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Edinburgh Art Festival's reckoning with the city's colonial legacies
We take a tour of the contemporary art exhibitions confronting colonial and Caribbean histories head-on
September 14, 2023
‘Empires are built on crossing borders on one’s own terms,’ provokes Hephzibah Israel, a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Journeying between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, her cursive scripts lay above two more exhibitions currently on show at the city’s Talbot Rice Gallery, in a poetic navigation of nationality and nationalism – something previously tapped into in a post-Brexit collaboration with Emeka Ogboh.
Referencing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Israel’s words chime with a wider effort by the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, to connect with places beyond the city – like Birmingham, but even more so, Ireland – and particularly, with Caribbean, and shared colonial, histories.
Born in 1980 in Bridgetown, Barbados, Alberta Whittle also first moved to Birmingham, before pursuing study at the Glasgow School of Art. Moving back and forth between Celtic and Caribbean locales, Whittle’s work is cited time and again, in Scottish Women Artists, and in a powerful performance at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall, where she strides a floor scattered with conches, cutlasses, and coconut shells.
But only her career-spanning survey at the Modern has enough space for her multidisciplinary practice. It goes beyond the digital collages for which she is best-known – and gives them context, highlighting the role of collage, masquerade, and calypso music in the Caribbean – adding newly commissioned textiles, gates kept from her Venice Biennale pavilion (2022), plus punctuation seats, giving pause to we participants. Whittle’s ‘Living Room’ is a highlight, where resin tiles cast with the artist’s own footprints encourage us to walk in, or perhaps follow, her way. It comes at a time of total rehang across the National Galleries of Scotland, from which its regional cousins in London, at the Tate Britain and National Portrait Gallery, could learn a thing or two.
Having made her way to Scotland more recently, the American artist Christian Noelle Charles is as embedded in Glasgow’s artistic community. In the Parliament Hall performance, The Last Born, she acts as Whittle’s ‘accomplice’, and vocalises with words which speak to the vulnerable, ‘soft’ bodies of Black children in particular. It’s a direct assault on colonial stereotypes of Black strength, resisting the transformation of human bodies into ‘callous’ things – a necessary detachment often used to justify slavery. The musicality echoes Sonia Boyce’s noisy exhibitions, but here, the bell is tolled in a more sinister manner, as though to call in school children from their breaks, but nod too to the funeral bell, and their premature deaths.
The name of Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I, hints at the artist’s primary interest in performance. But beyond Barber Shop Chronicles, the artist installs a beauty salon, with the sounds of women talking about their artistic practices in hushed tones, which whisper from a CD player. It’s more fucsia than rose-tinted, warm without nostalgia, and whilst with Whittle she wears red, this show is clad purple, a nod to the royalty we find inside. In New York, she’s pals with Carrie Mae Weems, and the respect for those who came before her crosses borders too: ‘Ingrid Pollard was there!’, a contributor remarks, in one of the audio pieces.
Royalty – or perhaps aristocracy - graces New Town’s Ingleby Gallery too. Frank Walter (or, Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter) styled himself as the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a Ding Nook. Despite his grandeur, Ingleby’s 2013 exhibition of the artist, curated with art historian Barbara Paca, marked the first ever of this twentieth-century titan, and total artist, from Antigua.
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In the ten years since, Walter’s position as one of the most distinctive Caribbean artists has been consolidated with a series of exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with Antigua and Barbuda’s first-ever pavilion (also curated by Paca). A second at Ingleby, Music of the Spheres, was central to the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, the first showing of his visionary ‘spool’ paintings, circular tondos which speak to his inventive practice.
Still, Walter remains lesser known than his white, Scots-born contemporaries; an upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum in London may help remedy this historic negligence, but in their work, we find traces of his influence. It was the first Walter exhibition that would connect Ingleby with Peter Doig – for a time, the market record-holder for a living European artist - who got in touch about this artist from the Caribbean who thought himself Scottish, his own situation in reverse.
Oft travelling from his birthplace of Edinburgh, Doig temporarily relocated to Trinidad, practising in a studio that was part of the former Fernandes Rum Factory complex in Port of Spain. He actively participated in the local community, painting surrealistic scenes steeped as much in soca music, and still consciously from his perspective as an outsider. During the Festival, more contemporary colonial landscapes can be found at Nat Raha’s epistolary (on carceral islands) and Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots.
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Doig’s encounter with Walter came not in the Caribbean, but back in Glasgow. He was introduced to Walter by his friend and fellow artist, Andrew Cranston, now on display at Ingleby Gallery. Cranston’s diverse practice, perhaps more than Doig’s, reflects the impact of Caribbean cultures on Scottish art – as much, if not more so, than the Western European interiors and impressionistic fashions typically read of his work. His deft employ of hazy, pastel shades, novel use of media, and scenes which exist in-between the imaginary and actuality, speak to Trinidadian traditions which so inspired the two that they are soon to release a talk about it.
