Coffee-Table Notes

Where did all the working class photographers go? This was a question posed by Johny Pitts when he started thinking about curating the exhibition that became After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024. The answer comes in images by a diverse array of more than twenty-five artists that make up the exhibition. As the show arrives in Edinburgh from the Hayward Gallery as part of a UK tour, it highlights an often-overlooked era in British photography.   “A s a kid I started to see the old world disappear, and this new world ushered in by neo liberal capitalism,’ says Pitts, who draws the title of the exhibition from  American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man . “On the one hand there was the complete destruction of working class community, but then there was this kind of resurrection of it through capitalist consumption. Yet what lingers are the ghosts of a working class culture, and even within th...

A large sycamore tree stands directly within the sight lines of the dining room windows of Colstoun House, the 900-year-old pink hued mansion house on the outskirts of Haddington in East Lothian, fifteen miles from Edinburgh. As a focal point of the immediate landscape surrounding the oldest family home in Scotland and still the domain of the Broun clan, the tree has proved an inspiration for the artists who have passed through the residency programme started up in 2022 by Colstoun Arts. This is the initiative set up by Mackie Sinclair-Parry, the former business strategy consultant and art collector nephew of the current laird.   “They all paint that tree,” Sinclair-Parry says, pointing through the window following a tour of Colstoun’s art collection. “It doesn't matter who it is. That's the starting point. I might as well dig that tree up and take it to London. It's funny how we’ve got hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of trees in Colstoun, but they all pic...

When Benno Schotz (1891-1984) visited his brother in Glasgow in 1912, the Estonian sculptor never really left. The then twenty-one year-old returned to his homeland once before settling in Scotland for good. The result of Schotz’s self imposed exile was an artistic and personal journey that saw him become one of twentieth century Scotland’s greatest sculptors.   As a member of the Royal Scottish Academy and Head of Sculpture and Ceramics at Glasgow School of Art, Schotz would also be an inspirational teacher and champion of other artists. At the heart of his work was a network of family and friends, with his wife Milly, daughter Cherna and son Amiel influencing his figurative work prior to him taking a more abstract path inspired by trees in Kelvingrove Park.   Schotz’s migration to Scotland is the drive behind Benno Schotz and A Scots Miscellany, the current exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy that puts some of Schotz’s key works alongside twelve other first generation m...

When a live staging of Derek Jarman’s final film was presented at Tramway in Glasgow last month, it heralded a major new exhibition of Jarman’s work at the Hunterian Art Gallery. Blue Now saw four performers read Jarman’s text for Blue (1993), in which extracts from Jarman’s diaries as he came to terms with losing his sight from an AIDS related illness were heard over an Yves Klein hued blue screen as the film’s sole hypnotic visual.  Digging in Another Time: Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature is the first Jarman exhibition in Scotland since 1992. Despite the thirty-two year gap, it marks a continuation of the late filmmaker’s connection with Scotland dating back decades. While this comes largely through a headline making 1989 show in Glasgow as part of the National Review of Live Art (NRLA), other tangential connections left their mark, with Jarman going on to influence a new generation of artists shown alongside him at the Hunterian.   Digging in Another Time features works from a...

Anya Gallaccio may not have any memory of Paisley, where she was born, but the Turner Prize nominated artist’s new installation currently gracing the Renfrewshire mecca’s High Street is a homecoming of sorts in other ways. Stroke, after all, is the latest iteration of a work first seen in Scotland in 2014 at Jupiter Artland, the sculpture park on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where Gallaccio has a permanent work, The light pours out of me (2012), in situ. As before with Stroke, Gallaccio has painted the walls of a room in chocolate, leaving an ever-changing sensory feast in its wake.   In Paisley, this has seen Gallaccio take over a disused shop, transforming it into an elegant looking chocolaty paradise designed to entice passers by into its sweetly scented interior. Sitting between a branch of WH Smith and Tech Doctor, and with signs for a long closed clothing alterations emporium still in the windows above, Stroke’s ornately painted exterior and flower adorned window is a classy l...

As its name implies, Sonica is about rocking worlds. Over eleven days in September, the Glasgow based Cryptic company’s eighth edition of its festival ‘for curious minds and restless spirits’ mixes up a smorgasbord of international audio-visual artworks from Egypt, Ukraine, Quebec and more. These are seen and heard alongside a plethora of homegrown fare from the likes of the Scottish Ensemble, the RSNO, composer Michael Begg and more, infiltrating the city across multiple venues great and small. Sonica sets out its store from the start with Nati Infiniti, the Scottish premiere of a new work at Tramway by Allesandro Cortini of Nine Inch Nails. Other highlights include Songs for a Passerby, Celine Daeman’s Venice Film Festival Award-winning VR opera for a sole headset wearer; a cyborg pop concert of the future from Danish ensemble, NEKO3 and German multimedia composer Alexander Schubert.   Scottish and Scotland based artists in the programme include the world premiere of Ela Orleans’...

