Coffee-Table Notes

The landscape has changed since John Maher first took his photographic studies of abandoned and derelict houses on the islands of Lewis and Harris that make up his exhibition, Nobody’s Home. Almost a decade on from its first showing in 2013 at An Lanntair, on Lewis, in tandem with work by fellow photographer Ian Paterson, the current selection of twenty-eight images by Maher at Dunoon Burgh Hall is a glimpse of a world that has largely been demolished.   “ It's probably two or three years since I last went back to revisit some of the houses,” says Maher, “but there's a point where that decay gets to a stage where it doesn't become photographically interesting to me. For instance, there's one that’s got a yellow Rayburn stove as the focal point of the picture, but the last time I went there, the ceiling had collapsed, and the floor had gone through. If it had been in that state when I originally looked in, I probably wouldn't have bothered taking a picture.   “There

The hard labour is almost done for London based artist  Céline Condorelli  the day before After Work, her sprawling compendium of installations, interventions and disruptions, opens at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh. All that is left for the University of Edinburgh's run institution’s team of technicians and installers to do is to put the finishing touches on Condorelli’s constructed evocations of gardens, adventure playgrounds and sports centres. These are set alongside images drawn from tyre factories and the everyday graft most people undertake before clocking off for weekend outings that might well include gallery excursions and suchlike.    Those bringing Condorelli’s visions to temporary life are the art world’s key workers, who remain largely unseen to the public, but who make things tick. Without them, the exhibitions we take for granted simply would not happen. This is something Condorelli is acutely aware of, both in the social make up of her constructions and in her re

Things have come a long way for the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal since it first opened for business in 1822. This should be apparent when Edinburgh Art Festival presents   Channels , a series of new public works by four artists, curated by this year’s EAF Associate Artist, Emmie McLuskey, as part of the festival’s 2022 commissions programme.    From Lochrin Basin to Wester Hailes, works by Maeve Redmond, Hannan Jones, Amanda Thomson and Janice Parker navigate their way through the waterway’s rich flow of history by way of sign writing, sound, botany, writing, and dance.   “ The canal kind of sits outside of the main bit of the city, and it's got a really interesting history in relation to industry,” says McLuskey,  EAF’s second Associate Artist following on from Tako Taal in 2021 . “This is obviously a huge generalisation, but Edinburgh doesn't necessarily see itself as an industrial city.”   McLuskey was attracted to  Channels  by way of another project she was working on

Michael Clark was still only in his mid-twenties when he danced solo on Italian television to Marc Bolan’s 1971 song that gives this epic exhibition of Clark’s vast back-catalogue its title. In the footage, Clark moves slowly, swathed in a swishy yellow dress and black lipstick as Bolan sings over elegiac strings of how he danced himself ‘right out of the womb’.     Broadcast in 1986, with Thatcher’s Britain in full pomp, it was a daring and tender routine for Clark, already feted as a taboo-busting enfant terrible of contemporary dance. Thirty-six years on, and with Clark now in his sixtieth year, his performance looks as vulnerable and as heroic a show of strength as it ever did.     The clip forms part of a loop of archive material that graces screens large and small before you even step in to the exhibition itself. As a tone-setting tease of things to come, it is the perfect curtain-raiser to what might be regarded as a sort-of prodigal’s return to Scotland for the Aberdeen-born po

When Daniel Clark and Amy Gear decided they wanted to open their own arts space   in   Shetland, they saw their ambitions as filling a gap in terms of studio and workshop provision on the Scottish islands. When they took over a former Methodist church on Burra, they acknowledged that aim by calling the new centre Gaada, which in Shetland dialect means ‘gaps’, and is a word Gear heard growing up on the island of Yell. It can also refer to a type of potato with holes in that became their logo.   Clark and Gear founded Gaada in 2018 after meeting while studying printmaking at the Royal College of Art. After graduating, Clark initially took a job at RCA, while Gear moved home, where a lack of studio spaces on the islands prompted the pair to take matters into their own hands.    “When I came home I worked as a freelance artist, running workshops and things like that with no studio,” Gear recalls. “There are no studios in Shetland, so it was quite hard work, and every time Daniel visited, w

When Linkshouse opens this summer as a new artists’ residency centre in Orkney, it will mark the culmination of several different lives the grand looking house has lived over the last century. Situated in Birsay village, on the north west of Orkney’s main island, The Mainland, Linkshouse’s most recent incarnation was as the base of the Erlend Williamson Fellowship, a charity set up in honour of the artist who tragically died in 1996 in a climbing accident on Glencoe.     Williamson had been a contemporary of artists including Ross Sinclair, Simon Starling and Mike Nelson. When Williamson’s parents, Barbara and Edgar, discovered the importance of Orkney in their son’s life and work, they set up the Fellowship at Linkshouse in his honour with some of his peers and friends.   One of the clauses in the Williamson’s wills was that if the charity should close, then the property be passed into the care of the Pier Arts Centre, based thirteen miles away from Birsay, in Stromness. For more than

In 2018, The Common Guild closed down its exhibition space in the Glasgow townhouse owned by artist Douglas Gordon it had called home for a decade. Beyond the move from Woodlands Terrace, ongoing off-site projects continued what had been a key component of the contemporary art organisation’s programme since being founded by Katrina Brown in 2006.    Even when forced to shut down physical events in 2020 due to Covid induced lockdown, an online strand included films by Phil Collins, Akram Zaatari and Sharon Hayes, as well as In the Open(2020-2021), two series’ of environmental sound-based commissions. Beyond lockdown, during COP26, The Common Guild presented  Mobbile  (1970/2021), a re-presentation of German artist Gustav Metzger’s modified car that collects and stores its own carbon emissions. All this pointed to an even more expansive future for the organisation.   “We were always only ever meant to be in that building on a temporary basis,” Brown explains. “What started out as a two o

When visitors to the Heart of Hawick arts centre in the Scottish Borders view the fourteen-foot wide Victorian waterwheel spin into life below the glass floor in the former mill’s café, local history will be brought to life several times over.   Waterwheel (2021) is a new permanent installation by filmmaker Andy Mackinnon, which projects archive film footage of Hawick’s annual week-long Common Riding festival onto the wheel. More archive footage of Hawick’s recent past is beamed by three projector onto a series of nine panels on the café floor.   The wheel based part of the installation will see images from the late 1960s depicting the festival’s lead rider, or Cornet, animated in the gold and blue of Hawick’s Common Riding flag. The event and flag were introduced to commemorate the victory of the town’s unmarried men over English raiders in 1514, when the English flag was captured after most of the men of the town had been killed in the Battle of Flodden the previous year.   It was He

Now is the Time When it was announced in July that the Helmsdale based Timespan organisation had been shortlisted for the 2021 Art Fund Museum of the Year prize, it was vindication for a venture that in recent times has sought to redefine what a museum can be. With a prize of £100,000 at stake, and £15,000 apiece going to the five nominees, the award gives a significant material boost for the winner, enabling them to develop concrete plans as well as raising their public profile.   As the smallest and arguably most low-key of the nominees, Timespan’s already progressive reputation has developed over the last thirty-five years in a village with a population of less than 800. If Timespan was named as winner of the Art Fund prize, both it and the village would potentially be transformed even more. Not that Timespan has been shy of pushing the envelope, both before and during the tenure of the museum’s current director, Sadie Young.   With Young in post since 2017, the Sutherland based ins