Cranston’s exhibition comes ten years after the Gallery relocated to Glasite Meeting House, a former place of worship of its titular Scottish religious sect. Small and strict in practice, the group found enlightenment in areas void of conspicuous decoration; during the 19th century, the House was known as Kail Kirk, in recognition of the communal meal of kale soup served at all-day services. Here, the building becomes part of the work, a stark contrast between Cranston’s lurid hues, and the House’s austere architecture, reflecting a show both historical in character, and contemporary in vision.
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More ornate Gothic gargoyles and abandoned stone carvings are to be found at Trinity Apse, a kirk hidden away near Waverley Station, which played host to Platform: 2023, the Festival’s annual group exhibition. All four of this year’s artists touched on themes of colonialism, but Crystal Bennes stands out for her multidisciplinary installation of maps, textiles, and milk soap sculptures – engagements with English imperialism in Ireland from the 1870s from plural perspectives. Dairy has a particular meaning for Bennes, speaking to the domestic and the use of women’s bodies as instruments of imperial control. One of the strategies by which English colonial administrators sought to ‘civilise’-as-Anglicise the Irish was through the ‘exchange of women’, sending poor English people over and into forced marriages. There, they became wives, mothers, and primary producers in stone-cold homes, constructed so as to churn out commodities like butter and cheese.
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Bennes brings us back to the island of Ireland – the roots of Festival director Kim McAleese, and many members of Array Collective, Northern Ireland’s first Turner Prize-winners - but reckonings continue closer to home and beyond the Festival too. Based out of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie work in collaboration, and recently produced work in response to two Libyan sculptures separated in their display at the National Museum of Scotland. By photographing how these North African objects were branded Scottish possessions, with item numbers carved out of them by previous collectors, their contactless interventions document historic disrespect – a constructive approach to art and history-making with great promise for the future.
Hephzibah Israel: / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 30 September 2023.
Alberta Whittle: create dangerously is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 7 January 2024.
Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is on view at Edinburgh Printmakers until 17 September 2023.
Andrew Cranston: Never a Joiner is on view at Ingleby Gallery until 16 September 2023. An expanded exhibition, What Made You Stop Here?, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield on 25 November 2023.
The Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023 was on view at Trinity Apse, Edinburgh, supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
All exhibitions were also part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
‘Empires are built on crossing borders on one’s own terms,’ provokes Hephzibah Israel, a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Journeying between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, her cursive scripts lay above two more exhibitions currently on show at the city’s Talbot Rice Gallery, in a poetic navigation of nationality and nationalism – something previously tapped into in a post-Brexit collaboration with Emeka Ogboh.
Referencing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Israel’s words chime with a wider effort by the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, to connect with places beyond the city – like Birmingham, but even more so, Ireland – and particularly, with Caribbean, and shared colonial, histories.
Born in 1980 in Bridgetown, Barbados, Alberta Whittle also first moved to Birmingham, before pursuing study at the Glasgow School of Art. Moving back and forth between Celtic and Caribbean locales, Whittle’s work is cited time and again, in Scottish Women Artists, and in a powerful performance at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall, where she strides a floor scattered with conches, cutlasses, and coconut shells.
But only her career-spanning survey at the Modern has enough space for her multidisciplinary practice. It goes beyond the digital collages for which she is best-known – and gives them context, highlighting the role of collage, masquerade, and calypso music in the Caribbean – adding newly commissioned textiles, gates kept from her Venice Biennale pavilion (2022), plus punctuation seats, giving pause to we participants. Whittle’s ‘Living Room’ is a highlight, where resin tiles cast with the artist’s own footprints encourage us to walk in, or perhaps follow, her way. It comes at a time of total rehang across the National Galleries of Scotland, from which its regional cousins in London, at the Tate Britain and National Portrait Gallery, could learn a thing or two.
Having made her way to Scotland more recently, the American artist Christian Noelle Charles is as embedded in Glasgow’s artistic community. In the Parliament Hall performance, The Last Born, she acts as Whittle’s ‘accomplice’, and vocalises with words which speak to the vulnerable, ‘soft’ bodies of Black children in particular. It’s a direct assault on colonial stereotypes of Black strength, resisting the transformation of human bodies into ‘callous’ things – a necessary detachment often used to justify slavery. The musicality echoes Sonia Boyce’s noisy exhibitions, but here, the bell is tolled in a more sinister manner, as though to call in school children from their breaks, but nod too to the funeral bell, and their premature deaths.
