Coffee-Table Notes

City Art Centre, Edinburgh until February 19   What do you do when you go home and find it isn’t there anymore? One imagines this was a question photographer Paul Duke might have been forced to square up to while making his prodigal’s return to Muirhouse, the north Edinburgh neighbourhood where he grew up.  No Ruined Stone is his answer.    When Duke revisited in 2014 after several decades away, his old house had been demolished, wiped out by several generations of demolition, regeneration and attempted renewal of an area central to the UK’s botched post Second World War civic experiment in urban living. Despite this, the communities that grew out of it have gradually gained strength through adversity enough to survive and cement their relationship with the neighbourhood.   Both facets are evident in  No Ruined Stone , which takes its name from a line in Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem, ‘On A Raised Beach’, in which MacDiarmid writes how ‘There are plenty of ruined buildings in the world but no

Gallery Malmo, Edinburgh  Franki Raffles would have fitted in well with the soon to be demolished former supermarket in North Edinburgh currently showing a small selection of her photographs. Since 2018, the space has been where the DIY-run Gallery Malmo has called home, and is the sort of roughshod space that Salford born Raffles might well have scrutinised with her lens, especially if were filled with the communal life of women at work.   In her short life, Raffles became best known for her images illustrating  Zero Tolerance , the then Edinburgh District Council’s 1992 campaign that laid bare the uncomfortable truths of male violence against women. The Zero Tolerance charity, co-founded by Raffles with Evelyn Gillan and others from EDC’s Women’s Committee, continues its work today.   In the decade prior to the campaign, Raffles developed a practice that took her from the Isle of Lewis to Zimbabwe, the then Soviet Union, China and Tibet, her images documenting the everyday lives of w

Carolee Schneemann embodied an era of late twentieth century live art that was all about pushing boundaries. Works such as Meat Joy (1964) indulged in orgiastic celebrations of bodies in motion in collective acts of play. Meat Joy itself saw near naked participants roll around in bucket loads of paint while assorted foodstuffs rained down on them like an action painting come to full liberating life.   While Barbican’s overview of Schneemann puts photographic documentation of such works at the centre of her half-century of iconoclastic wildness prior to her death in 2019 aged 79, this epic homage goes a lot further. This is clear from the insistent thwack of a mechanically controlled mop beating the top of the television set it is attached to that permeates the air as you move through the exhibition. It is clear too from Schneemann’s declaration quoted at its start.   ‘I’m a painter,’ Schneemann said. ‘I’m still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to

If travel broadens the mind, how to capture an unexpected moment that changed everything beyond mere postcards home? This is something Mark Cousins’ new four-screen film installation attempts to tune in to, as he channels a once-in-a-lifetime epiphany experienced by St Andrews born artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004). This occurred in May 1949, when Barns-Graham climbed the Grindelewald glacier in Switzerland. Whatever intoxicated her up there on what was meant to be a mere away day excursion left its mark on her mind’s eye with such force that she never quite came down.   This is evident from the cycle of paintings drawn from that afternoon, which at points beam out from each screen like transmissions from Barns-Graham’s brain that Cousins immerses the viewer inside alongside his own retelling of the event. This comes by way of a subtitled dialogue between the older and younger Barns-Graham indicated by photographs taken of her fifty years apart. The cross-generational discours

McManus Art Gallery and Museum, Dundee Saturday October 29th   It is thirty years since Alastair MacLennan performed CAN’T CANT over several days at McManus Galleries in Dundee. Three decades on, the Perthshire born artist is recognised as one of the world’s most important live practitioners, with his ever-expanding archive now housed at his alma mater, Duncan and Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Returning to The McManus for this afternoon commemoration, MacLennan’s new work, SILIBANT MISCIBLE, bridged past, present and possible futures.   Brought together by DJCAD (University of Dundee) and Leisure and Culture Dundee with artist-led spaces, Bbeyond in Belfast, and GENERATORprojects, Dundee, this fusion of the institutional and the independent also saw two younger artists - Rabindranath X Bhose and Hattie Godfrey - present work inspired by the Archive.   In the Howf Graveyard, across the road from The McManus, Bhose, bare-torsoed and sporting coloured scarves tucked into his wais

  Four stars   Old clothes  tell a multitude of stories in Japanese photographer Ishiuchi Miyako’s debut solo exhibition in Scotland. Drawing from three bodies of work, ‘b odies’ is the operative word here. While no flesh and blood are on show in Miyako’s memorialising of her mother, artist Frida Kahlo and the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, by showing the everyday accoutrements that adorned them both honours and memorialises her subjects.    In  Hiroshima (2008), crumpled dresses are spread out like evidence, scorched beyond repair.  Mother’s (2002) shows off close-ups of shoes, false teeth and lipstick.  Frida: Love and Pain (2012) reveals the ultimate self-creation through clothes and make-up jars.    Combining very personal images with much more collective mementoes shows how intertwined things are, joining the dots between public, private and secret selves with an intimacy that moves beyond any fears of morbid intrusion to immortalise and mourn.    Stills Centre for Ph

