Coffee-Table Notes

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...

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....

The world had yet to close down when Imogen Stirling began writing Love The Sinner in 2019. By the time she finished her epic poetic take on the seven deadly sins, any chance of performing it were thwarted by assorted pandemic induced lockdowns. When Stirling brings it to Edinburgh’s Hidden Door festival this month, however, her stripped back rendition of a forthcoming full theatrical production - both created with composer and fellow performer Sarah Carton, who performs a live electronic accompaniment - can’t help but echo recent times.  As the latest link in a chain of poetic and dramatic interpretations that date from Dante through to Chaucer, Brecht and beyond, Stirling’s take on the seven deadly sins drags the action into a big city urban environment that sounds not unlike Glasgow. Here her seven protagonists live in fractured isolation, as a biblical rain pours onto the streets outside.    “ The concept of the seven deadly sins has always fascinated me,” says Stirli...

Ross Simonini began his podcast, Subject, Object, Verb, in 2020, with the desire to “ express the sonic dimension of contemporary art, and an audio show seemed like the best format for doing that.”    Produced by ArtReview magazine, the show’s title is a kind of manifesto that joins the dots between artist, art, and the life driving them.   “Art is not created in a vacuum,” Simonini says. “The personality and the life of the artist are connected to the work. We live in an era where people want to understand those connections more than ever - the rise of social media, activism, the  # MeToo movement, identity politics.   “Even if an artist wants to stay out of the work and hides in the woods, and completely rejects the capitalist system, their hermetic life is reflected in the work, and people will consider the artist’s refusal when they see the work. Think about Lee Lozano or David Hammons or Thomas Pynchon or JD Salinger - known as much for their work as their ...

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 ...

The Studio, Capital Theatres, Edinburgh Three stars A cuddly toy perched on the seat beside you is a welcome companion for audience members watching Skye Loneragan’s new solo work drawn from the chaotic playpen of her mind. The furry friends in question become the equivalent of a comfort blanket to cling to during Loneragan’s 65-minute free-associative meditation on sanity, madness and the family. These domestic meanderings seem to have been sired by a post-natal fever dream that reflects Loneragan’s own sleep-deprived voyage into motherhood, as assorted hand-me-down neuroses bring up sense memories of madnesses past.    In what could have been the frustrated dramatic equivalent of throwing her toys out of the pram, Loneragan marks her low attention span leaps into the void with Shakespeare references aplenty. Each moment is broken up by way of a series of projected post-it notes designed by Roddy Simpson, with Mairi Campbell’s nursery rhyme style folk soundtrack bubbling into...

Three stars   Like The Bible, The Sex Pistols story has many versions. Director Danny Boyle and writer Craig Pearce’s six-part drama for FX Productions looks to the gospel according to guitarist Steve Jones as the basis for this latest piece of myth-making, drawn from Jones’ 2017 memoir,  Lonely Boy .    John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, has condemned Pistol as a “middle class fantasy”. If he watches without prejudice, he’ll see an over-excited if eminently watchable yarn that marries reimaginings of well-worn Pistols legends to social history and nods to pre-punk 1970s Brit-flicks, with dropped-in archive footage aplenty.    Every line of Pearce’s script sounds like a Situationist manifesto, and is delivered with an accompanying performative archness. As Johnny, Anson Boon is more Rik from The Young Ones than Rotten; Talulah Riley and Thomas Brodie-Sangster ham it up wildly as shop-front svengalis Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren; while Maisie Williams m...