The name of Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I, hints at the artist’s primary interest in performance. But beyond Barber Shop Chronicles, the artist installs a beauty salon, with the sounds of women talking about their artistic practices in hushed tones, which whisper from a CD player. It’s more fucsia than rose-tinted, warm without nostalgia, and whilst with Whittle she wears red, this show is clad purple, a nod to the royalty we find inside. In New York, she’s pals with Carrie Mae Weems, and the respect for those who came before her crosses borders too: ‘Ingrid Pollard was there!’, a contributor remarks, in one of the audio pieces.
Royalty – or perhaps aristocracy - graces New Town’s Ingleby Gallery too. Frank Walter (or, Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter) styled himself as the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a Ding Nook. Despite his grandeur, Ingleby’s 2013 exhibition of the artist, curated with art historian Barbara Paca, marked the first ever of this twentieth-century titan, and total artist, from Antigua.
In the ten years since, Walter’s position as one of the most distinctive Caribbean artists has been consolidated with a series of exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with Antigua and Barbuda’s first-ever pavilion (also curated by Paca). A second at Ingleby, Music of the Spheres, was central to the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, the first showing of his visionary ‘spool’ paintings, circular tondos which speak to his inventive practice.
Still, Walter remains lesser known than his white, Scots-born contemporaries; an upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum in London may help remedy this historic negligence, but in their work, we find traces of his influence. It was the first Walter exhibition that would connect Ingleby with Peter Doig – for a time, the market record-holder for a living European artist - who got in touch about this artist from the Caribbean who thought himself Scottish, his own situation in reverse.
Oft travelling from his birthplace of Edinburgh, Doig temporarily relocated to Trinidad, practising in a studio that was part of the former Fernandes Rum Factory complex in Port of Spain. He actively participated in the local community, painting surrealistic scenes steeped as much in soca music, and still consciously from his perspective as an outsider. During the Festival, more contemporary colonial landscapes can be found at Nat Raha’s epistolary (on carceral islands) and Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots.
Doig’s encounter with Walter came not in the Caribbean, but back in Glasgow. He was introduced to Walter by his friend and fellow artist, Andrew Cranston, now on display at Ingleby Gallery. Cranston’s diverse practice, perhaps more than Doig’s, reflects the impact of Caribbean cultures on Scottish art – as much, if not more so, than the Western European interiors and impressionistic fashions typically read of his work. His deft employ of hazy, pastel shades, novel use of media, and scenes which exist in-between the imaginary and actuality, speak to Trinidadian traditions which so inspired the two that they are soon to release a talk about it.
Cranston’s exhibition comes ten years after the Gallery relocated to Glasite Meeting House, a former place of worship of its titular Scottish religious sect. Small and strict in practice, the group found enlightenment in areas void of conspicuous decoration; during the 19th century, the House was known as Kail Kirk, in recognition of the communal meal of kale soup served at all-day services. Here, the building becomes part of the work, a stark contrast between Cranston’s lurid hues, and the House’s austere architecture, reflecting a show both historical in character, and contemporary in vision.
More ornate Gothic gargoyles and abandoned stone carvings are to be found at Trinity Apse, a kirk hidden away near Waverley Station, which played host to Platform: 2023, the Festival’s annual group exhibition. All four of this year’s artists touched on themes of colonialism, but Crystal Bennes stands out for her multidisciplinary installation of maps, textiles, and milk soap sculptures – engagements with English imperialism in Ireland from the 1870s from plural perspectives. Dairy has a particular meaning for Bennes, speaking to the domestic and the use of women’s bodies as instruments of imperial control. One of the strategies by which English colonial administrators sought to ‘civilise’-as-Anglicise the Irish was through the ‘exchange of women’, sending poor English people over and into forced marriages. There, they became wives, mothers, and primary producers in stone-cold homes, constructed so as to churn out commodities like butter and cheese.
Bennes brings us back to the island of Ireland – the roots of Festival director Kim McAleese, and many members of Array Collective, Northern Ireland’s first Turner Prize-winners - but reckonings continue closer to home and beyond the Festival too. Based out of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie work in collaboration, and recently produced work in response to two Libyan sculptures separated in their display at the National Museum of Scotland. By photographing how these North African objects were branded Scottish possessions, with item numbers carved out of them by previous collectors, their contactless interventions document historic disrespect – a constructive approach to art and history-making with great promise for the future.
Hephzibah Israel: / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 30 September 2023.
Alberta Whittle: create dangerously is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 7 January 2024.
Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is on view at Edinburgh Printmakers until 17 September 2023.