St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh has seen many things over the last 900 years since it was founded in 1124 by King David I. Civil War and the Reformation may have put what was once John Knox’s parish church at the centre of history, but neither Knox or the king could have predicted Luminescence.  This unique collaboration between internationally renowned Edinburgh born saxophonist Tommy Smith and Russian émigré artist Maria Rud will see Smith and Rud improvise their responses both to each other and the building. As Smith’s solo saxophone absorbs the cathedral’s acoustic, Rud will project her live paintings onto stained glass windows on the cathedral wall. The result should make for an ever-changing fusion of sound and vision that utilises the venue’s atmosphere to make something monumental.   ‘I love it,’ says Rud.  ‘St Giles’ is very much the third performer in the show. The architecture dictates what I paint, and the acoustics as well are very special. St Giles’ t...

When Flannery O’kafka learned that the shop front space that houses Sierra Metro gallery used to be a carpet shop, something clicked with her ongoing ideas for her proposed Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition. The result is For Willy Love and Booker T; Blue babies do whatever they want. O’kafka’s show mixes photography and film installation as part of a continuum of a deeply personal exploration of the notion of family albums, offering sanctuary and safety to adoptees like her in this most playful of spaces.  ‘It began when a friend of mine sent me this film of her baby with a blanket on her head,’ O’kafka explains. ‘My friend sent me a message saying I’d love it, and how her baby had been doing this for twenty minutes.  In the film, there's a blue carpet, and then I thought, I've always wanted to carpet a space, because there's a different feeling when you walk into a space with a different surface. The carpet in my bedroom as a child was light blue. The baby in the film is ...

As Edinburgh Art Festival celebrates its twentieth birthday, it also marks the tenth anniversary of PLATFORM, the initiative set up to showcase early career artists in the context of a festival environment. This year’s cohort features four artists whose work spans a variety of mediums and has been bubbling for some time now.  Where Alaya Ang works with durational performance, writing and other forms, Edward Gwyn Jones focuses mainly on moving image, text, and printmaking. Tamara MacArthur, meanwhile, uses intricate handcrafted installation activated by performance, while Kialy Tihngang works with sculpture, video, textiles, animation, and photomontage.      Selected by a panel led by EAF curator Eleanor Edmonson, the Platform artists will this year respond to the 2024 festival’s themes of ‘intimacy, material memory, protest and persecution’. The results will be seen on the fourth floor of the City Art Centre, which this year is set to become EAF’s home. This puts Pla...

It was autumn 1968 when a twenty-something Edinburgh College of Art graduate called Alexander Moffat (b. 1943) received a telephone call from one of his former tutors. Moffat was told he had to go on to the committee of what by now had become The New 57 Gallery. The artist run Edinburgh space had been going for eleven years by this time, having been set up by a group of artists wanting to present the sort work that wasn’t being shown in staid institutions adorned with landscape paintings.   Founded ‘by artists for artists’, and with architect Patrick Nuttgens (1930-2004) as chair, The 57 set up a subscription based model, taking up residence at 53 George Street on the second floor studio of sculptor Daphne Dyce Sharp (1924-2010). Moffat had visited the gallery as a schoolboy, and been inspired by what he saw. The spirit of innovation continued after the gallery moved to a shop-front space at 105 Rose Street in 1961, becoming The New 57 en route. It was into the Rose Street New...

Homeliness is where the heart is in Lawnmower, Laura Aldridge’s domestically inclined new commission and accompanying exhibition that has just opened as part of Jupiter Artland’s 2024 summer season. You can see it in the Edinburgh sculpture park’s Steadings Gallery, where hand crafted love seats are given the names You & Me I (2024), You & Me II (2024), You & Me III (2024). These are watched over by a series of wall mounted globe lights in coloured skirts that – with names like Housework (Ultra Vivid Scene (2024), and We too form a multitude (my brain is everywhere) (2024) - give the lights the air of blank faced disembodied doll heads.   The seats themselves are decorated with ornaments that offer up appealingly tactile armrests that allow the sitter to view three screens beaming out seventeen-minute video installation, Go Wo Mango! (2024). This was made by Aldridge in collaboration with fellow artists Juliana Capes, Morwenna Kearsley and Sarah McFadyen, with a soundtr...

When Lynn MacRitchie gave a public lecture at Edinburgh College of Art in February this year titled The Participation Art Event 1973: Provocation or Prophecy, it shed light on one of Scotland’s lesser known avant-garde art happenings that might finally have found its time. Instigated by MacRitchie while a student at ECA more than half a century ago, The Participation Art Event (PAE) explored the idea of art being a collective action rather than an individual, studio-bound pursuit. Over five days in December 1973, PAE took over ECA’s Sculpture Court, where a series of participatory actions took place. At the centre of this were David Medalla (1942-2020) and John Dugger (1948-2023). Medalla was a Filipino artist and activist who in 1964 co-founded the kinetic art based Signals London gallery, and was one of those behind hippie/counterculture collective the Exploding Galaxy. It was through the latter that Medalla met Dugger, an American artist who landed on the scene in 1967. The pair col...