  Four stars Bright colours only appears to be the credo of Glasgow based artist Lorna Robertson in her exhibition of new paintings. These are possessed with a vintage air, both in the figures of women who occupy them like they might have perambulated out of a Katherine Mansfield short story, and in the sense of psycho-analysis induced free associations that seem to spirit from their minds beyond their blank mannequin’s visages.   Lined up like show room dummies in ice cream coloured pink and lemon apparel, these silent women appear to have taken a wrong turn while lost in their own dreamings, finding themselves among some Pepperland foliage, out of which their minds rush with images both pastoral and domestic.   In ‘Dumb’, Robertson’s women could be a display in a milliner’s window. ‘ We are the robots’ sees them perusing vases of flowers like judges at a fete. In ‘Words murmured’ they share swishy conspiracies. Elsewhere,  they are all but hidden by barricades of busy, all angles abs

The contradictions inherent in the system are everywhere at the Calton Hill home of Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery just now. As gentrification encroaches the landscape, the gallery’s three Edinburgh Art Festival shows turn received historical narratives on their head to reveal more ambiguous readings of the past.   Outside, visitors are greeted by ‘Silent Agitator’ (2019), a giant clock made by Ruth Ewan bearing the words ‘TIME TO ORGANISE’. This monumental call to arms is based on an illustration by American writer and activist Ralph Chaplin for the Industrial Workers of the World labour union, and is a companion piece to ‘The Beast’ (2022), a newly commissioned twelve-minute animated film penned by Ewan with socialist magician Ian Saville.   Animated by Regina Ohak with Duncan Marquiss, and with music and sound design by Ross Downes, the film depicts nineteenth century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, forced to engage in dialectical discourse with  Diplodocus carnegi

A bare-chested man poses with a football tied on his head with the sort of scarf that might have been sported by the daughters in Lorca’s play, The House of Bernarda Alba, on one of their sunnier days. This is ‘Immigrante’ (2022),  in which El Salvador born Jose Campos, in his guise of Studio Lenca, strikes a pose.   In ‘El Historiante Blanco’ (2019), Campos stares defiantly at the camera from the next wall, a sword-wielding warrior clad in armour made, not of metal and mesh, but flowers and lace, in a fancy dress subversion of machismo.     These are two of  Los Historiantes (2019), in which Campos dons the dressing-up-box apparel of characters depicted by his country’s folkloric storytelling dancers, who hand down tales of colonialism and subjugation of their Indigenous people. As an émigré fleeing his war-torn country, first to America, now to the UK, where he is officially classed as ‘Other’, Campos reimagines these various identities in flamboyantly theatrical fashion.    The two

Ripples of an island life by the sea coarse throughout this large-scale gathering of work created by Will Maclean over the last half century. Throughout that time, the Inverness born artist has drawn consistently if not exclusively from his own roots as both a midshipman and a fisherman.   This is evident from the earliest works on show across two floors of the City Art Centre in Edinburgh, as much as it is in the various suites of work that followed more recently. The tools of Maclean’s former trade too are there from the off, hung in cupboards like monuments to the intricate artistry of ancient everyday crafts.    Along the way there are memorials, commemorations and visual poems that brood with the mysteries of the lower depths. Maclean has brought these to the surface and arranged them to create something that at times invokes a perilous essence of the natural world. If the word ‘museum’ pops up in some of the evocative titles Maclean adorns his work with, rather than signalling so

If you go down to the woods today - or any other day at Jupiter Artland during opening hours for the foreseeable future – the big surprise for visitors to the Edinburgh sculpture park can be found in a forest glade tucked away off the beaten track.     Here, Tracey Emin’s newly unveiled bronze sculpture,  I Lay Here For You (2018) lays in repose, in wait and possibly in state  beneath a tree. Monumental in scale, Emin’s six-metre construction of a woman’s body lays her bare with her secret self, face down and possibly in the throes of some private ecstasy.    A hand is tucked under the bent thigh, bum perched high, while a distorted head bites the pillow  of earth that cushions her. The body itself seems to ripple with the current of some erotic charge, every muscle and sinew taut with some unseen force.  No teddy bear’s picnic this, Emin’s creation is getting back to the garden, like a prodigal Eve reclaiming original sin, or a horny Titania still dreaming of donkeys the morning after