Andrew Cranston: Never a Joiner is on view at Ingleby Gallery until 16 September 2023. An expanded exhibition, What Made You Stop Here?, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield on 25 November 2023.
The Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023 was on view at Trinity Apse, Edinburgh, supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
All exhibitions were also part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
‘Empires are built on crossing borders on one’s own terms,’ provokes Hephzibah Israel, a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Journeying between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, her cursive scripts lay above two more exhibitions currently on show at the city’s Talbot Rice Gallery, in a poetic navigation of nationality and nationalism – something previously tapped into in a post-Brexit collaboration with Emeka Ogboh.
Referencing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Israel’s words chime with a wider effort by the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, to connect with places beyond the city – like Birmingham, but even more so, Ireland – and particularly, with Caribbean, and shared colonial, histories.
Born in 1980 in Bridgetown, Barbados, Alberta Whittle also first moved to Birmingham, before pursuing study at the Glasgow School of Art. Moving back and forth between Celtic and Caribbean locales, Whittle’s work is cited time and again, in Scottish Women Artists, and in a powerful performance at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall, where she strides a floor scattered with conches, cutlasses, and coconut shells.
But only her career-spanning survey at the Modern has enough space for her multidisciplinary practice. It goes beyond the digital collages for which she is best-known – and gives them context, highlighting the role of collage, masquerade, and calypso music in the Caribbean – adding newly commissioned textiles, gates kept from her Venice Biennale pavilion (2022), plus punctuation seats, giving pause to we participants. Whittle’s ‘Living Room’ is a highlight, where resin tiles cast with the artist’s own footprints encourage us to walk in, or perhaps follow, her way. It comes at a time of total rehang across the National Galleries of Scotland, from which its regional cousins in London, at the Tate Britain and National Portrait Gallery, could learn a thing or two.
Having made her way to Scotland more recently, the American artist Christian Noelle Charles is as embedded in Glasgow’s artistic community. In the Parliament Hall performance, The Last Born, she acts as Whittle’s ‘accomplice’, and vocalises with words which speak to the vulnerable, ‘soft’ bodies of Black children in particular. It’s a direct assault on colonial stereotypes of Black strength, resisting the transformation of human bodies into ‘callous’ things – a necessary detachment often used to justify slavery. The musicality echoes Sonia Boyce’s noisy exhibitions, but here, the bell is tolled in a more sinister manner, as though to call in school children from their breaks, but nod too to the funeral bell, and their premature deaths.
The name of Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I, hints at the artist’s primary interest in performance. But beyond Barber Shop Chronicles, the artist installs a beauty salon, with the sounds of women talking about their artistic practices in hushed tones, which whisper from a CD player. It’s more fucsia than rose-tinted, warm without nostalgia, and whilst with Whittle she wears red, this show is clad purple, a nod to the royalty we find inside. In New York, she’s pals with Carrie Mae Weems, and the respect for those who came before her crosses borders too: ‘Ingrid Pollard was there!’, a contributor remarks, in one of the audio pieces.
Royalty – or perhaps aristocracy - graces New Town’s Ingleby Gallery too. Frank Walter (or, Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter) styled himself as the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a Ding Nook. Despite his grandeur, Ingleby’s 2013 exhibition of the artist, curated with art historian Barbara Paca, marked the first ever of this twentieth-century titan, and total artist, from Antigua.
In the ten years since, Walter’s position as one of the most distinctive Caribbean artists has been consolidated with a series of exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with Antigua and Barbuda’s first-ever pavilion (also curated by Paca). A second at Ingleby, Music of the Spheres, was central to the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, the first showing of his visionary ‘spool’ paintings, circular tondos which speak to his inventive practice.
Still, Walter remains lesser known than his white, Scots-born contemporaries; an upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum in London may help remedy this historic negligence, but in their work, we find traces of his influence. It was the first Walter exhibition that would connect Ingleby with Peter Doig – for a time, the market record-holder for a living European artist - who got in touch about this artist from the Caribbean who thought himself Scottish, his own situation in reverse.
Oft travelling from his birthplace of Edinburgh, Doig temporarily relocated to Trinidad, practising in a studio that was part of the former Fernandes Rum Factory complex in Port of Spain. He actively participated in the local community, painting surrealistic scenes steeped as much in soca music, and still consciously from his perspective as an outsider. During the Festival, more contemporary colonial landscapes can be found at Nat Raha’s epistolary (on carceral islands) and Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots.
