Coffee-Table Notes

Water is at the centre of Sarah Calmus’s world in Right to Roam, as the Edinburgh based artist follows up on her recent multi-screen intervention, Uisge, viewable on Potterow in Edinburgh, with a full-on immersive experience. Calmus’s exhibition takes its title from the internationally recognised notion of a public right to access public and privately owned land. Focusing on the River Forth, she utilises moving image, sculpture, sound and screenprints to take a deep dive into environmental pollution, climate change and how the natural landscape is threatened.   “I wanted to talk about this idea within the lens of water,” Calmus says of an exhibition that has its roots in a residency in Sweden. “I swim in the Forth quite a lot, and I also row, and because of where I live in Newhaven I see the river every morning, so I'm all about the water, so I thought I would hone in on this conversation about the right to roam and really focus on water. We're all made of water, and the tides ...

Palestine Museum Scotland is hard to miss in its new home in the heart of Edinburgh’s commercial gallery district. The two artworks that fill the Museum’s windows looking out on to Dundas Street are a striking introduction to this holistic initiative set up by Palestinian American Faisal Saleh as the first such venture in Europe.   Inside, the gallery floor is dominated by a map of Palestine in 1948 that features the names of 500 villages destroyed by Israel that year during the Nakba, in which more than 800,000 Palestinians were driven from their homeland. These names have been reinstated into the landscape by historian Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, who, aged ten, was himself forced from his home during the Nakba to seek refuge elsewhere.   The map is flanked on one side by a painting by veteran Palestinian artist, Samia Halaby, which shows idyllic looking fields spread out across the canvas. “It’s a typical Palestinian landscape before it was cut up,” Saleh explains. “It’s the sort ...

Politics and performance are at the international heart of Adelaide Festival’s visual art programme this year, spread over a series of five exhibitions. The Adelaide Fringe meanwhile, features more than sixty exhibitions and events covering an array of forms and themes.   At the Festival, the tellingly named Radical Textiles (Art Gallery of South Australia until 30 th March )  looks at one of the most quietly unsung of artforms that has been central to the visual identity of protest movements, from William Morris in the nineteenth century, and Sonia Delauney in the twentieth and beyond. This exhibition is a patchwork of more than 100 artists, designers and activists drawn from Art Gallery of South Australia’s expansive collections of international, Australian and First Nations collections to knit together a history of textiles across 150 years.   The meaning of family is behind Shared Skin (Adelaide Contemporary Experimental, 15 th February-12 th April), a group show of...

“George wasn’t too fond of museums,” says Will Cooper as he walks through the two main rooms that form The Wyllieum, the newly opened Greenock based gallery space devoted to George Wyllie (1921-2012), the ‘George’ of Cooper’s observation. “That is something we have to negotiate every day,” says the centre’s director.   Such are the glorious contradictions of the Glasgow born artist and self styled Whys?man who first came to prominence with his playfully theatrical critique of capitalism, A Day Down a Goldmine (1982). The large-scale works that followed occupied similarly non-institutional spaces. They were equally damning too about the managed decline of shipbuilding and industrial culture that was taking place at the time.    The Straw Locomotive (1987), saw a full-scale wire and straw reconstruction of a locomotive hung from Glasgow’s Finnieston Crane before being ceremonially burnt. The Paper Boat (1989-1990), was a 78-foot vessel that sailed the Clyde and beyond....

When Vasile Toch was elected President of the Scottish Society of Artists in March 2023, the Romanian born émigré decreed to give Scotland’s oldest and largest artist led organisations a shake up. The first fruits of this are to be found in the SSA’s annual exhibition, which, for only the third time in its 125-year existence, moves out of its regular venue at the Royal Academy Building in Edinburgh to take over the Maclaurin Gallery in Ayr.   Here, the SSA show will feature some 175 artworks across all forms by its members. The exhibition will also feature work by fifteen recent graduates from Scottish art schools. These young artists are all recipients of SSA awards following visits to degree shows by SSA selectors. A series of moving image works will be staged by artist collective, CutLog, while the exhibition will feature new work by the Maclaurin Gallery’s patron, Peter Howson. Outwith Ayr, an SSA satellite exhibition, Connect and Grow, will run at Cass Art in Glasgow.   W...

Early on in Art is Magic, Jeremy Deller’s bumper compendium of his back catalogue, the 2004 Turner Prize winner talks about how he made the shift ‘from making things to making things happen.’ This line sums up Deller’s whole approach as an artist over the last thirty years, whether persuading the Williams Fairey Brass Band to play house music in Acid Brass (1997), reconstructing The Battle of Orgeave (2001), one of the key moments in the 1984 miners’ strike, or reinventing Stonehenge as a bouncy castle on Glasgow Green (2012).   Other works featured in Art is Magic include So Many Ways to Hurt You (2010) – a film about glam wrestler Adrian Street – and Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (2019) , which filmed Deller giving a history of rave culture to a classroom of teenagers. Deller’s mix of pop culture, social history and civic spectacle has made for a form of very public art that engages with the world with a playfulness at its heart.   In kee...

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 a...

  When Kirkcaldy Galleries were dubbed the ‘Tate Gallery of Scotland’ in lectures by its first Convenor, local linen manufacturer John Blyth, the hype was due to the Galleries’ impressive collection of Scottish Colourist paintings. The accolade has stuck, and continues to capture the expanse of the Fife town’s main exhibition space. Not only does the gallery built in 1925 hold the largest collection of paintings by William McTaggart (1835-1910), it also has the second largest collection of works by Samuel Peploe (1871-1935) outside the National Galleries of Scotland, and many significant works by the Glasgow Boys.   More recently, an adventurous contemporary strand has been introduced, with works by the likes of Alison Watt now included in the collection. A £2.5m refurbishment of the building undertaken by Fife Council in 2013 has seen the Galleries expand operations, so it now houses a museum, library, PC suite, café and gift shop, as well as spaces for community and educatio...

David Mach is thinking big. The home studio of the Methil born sculptor and icon of monumental public art more resembles a small factory than a building site, with it’s production line of materials either laid out on a series of tables, or else neatly filed away in folders and drawers that line the whole of one wall.   Echoes of the former Turner Prize nominee’s earlier projects abound. Miniature Sumo wrestlers grapple on one table. Sliced up mini red telephone boxes lay on another workspace. As the wheels of industry turn, this all looks set to feed in to Heavy Metal, Mach’s forthcoming London show of maquettes that acts as a showcase for future projects and proposals which their creator aims to build on the grandest of scales. This includes plans for major works on a London roundabout in Chiswick and an epic construction in Mauritius.   Also on show will be assorted models for Mach 1, a proposed building based work set to be created out of shipping containers and housed at E...