Coffee-Table Notes

When Queen Victoria granted what was about to become the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts its Royal Charter in 1896, the then thirty-five year old organisation was at the centre of Glasgow’s contemporary art scene. At various times, the likes of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and assorted Glasgow Boys and Scottish Colourists were all fully paid up members of an organisation that at one point hosted the biggest open exhibitions outside London.   130 years on, and after a few years off radar, the RGI is back with its largest exhibition in a decade. This comes with a bold new impetus to reclaim the organisation’s place at the heart of the Glasgow scene. This is most evident in RGI: Celebrating 130 Years of Royal Status, a major new group show at the Lillie Art Gallery in Milngavie.   This follows a series of small RGI exhibitions that have taken place since December 2024 at the John D Kelly Gallery, whose city centre presence on Douglas Street has literally provided a shop win...

When  twenty-two people were commissioned by a community arts project in the North-East of Glasgow to take photographic portraits of their fellow Glaswegians, the 30,000 images taken between 1989 and 1993 documented a city and its citizens at work, rest and play. Three decades on, these images have become a vital grassroots archive of a city in flux. They also document a world that existed beyond some of the glossier initiatives that spearheaded Glasgow’s tenure as 1990 European City Of Culture.   Glaswegians was the brainchild of Alistair McCallum, then artist in residence with Cranhill Arts Project, the community initiative founded in 1981. Around the same time, McCallum and artist collaborator Jane Carroll found themselves designing and producing banners and posters for some of the numerous political events that were galvanising assorted protest movements across Scotland. While many of the photographs are in black and white, the posters and banners are rich in colour and em...

When Hamish Halley was working one day, he came across a photograph in a drawer of a cat. While this pre digital artefact of what was presumably a long lost pet was a poignant enough remnant of somebody’s life, it was what was written on the back of the picture that captured Halley’s attention. The two words, ‘please keep’, not only stressed the importance of the photograph to its owner, but was a firm pointer to future rummagers to preserve it for posterity.   The phrase subsequently became the title of Halley’s new short video work that premieres at Edinburgh Art Festival 2025. It features footage taken while Halley was clearing out his grandmother’s Perthshire farmland home after her death. This is seen alongside captures of the former Perth Museum and Art Gallery collection Halley visited as a child being moved to its new home in the former Perth City Hall as the newly dubbed Perth Museum.   “I think the two things were happening around the same time,” says Halley on a bre...

The cast of one of the two films that make up this large-scale exhibition by Wael Shawky are all lined up in a room. They are gathered together in full costume next to the gallery where the third part of the major trilogy they appear in is screening on a loop. This is no red carpet Hollywood A-lister meet-and-greet, mind you. These actors are made of glass, fantastical marionettes that have their strings pulled by Shawky and many others to play out several hundred years of world changing history. . Some of Shawkey’s creatures look like they might have been dreamt up by master animator Ray Harryhausen or puppet genius Gerry Anderson, or else appeared in episodes of 1970s era Dr. Who. Of course, such predictably western pop culture reference points belie the fact that Shawky’s creations are actually rooted in more ancient artistry. As too are the complex and at times horrible histories he depicts that show off the umbilical links with the all too real climate of occupation and invasi...

Few artists have altered the physical landscape more than Andy Goldsworthy. For half a century now, the Cheshire born sculptor has used natural materials to alter outdoor spaces in ways that are both temporary and monumental. To mark the occasion, Goldsworthy’s work is celebrated at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh with Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, a major exhibition that opens in July 2025 with a mix of old and new creations that combine to create its own environment.   Prior to this, in April, Jupiter Artland sculpture park outside Edinburgh will show WORK BEGAT WORK: Ian Hamilton Finlay & Andy Goldsworthy. This will display Goldswothy’s permanent commissions alongside work by Finlay, bringing together two of Jupiter Artland’s great inspirations in tandem with Finlay’s own National Galleries of Scotland retrospective as well as Goldsworthy’s RSA show.   “ We've been working on it now for a couple of years, so it's a bit more than an exhibition,” Goldsworthy says...

Ten seconds into Linder’s new performance creation, and a baby starts crying. It’s Saturday afternoon in Mount Stuart House, the gothic country pile on the Isle of Bute, and the storm outside has already provided a dramatic backdrop to  A kind of glamour about me  and  its accompanying exhibition, which sees Linder drawing from Victorian photographs of a family dressing up for some kind of Alice in Wonderland cosplay.    The title comes from Walter Scott, who wrote how ‘There is a kind of glamour about me, which sometimes makes me read dates, etc, in the proof-sheets, not as they actually do stand, but as they ought to stand.’ Such notions chime with Linder’s own mystical fantasias.   For a moment at the start of the performance, one wonders whether the infant wail is being conjured up by composer Maxwell Sterling on his electric cello at the side of the stage. Either way, it seems to fit with the maelstrom that follows as a quartet of extravagantly cl...

By the time Ken Currie graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1983 his work was steeped in politically driven socialist realism. The acquisition of two of Currie’s works from that time - Union Organiser (1987) and The Calton Activist (1987) – highlight the significance of such early pieces.     Currie is probably best known today for paintings such as Three Oncologists (2002), a study of three doctors at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee. More recently, Currie’s fascination with mortality and the body saw him paint Unknown Man (2019), a portrait of forensic anthropologist Dame Sue Black. Many of Currie’s works are set against dark backgrounds full of foreboding that suggests his figures are spotlit as if for a film.   Currie’s early career saw him became part of a generation of artists – Steven Campbell, Stephen Conroy, Peter Howson and Adrian Wiszniewski were others – brought together in 1985 for the New Image Glasgow exhibition at the Third Eye Centre, now the site of the C...

Saturday lunchtime in Dundee’s City Square, and the Gods walk amongst us. The red carpet is out on the steps of the Caird Hall leading inside to the Marryat Hall, and the Square is alive with noise. As Dundee Community Youth Orchestra rehearse a horn-led number that sounds like an off-cut from the soundtrack to cult 1970s film The Wicker Man, a stall run by KennardPhillipps, the artist duo of Peter Kennard and Cat Phillipps, is being set up for people to screen-print their own t-shirts.    Another stall invites passers by to toss celestial looking laurels on to hooks to win a mystery teapot. A group of students are dressed in homemade outfits that look like a miniature Stonehenge. Co-curator of the day’s events Laura McSorley walks across the Square wielding what appears to be a gold  lamé  bullhorn.   At the far end of the Square, the drums and chants of pro and counter refugee based demos may not be part of the official spectacle at the Caird Hall end, bu...

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...