Coffee-Table Notes

The views are great from Cove Park, the rural artists’ residency centre based on Scotland’s west coast. Any of the more than 1,500 artists who have stayed in the centre since it was founded in 1999 by Peter and Eileen Jacobs will have been able to gaze out on Loch Long and the Firth of Clyde, with Arran and Bute within sight. This will probably have been the case too for 2018 Turner Prize winner Charlotte Prodger when she was awarded a Cove Park Emerging Artist residency care of the Craignish Trust back in 2010. Nine years on, Cove Park and curator Linsey Young have commissioned Prodger to represent Scotland at this year’s Venice Biennale. With a major new single channel video work developed over a series of research and production residencies at the centre.     “When Charlotte first came in 2010, she was here for a month,” says Cove Park’s associate director and visual arts programme producer, Alexia Holt. “It was the end of the summer season, and was a relatively solitary ti

A day at the races with Vic Godard and Robert Lloyd was always going to be a winner. A night at the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh, where these two elder states-people of what we now call post punk appear tomorrow night with the latest incarnations of their respective bands, Subway Sect and The Nightingales, looks like a pretty safe bet as well. “The CEO of the Jockey Club is a big Nightingales fan, and he invites us every year,” says Lloyd of the dynamic duo’s day out at Sandown Park last year, “and we always get to go in this private enclosure.” “It turns out the bloke from the Jockey Club lives round the corner from me,” says Godard, “and I got picked up in this chauffeur-driven car.” While this was Godard’s first experience of watching from a private box, he is no stranger to the track. Like Lloyd, he has long been fond of a flutter. “Rob’s a bit of a tipster,” says Godard. “He e-mailed me this morning and gave me a dead cert at Kempton.” The horse in question, You

When Rep Stripped opens at Dundee Rep next week, it will look a lot different from the Tayside theatre’s usual programme. This inaugural ten-day festival of new work won’t feature full productions as the company’s in-house ensemble have done on the main stage since the company was founded. Instead, under the curatorship of producer Carla Marina Almeida and director Jordan Blackwood, Rep Stripped will see artists at different levels of experience present a series of works in progress and Scratch performances at early stages in development.  With the festival pulled together from an open call-out, the sheer level of activity on offer is an impressively mammoth operation for Almeida and Blackwood to oversee, especially given that both are themselves at the early stages of their careers. “It’s been a really long process to bring everything together,” says Almeida, who for the last year has been Dundee Rep’s Stage One Regional Producer, a UK-wide initiative for young producers. “I