Coffee-Table Notes

“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...

Alberta Whittle took a while to get to the Venice Biennale with her film, Lagareh - The Last Born. Originally commissioned before the world closed down due to the pandemic, Lagareh finally made the trip as part of the Barbados born, Glasgow based artist’s deep  dive (pause)   uncoiling memory  exhibition that formed the Scotland + Venice 2022 programme. Focusing on Scotland’s connections to the Transatlantic slave trade as well as more contemporary losses of Black lives to racist violence, Lagareh has now come home, as Whittle’s labour of love tours cinemas for a series of screenings that began in September.    “ This is the film I've wanted to make for a long time,’ says Whittle of Lagareh. “I arrived in the UK the year Stephen Lawrence was murdered, and that always stayed with me. I remember when Sheku Bayoh lost his life, how that shook me even further, and for a long time, I wanted to find some way to really speak of these groundbreaking moments that shake y...

When Elizabeth Price undertook a Research Fellowship with the University of Glasgow Library in 2020, the Turner Prize winning artist found a kaleidoscopic world beneath her feet. The vivid swirls that pattern the carpets lining the Mitchell Library in particular led to two new commissions about to go on show at the University’s Hunterian Art Gallery.   UNDERFOOT (2022) is a moving image work drawing from the photographic and pattern book archives of carpet manufacturers, Stoddard International Plc, and James Templeton and Co. Ltd. A complementary textile piece, SAD CARREL (2022), sees Price embark on her first non-video work in five years.   Commissioned by the Hunterian and developed with curatorial organisation, Panel, Fiona Jardine of Glasgow School of Art, and Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, Price’s new constructions mine the sort of social histories that won her the 2012 Turner for her video, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (2012).   With vinyl records forming a recurring m...

When Ian MacInnes was headmaster of Stromness Academy on Orkney, he introduced a Friday activities afternoon, whereby students would knock off their studies early in order to explore less academic pursuits such as sailing, introducing an element of play to start the weekend.   This was a typical act of everyday rebellion by MacInnes, whose work is currently on show on home turf at Pier Arts Centre to commemorate the centenary of the Orkney born artist’s birth. The exhibition spans MacInnes’ life’s work, from formal portraits of friends and contemporaries such as writer George Mackay Brown, to more politically driven impressionistic images of life on his doorstep, with striking studies of the ever changing local landscapes in Stromness, the West Shore and Rackwick Valley inbetween.   Also on show are some of MacInnes’ early satirical caricatures of local dignitaries that appeared in the Orkney Herald when he was still a teenager, as well as his illustrations for books by Mackay...

Iza Tarasewicz never danced the Mazurka while growing up on her family farm in the rural Polish village of Kaplany. Only a decade ago did she discover the prevalence of the sixteenth century folk dance that brought farm worker serfs together in a way that has influenced similar expressions of choreographed community across the world.   Tarasewicz has applied the spirit of the Mazurka to her first solo UK exhibition at Tramway in Glasgow, where the circular rhythms of the dance become a life force to her large-scale sculptural constructions crafted from agricultural machinery rendered redundant by industrialisation. Following research based on the decline in farm labour, agricultural problems and controls on produce distribution in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tarasewicz gives what she calls ‘traumatised objects’ a new lease of life that mirrors a real life need for community in a turbulent world.   " The whole world is in a crazy state just now,” says Tarasewic...