Four stars   Life, the universe and everything are gathered together in Katie Peterson’s monumental new work, which draws together materials across the ages to create an epoch-spanning time capsule marking out the world’s ongoing destruction.   In the title work, 364 small glass jars are lined up side by side. Each jar contains the ground down remains of a fleeting moment, beginning with meteorite dust from before the Sun existed, with the world’s story so far ending with blood samples from a Polynesian snail reborn from extinction. The short descriptions of all 364 samples contained in the accompanying publication by Palaeobiology professor Jan Zalasiewicz capture the full mind-expanding breadth of Paterson’s endeavour.   With accompanying time-based works upstairs, during the exhibition’s run, the contents of each jar are poured into a large glass urn at the centre of the room. From first to last, this funereal rite creates a dried up cocktail of life on earth, as what once was is tu

If clothes maketh the man – and woman - chances are they also maketh the artist that springs forth from such wilfully individual sartorial felicities. This was certainly the case with Steven Campbell, whose death in 2007 aged fifty-four left behind a body of work embodied by tweedy romantics occupying extravagant dreamscapes that all but burst through the frame in their desire to make a world of one’s own.   The importance of clothes to Campbell is unwrapped in this online promenade through the fabric of his life and work, curated by fashion historian Mairi MacKenzie and fashion designer Beca Lipscombe. Their hi-tech rendering is produced by Glasgow based curatorial organisation, Panel, and developed in partnership with digital media designers ISODESIGN and artist Rob Kennedy in a presentation by Tramway, Glasgow.    With Campbell’s wife Carol talking us through the couple’s life together, as they sashay through early days at Glasgow School of Art, through to success in New York, befor

‘KEEP ON FIGHTING’ was the very first front-page headline of Aberdeen Peoples Press, the fortnightly community newspaper founded in 1973, and which ran until 1984. Priced at an economy busting 5p, this DIY alternative to millionaire-owned tabloids announced its agenda with a boldness born on its own doorstep.   This was clear from the words ‘says Mrs Simpson’ typed beneath the headline next to a black and white photograph of a local resident who looked a far cry from the earnest image of the era’s young radicals. In terms of making a statement, this calculated alliance of word and image demonstrated exactly how much this new publication was by, for and of those after whom it was named.   This exhibition of archive material from APP is presented by the Aberdeen based Peacock Visual Art, the ‘printmaking powerhouse’ founded in the same era. The connection is telling. Curated in association with the University of Aberdeen Special Collections, the selection of posters, photographs and fron

Life’s a riot in  The Fearful  Part Of It Was The Absence,  Joey Simons’s new presentation, which forms the latest edition of Collective’s Satellites Programme of work by upcoming artists, provocateurs and other practitioners. Simons draws his title from the journals of Henry Cockburn, the Edinburgh born nineteenth Solicitor General for Scotland, author, conservationist and Edinburgh Royal High School graduate.    Cockburn wrote in his journals of a ‘terrible silence’ and ‘fearful absence of riot’ at demonstrations in Scotland in support of parliamentary reform. These protests nevertheless helped lead to the introduction of The Representation of the People Act 1832. More than a century and a half later, as riots swept across England in 2011 after Mark Duggan was shot and killed in London by police, Scotland again seemingly remained passive.    Drawing from his observations of such apparent cross-border differences, Simons was informed in part too by artist Jimmy Cauty’s The Aftermath D

Fruit market Gallery, Edinburgh,  July 7th-October 24 th 2021     Karla Black has been mining for gold for more than two decades now. Over that time, the accrued objects of her sculptural desires have often looked like they’ve been put together with stuff gathered from the mess of a playpen and transformed into retro-future relics occupying an adventure playground of the imagination. A decade on from Black’s Fruitmarket Gallery curated Venice Biennale show - the same year she was nominated for the Turner Prize - where better for Black to run riot some more than the former fruit and veg storeroom turned nightclub that makes up the Edinburgh gallery’s newly expanded space now christened The Warehouse.   The Fruitmarket’s existing galleries here house an array of Black’s older confections. Upstairs, almost the entire floor has become a pink powdered planet, with reels of cotton linking the threads that line its surface or else left dangling in a new iteration of Punctuation is pretty popu

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two) until February 22nd 2022. Long time ago, in an imaginary kingdom that existed before CGI, Ray Harryhausen was king. Now, after this definitive phantasmagoria of the near legendary stop-motion animation pioneer’s work across half a century almost faced COVID induced extinction, it lives again.   Lovingly put together by the National Galleries of Scotland with The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation to honour the 100 th anniversary of his birth in 1920, this comprehensive retrospective of Harryhausen’s transformation of widescreen cinematic fantasy runs riot throughout Modern Two’s entirety. As it follows its own evolutionary path, the exhibition tells an epic yarn of how a little boy was so enraptured by seeing Willis O’Brien’s giant ape brought to life in King Kong (1933) that he created his own miniature worlds.    From being let loose by O’Brien on the far cosier creature feature, Mighty Joe Young (1949), through to his ever more