Doig’s encounter with Walter came not in the Caribbean, but back in Glasgow. He was introduced to Walter by his friend and fellow artist, Andrew Cranston, now on display at Ingleby Gallery. Cranston’s diverse practice, perhaps more than Doig’s, reflects the impact of Caribbean cultures on Scottish art – as much, if not more so, than the Western European interiors and impressionistic fashions typically read of his work. His deft employ of hazy, pastel shades, novel use of media, and scenes which exist in-between the imaginary and actuality, speak to Trinidadian traditions which so inspired the two that they are soon to release a talk about it.
Cranston’s exhibition comes ten years after the Gallery relocated to Glasite Meeting House, a former place of worship of its titular Scottish religious sect. Small and strict in practice, the group found enlightenment in areas void of conspicuous decoration; during the 19th century, the House was known as Kail Kirk, in recognition of the communal meal of kale soup served at all-day services. Here, the building becomes part of the work, a stark contrast between Cranston’s lurid hues, and the House’s austere architecture, reflecting a show both historical in character, and contemporary in vision.
More ornate Gothic gargoyles and abandoned stone carvings are to be found at Trinity Apse, a kirk hidden away near Waverley Station, which played host to Platform: 2023, the Festival’s annual group exhibition. All four of this year’s artists touched on themes of colonialism, but Crystal Bennes stands out for her multidisciplinary installation of maps, textiles, and milk soap sculptures – engagements with English imperialism in Ireland from the 1870s from plural perspectives. Dairy has a particular meaning for Bennes, speaking to the domestic and the use of women’s bodies as instruments of imperial control. One of the strategies by which English colonial administrators sought to ‘civilise’-as-Anglicise the Irish was through the ‘exchange of women’, sending poor English people over and into forced marriages. There, they became wives, mothers, and primary producers in stone-cold homes, constructed so as to churn out commodities like butter and cheese.
Bennes brings us back to the island of Ireland – the roots of Festival director Kim McAleese, and many members of Array Collective, Northern Ireland’s first Turner Prize-winners - but reckonings continue closer to home and beyond the Festival too. Based out of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie work in collaboration, and recently produced work in response to two Libyan sculptures separated in their display at the National Museum of Scotland. By photographing how these North African objects were branded Scottish possessions, with item numbers carved out of them by previous collectors, their contactless interventions document historic disrespect – a constructive approach to art and history-making with great promise for the future.
Hephzibah Israel: / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 30 September 2023.
Alberta Whittle: create dangerously is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 7 January 2024.
Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is on view at Edinburgh Printmakers until 17 September 2023.
Andrew Cranston: Never a Joiner is on view at Ingleby Gallery until 16 September 2023. An expanded exhibition, What Made You Stop Here?, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield on 25 November 2023.
The Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023 was on view at Trinity Apse, Edinburgh, supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
All exhibitions were also part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
‘Empires are built on crossing borders on one’s own terms,’ provokes Hephzibah Israel, a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Journeying between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, her cursive scripts lay above two more exhibitions currently on show at the city’s Talbot Rice Gallery, in a poetic navigation of nationality and nationalism – something previously tapped into in a post-Brexit collaboration with Emeka Ogboh.
Referencing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Israel’s words chime with a wider effort by the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, to connect with places beyond the city – like Birmingham, but even more so, Ireland – and particularly, with Caribbean, and shared colonial, histories.
Born in 1980 in Bridgetown, Barbados, Alberta Whittle also first moved to Birmingham, before pursuing study at the Glasgow School of Art. Moving back and forth between Celtic and Caribbean locales, Whittle’s work is cited time and again, in Scottish Women Artists, and in a powerful performance at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall, where she strides a floor scattered with conches, cutlasses, and coconut shells.
But only her career-spanning survey at the Modern has enough space for her multidisciplinary practice. It goes beyond the digital collages for which she is best-known – and gives them context, highlighting the role of collage, masquerade, and calypso music in the Caribbean – adding newly commissioned textiles, gates kept from her Venice Biennale pavilion (2022), plus punctuation seats, giving pause to we participants. Whittle’s ‘Living Room’ is a highlight, where resin tiles cast with the artist’s own footprints encourage us to walk in, or perhaps follow, her way. It comes at a time of total rehang across the National Galleries of Scotland, from which its regional cousins in London, at the Tate Britain and National Portrait Gallery, could learn a thing or two.
Having made her way to Scotland more recently, the American artist Christian Noelle Charles is as embedded in Glasgow’s artistic community. In the Parliament Hall performance, The Last Born, she acts as Whittle’s ‘accomplice’, and vocalises with words which speak to the vulnerable, ‘soft’ bodies of Black children in particular. It’s a direct assault on colonial stereotypes of Black strength, resisting the transformation of human bodies into ‘callous’ things – a necessary detachment often used to justify slavery. The musicality echoes Sonia Boyce’s noisy exhibitions, but here, the bell is tolled in a more sinister manner, as though to call in school children from their breaks, but nod too to the funeral bell, and their premature deaths.
