands. While Inverness itself is a relatively small city, the catchment area for cultural provision is, as one curator observes, as big as Belgium. The European comparison is apt. While younger art spaces are informed by received notions of more traditional approaches, most look beyond to something more modern.   This is as much the case in Highland Print Studio as it is in WASPS studio spaces at Inverne