Coffee-Table Notes

Few areas of Glasgow have been photographed as much as the Gorbals. From Bert Hardy in the 1940s and Oscar Marzaroli in the 1960s through to Steven Berkoff  during the same era, each photographer has marked the changes of the once notorious area from tenement slum to high rise life and beyond. A new book of images from the archive of the late Peter Christopherson forms something of a missing link, drawing as it does from the mid to late 1970s, when Christopherson was commissioned by the Citizens Theatre to provide images for posters pasted across the city.   Published in a lavish hardback by Timeless editions, the French based imprint that specialises in underground art, GORBALS showcases a vast array of Christopherson’s images over more than 200 pages. The book also features interviews with two of the Citizens Theatre’s former artistic directors, Giles Havergal and Philip Prowse by writer Nick Soulsby that puts the photographs in context. With Prowse the design genius wh...

By the time Elizabeth Blackadder (1931-2021) became the first woman to be elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1972, the Falkirk born painter and printmaker had already carved out a unique oeuvre of vibrant landscapes and still lives focused on flowers and  objects. Some of this was channelled into the tapestries and rugs contained in Elizabeth Blackadder: A Life in Colour, a new exhibition of Blackadder works that puts the textiles in dialogue with paintings and drawings drawn from the RSA collection. Marking five years since Blackadder’s death, the exhibition at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, where the textile works were made, aims to show off Blackadder’s vivid use of colour in her visual language. Blackadder’s relationship with Dovecot dates back to 1966, when Still Life, Tulips (1966) was her first tapestry work. Since then, Dovecot has collaborated with Blackadder on a total of thirty-one tapestries and five rugs. These include Eastern Still Life (1980)...

The day Edinburgh photographer Sandra George’s vast archive landed on the doorstep of the then recently set up Craigmillar Now organisation changed things for everyone who was there. With one eye on the neighbourhood’s past in the form of Craigmillar Festival Society, the globally recognised community arts organisation that paved the way for everything that followed, Craigmillar Now opened in 2020, and had just established a weekly archiving initiative.   A chance encounter with George’s former partner Jimmy Hewitt saw her archive rescued from a garden shed where it had sat since her death in 2013 and put into Craigmillar Now’s care. As  thousands of negatives were digitised, a vital portrait of Edinburgh life in the 1980s and 1990s seen from the frontline of George’s lens was revealed.   Also there that day was Lee McCormack, another photographer tending to her own neglected archive after working as a photographer around the same time as George. Where George worked ...

Yield Strength is an engineering term that defines the amount of stress a material can take before it is permanently changed. It is also the name given to the 2026 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art by this edition’s curator, Ellie Buttrose. Rather than impose a theme from the start, the name was chosen after the twenty-four artists who make up the showcase were selected.   With the Biennial spread across the Art Gallery of South Australia as well as the Samstag Museum of Art and Adelaide Botanic Gardens, Yield Strength seems to capture the spirit of some of Buttrose’s discoveries during her selection process.   “As I was travelling, I noticed that there was kind of a general return to artists really playing with materials,” says the Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art. “There seemed to be a lot of push and pull going on in the work, and this sense that things cannot go back to the way they were after you've pushed...

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...