The name of Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I, hints at the artist’s primary interest in performance. But beyond Barber Shop Chronicles, the artist installs a beauty salon, with the sounds of women talking about their artistic practices in hushed tones, which whisper from a CD player. It’s more fucsia than rose-tinted, warm without nostalgia, and whilst with Whittle she wears red, this show is clad purple, a nod to the royalty we find inside. In New York, she’s pals with Carrie Mae Weems, and the respect for those who came before her crosses borders too: ‘Ingrid Pollard was there!’, a contributor remarks, in one of the audio pieces.
Royalty – or perhaps aristocracy - graces New Town’s Ingleby Gallery too. Frank Walter (or, Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter) styled himself as the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a Ding Nook. Despite his grandeur, Ingleby’s 2013 exhibition of the artist, curated with art historian Barbara Paca, marked the first ever of this twentieth-century titan, and total artist, from Antigua.
In the ten years since, Walter’s position as one of the most distinctive Caribbean artists has been consolidated with a series of exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with Antigua and Barbuda’s first-ever pavilion (also curated by Paca). A second at Ingleby, Music of the Spheres, was central to the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, the first showing of his visionary ‘spool’ paintings, circular tondos which speak to his inventive practice.
Still, Walter remains lesser known than his white, Scots-born contemporaries; an upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum in London may help remedy this historic negligence, but in their work, we find traces of his influence. It was the first Walter exhibition that would connect Ingleby with Peter Doig – for a time, the market record-holder for a living European artist - who got in touch about this artist from the Caribbean who thought himself Scottish, his own situation in reverse.
Oft travelling from his birthplace of Edinburgh, Doig temporarily relocated to Trinidad, practising in a studio that was part of the former Fernandes Rum Factory complex in Port of Spain. He actively participated in the local community, painting surrealistic scenes steeped as much in soca music, and still consciously from his perspective as an outsider. During the Festival, more contemporary colonial landscapes can be found at Nat Raha’s epistolary (on carceral islands) and Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots.
Doig’s encounter with Walter came not in the Caribbean, but back in Glasgow. He was introduced to Walter by his friend and fellow artist, Andrew Cranston, now on display at Ingleby Gallery. Cranston’s diverse practice, perhaps more than Doig’s, reflects the impact of Caribbean cultures on Scottish art – as much, if not more so, than the Western European interiors and impressionistic fashions typically read of his work. His deft employ of hazy, pastel shades, novel use of media, and scenes which exist in-between the imaginary and actuality, speak to Trinidadian traditions which so inspired the two that they are soon to release a talk about it.
Cranston’s exhibition comes ten years after the Gallery relocated to Glasite Meeting House, a former place of worship of its titular Scottish religious sect. Small and strict in practice, the group found enlightenment in areas void of conspicuous decoration; during the 19th century, the House was known as Kail Kirk, in recognition of the communal meal of kale soup served at all-day services. Here, the building becomes part of the work, a stark contrast between Cranston’s lurid hues, and the House’s austere architecture, reflecting a show both historical in character, and contemporary in vision.
More ornate Gothic gargoyles and abandoned stone carvings are to be found at Trinity Apse, a kirk hidden away near Waverley Station, which played host to Platform: 2023, the Festival’s annual group exhibition. All four of this year’s artists touched on themes of colonialism, but Crystal Bennes stands out for her multidisciplinary installation of maps, textiles, and milk soap sculptures – engagements with English imperialism in Ireland from the 1870s from plural perspectives. Dairy has a particular meaning for Bennes, speaking to the domestic and the use of women’s bodies as instruments of imperial control. One of the strategies by which English colonial administrators sought to ‘civilise’-as-Anglicise the Irish was through the ‘exchange of women’, sending poor English people over and into forced marriages. There, they became wives, mothers, and primary producers in stone-cold homes, constructed so as to churn out commodities like butter and cheese.
Bennes brings us back to the island of Ireland – the roots of Festival director Kim McAleese, and many members of Array Collective, Northern Ireland’s first Turner Prize-winners - but reckonings continue closer to home and beyond the Festival too. Based out of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie work in collaboration, and recently produced work in response to two Libyan sculptures separated in their display at the National Museum of Scotland. By photographing how these North African objects were branded Scottish possessions, with item numbers carved out of them by previous collectors, their contactless interventions document historic disrespect – a constructive approach to art and history-making with great promise for the future.
Hephzibah Israel: / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 30 September 2023.
Alberta Whittle: create dangerously is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 7 January 2024.
Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is on view at Edinburgh Printmakers until 17 September 2023.
Andrew Cranston: Never a Joiner is on view at Ingleby Gallery until 16 September 2023. An expanded exhibition, What Made You Stop Here?, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield on 25 November 2023.
The Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023 was on view at Trinity Apse, Edinburgh, supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
All exhibitions were also part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
‘Empires are built on crossing borders on one’s own terms,’ provokes Hephzibah Israel, a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Journeying between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, her cursive scripts lay above two more exhibitions currently on show at the city’s Talbot Rice Gallery, in a poetic navigation of nationality and nationalism – something previously tapped into in a post-Brexit collaboration with Emeka Ogboh.
Referencing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Israel’s words chime with a wider effort by the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, to connect with places beyond the city – like Birmingham, but even more so, Ireland – and particularly, with Caribbean, and shared colonial, histories.
Born in 1980 in Bridgetown, Barbados, Alberta Whittle also first moved to Birmingham, before pursuing study at the Glasgow School of Art. Moving back and forth between Celtic and Caribbean locales, Whittle’s work is cited time and again, in Scottish Women Artists, and in a powerful performance at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall, where she strides a floor scattered with conches, cutlasses, and coconut shells.
But only her career-spanning survey at the Modern has enough space for her multidisciplinary practice. It goes beyond the digital collages for which she is best-known – and gives them context, highlighting the role of collage, masquerade, and calypso music in the Caribbean – adding newly commissioned textiles, gates kept from her Venice Biennale pavilion (2022), plus punctuation seats, giving pause to we participants. Whittle’s ‘Living Room’ is a highlight, where resin tiles cast with the artist’s own footprints encourage us to walk in, or perhaps follow, her way. It comes at a time of total rehang across the National Galleries of Scotland, from which its regional cousins in London, at the Tate Britain and National Portrait Gallery, could learn a thing or two.
Having made her way to Scotland more recently, the American artist Christian Noelle Charles is as embedded in Glasgow’s artistic community. In the Parliament Hall performance, The Last Born, she acts as Whittle’s ‘accomplice’, and vocalises with words which speak to the vulnerable, ‘soft’ bodies of Black children in particular. It’s a direct assault on colonial stereotypes of Black strength, resisting the transformation of human bodies into ‘callous’ things – a necessary detachment often used to justify slavery. The musicality echoes Sonia Boyce’s noisy exhibitions, but here, the bell is tolled in a more sinister manner, as though to call in school children from their breaks, but nod too to the funeral bell, and their premature deaths.
The name of Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I, hints at the artist’s primary interest in performance. But beyond Barber Shop Chronicles, the artist installs a beauty salon, with the sounds of women talking about their artistic practices in hushed tones, which whisper from a CD player. It’s more fucsia than rose-tinted, warm without nostalgia, and whilst with Whittle she wears red, this show is clad purple, a nod to the royalty we find inside. In New York, she’s pals with Carrie Mae Weems, and the respect for those who came before her crosses borders too: ‘Ingrid Pollard was there!’, a contributor remarks, in one of the audio pieces.
Royalty – or perhaps aristocracy - graces New Town’s Ingleby Gallery too. Frank Walter (or, Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter) styled himself as the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a Ding Nook. Despite his grandeur, Ingleby’s 2013 exhibition of the artist, curated with art historian Barbara Paca, marked the first ever of this twentieth-century titan, and total artist, from Antigua.
In the ten years since, Walter’s position as one of the most distinctive Caribbean artists has been consolidated with a series of exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with Antigua and Barbuda’s first-ever pavilion (also curated by Paca). A second at Ingleby, Music of the Spheres, was central to the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, the first showing of his visionary ‘spool’ paintings, circular tondos which speak to his inventive practice.
Still, Walter remains lesser known than his white, Scots-born contemporaries; an upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum in London may help remedy this historic negligence, but in their work, we find traces of his influence. It was the first Walter exhibition that would connect Ingleby with Peter Doig – for a time, the market record-holder for a living European artist - who got in touch about this artist from the Caribbean who thought himself Scottish, his own situation in reverse.
Oft travelling from his birthplace of Edinburgh, Doig temporarily relocated to Trinidad, practising in a studio that was part of the former Fernandes Rum Factory complex in Port of Spain. He actively participated in the local community, painting surrealistic scenes steeped as much in soca music, and still consciously from his perspective as an outsider. During the Festival, more contemporary colonial landscapes can be found at Nat Raha’s epistolary (on carceral islands) and Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots.
