Coffee-Table Notes

As the eleventh edition of Alchemy’s Hawick-based festival of experimental film moves online due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, its programme features 171 works of film and artists’ moving image. These span live screenings, an on demand programme, exhibitions and new commissions, plus talks and events to accompany them. Highlights include -    Charlie Chaplin Lived Here Saturday May 1 st , 3pm-4.15pm, and on demand with audio description for blind and partially sighted audiences. Set in London in 1969,  Louise S. Milne and Seán Martin’s new film focuses on the parallel lives of two great film-makers who never quite meet, as Chaplin visits his old haunts incognito, while Scottish film-maker Bill Douglas and his friend Peter Jewell makes a student film about Chaplin’s childhood and early years in the city. Douglas would go on to direct his famed trilogy of short films –  My Childhood, My Ain Folk , and  My Way Home - based loosely on Jewell’s life, as well as his only feature,  Comrad

The snow fell deep recently on Scottish Sculpture Workshop, the Aberdeenshire based centre of ‘making and thinking’ that celebrated its fortieth anniversary just a few short months before the first lockdown brought on by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. While the latter has forced SSW to temporarily close to the public in line with social distancing regulations, neither Covid nor the elements have prevented SSW director Sam Trotman and her team from making plans for what might turn out to be a very different future.    This is clear from the just announced series of residencies that will see SSW collaborate with Glasgow based contemporary music festival, Counterflows. With artists Laura Bradshaw, Chris Dooks and Hang Linton taking part, the series focuses in different ways on notions of caregiving, what such concerns bring to the artistic process, and vice versa.    The caregivers residency programme has been a long held ambition for SSW, and chime with a recent survey by Scottish Contem

As Claudia Zeiske passes the baton to Natalia Palombo at Deveron Projects, a look at the past, present and possible futures of the Huntly-based experiment where art meets life in a place where ‘the town is the venue’.     From little acorns do mighty oaks grow. So it is with Deveron Projects, the Aberdeenshire based arts initiative, which over the last quarter of a century has operated in the small town of Huntly as a holistic body that puts a sense of place at its core. Co-founded by dynamic German émigré Claudia Zeiske in 1995 as Deveron Arts, over the following twenty-five years, the freethinking organisation has hosted more than 100 artists’ residencies that have focussed on the relationship between the local and the global. Major figures taking part have included Christine Borland, Peter Liversidge, Dalziel + Scullion and Jacqueline Donachie.   Each temporary resident has also left some kind of totemic legacy behind to create what has become The Town Collection. Rather than have t

The spirit of Orpheus is ever present in Marchmont House, the Grade A listed Palladian mansion nestled in the Scottish Borders since being built by the 3 rd Earl of Marchmont, Hugh Hume-Campbell, in 1750. A carving of the great prophet of Greek mythology by sculptor Louis Deuchers dominates the fireplace of what Marchmont director Hugo Burge likes to call the Larimer Dining Room. This is an unofficial acknowledgement to architect Robert Lorimer, who modified and expanded the House between 1914 and 1917, building on its original design attributed at various points to either William Adam or James Gibbs.    With Orpheus plucking his lyre in the woods while surrounded by animals charmed by his great musicianship, this image alone seems to sum up the power of art to transcend the ordinary, both in Greek times and in Marchmont House itself. Built on the edge of the village of Greenlaw, some nineteen miles from Berwick-upon-Tweed, under Burge’s guidance, Marchmont’s previously neglected count

Ray Harryhausen’s adventures in stop motion animation left generations of film-goers wide-eyed at the feats of artistry he brought to the big screen. More than half a century’s work is brought together in Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema, a suitably epic blockbuster exhibition that brings together the biggest collection of the mythological master’s work to date. Presented in conjunction with the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, this major summer commemorates what would have been Harryhausen’s 100 th  birthday.   From the sword-fighting skeletons of the Sinbad films and Jason and the Argonauts to the dinosaurs of One Million Years B.C., Harryhausen’s painstakingly realised creations forged from his ‘Dynamation’ technique had a profound influence on film directors including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Tim Burton. Nick Park and Peter Lord, who created Wallace and Gromit for Aardman Animation, have also praised Harryhausen’s onscreen alchemy, which itself was influenced by s

Richard Parry has clearly been paying attention while putting together the programme for this year’s Glasgow International, the city’s bi-annual festival of contemporary art. Indeed, following Parry’s inaugural tenure as festival director in 2018, Attention is the theme of GI’s three-week city-wide trawl through venues great and small, with the latter including a former strip club and a garage. “The way we see things is changing,” says Parry of GI’s theme. “We’ve got 24-hour news, we’re seeing things constantly through a screen, and we’re living in a world where we’re required to be constantly ‘on’. Our attention is changing because of that, and that has both physical and mental consequences. Looking at art in the flesh rather than through a screen, you’re going to see it differently. The sign of great art is that invites you to look at it again and again and get something different from it each time, and that requires attention.” This year’s GI programme will see some marked