Doig’s encounter with Walter came not in the Caribbean, but back in Glasgow. He was introduced to Walter by his friend and fellow artist, Andrew Cranston, now on display at Ingleby Gallery. Cranston’s diverse practice, perhaps more than Doig’s, reflects the impact of Caribbean cultures on Scottish art – as much, if not more so, than the Western European interiors and impressionistic fashions typically read of his work. His deft employ of hazy, pastel shades, novel use of media, and scenes which exist in-between the imaginary and actuality, speak to Trinidadian traditions which so inspired the two that they are soon to release a talk about it.
Cranston’s exhibition comes ten years after the Gallery relocated to Glasite Meeting House, a former place of worship of its titular Scottish religious sect. Small and strict in practice, the group found enlightenment in areas void of conspicuous decoration; during the 19th century, the House was known as Kail Kirk, in recognition of the communal meal of kale soup served at all-day services. Here, the building becomes part of the work, a stark contrast between Cranston’s lurid hues, and the House’s austere architecture, reflecting a show both historical in character, and contemporary in vision.
More ornate Gothic gargoyles and abandoned stone carvings are to be found at Trinity Apse, a kirk hidden away near Waverley Station, which played host to Platform: 2023, the Festival’s annual group exhibition. All four of this year’s artists touched on themes of colonialism, but Crystal Bennes stands out for her multidisciplinary installation of maps, textiles, and milk soap sculptures – engagements with English imperialism in Ireland from the 1870s from plural perspectives. Dairy has a particular meaning for Bennes, speaking to the domestic and the use of women’s bodies as instruments of imperial control. One of the strategies by which English colonial administrators sought to ‘civilise’-as-Anglicise the Irish was through the ‘exchange of women’, sending poor English people over and into forced marriages. There, they became wives, mothers, and primary producers in stone-cold homes, constructed so as to churn out commodities like butter and cheese.
Bennes brings us back to the island of Ireland – the roots of Festival director Kim McAleese, and many members of Array Collective, Northern Ireland’s first Turner Prize-winners - but reckonings continue closer to home and beyond the Festival too. Based out of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie work in collaboration, and recently produced work in response to two Libyan sculptures separated in their display at the National Museum of Scotland. By photographing how these North African objects were branded Scottish possessions, with item numbers carved out of them by previous collectors, their contactless interventions document historic disrespect – a constructive approach to art and history-making with great promise for the future.
Hephzibah Israel: / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 30 September 2023.
Alberta Whittle: create dangerously is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 7 January 2024.
Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is on view at Edinburgh Printmakers until 17 September 2023.
Andrew Cranston: Never a Joiner is on view at Ingleby Gallery until 16 September 2023. An expanded exhibition, What Made You Stop Here?, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield on 25 November 2023.
The Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023 was on view at Trinity Apse, Edinburgh, supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
All exhibitions were also part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
‘Empires are built on crossing borders on one’s own terms,’ provokes Hephzibah Israel, a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Journeying between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, her cursive scripts lay above two more exhibitions currently on show at the city’s Talbot Rice Gallery, in a poetic navigation of nationality and nationalism – something previously tapped into in a post-Brexit collaboration with Emeka Ogboh.
Referencing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Israel’s words chime with a wider effort by the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, to connect with places beyond the city – like Birmingham, but even more so, Ireland – and particularly, with Caribbean, and shared colonial, histories.
Born in 1980 in Bridgetown, Barbados, Alberta Whittle also first moved to Birmingham, before pursuing study at the Glasgow School of Art. Moving back and forth between Celtic and Caribbean locales, Whittle’s work is cited time and again, in Scottish Women Artists, and in a powerful performance at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall, where she strides a floor scattered with conches, cutlasses, and coconut shells.
But only her career-spanning survey at the Modern has enough space for her multidisciplinary practice. It goes beyond the digital collages for which she is best-known – and gives them context, highlighting the role of collage, masquerade, and calypso music in the Caribbean – adding newly commissioned textiles, gates kept from her Venice Biennale pavilion (2022), plus punctuation seats, giving pause to we participants. Whittle’s ‘Living Room’ is a highlight, where resin tiles cast with the artist’s own footprints encourage us to walk in, or perhaps follow, her way. It comes at a time of total rehang across the National Galleries of Scotland, from which its regional cousins in London, at the Tate Britain and National Portrait Gallery, could learn a thing or two.
Having made her way to Scotland more recently, the American artist Christian Noelle Charles is as embedded in Glasgow’s artistic community. In the Parliament Hall performance, The Last Born, she acts as Whittle’s ‘accomplice’, and vocalises with words which speak to the vulnerable, ‘soft’ bodies of Black children in particular. It’s a direct assault on colonial stereotypes of Black strength, resisting the transformation of human bodies into ‘callous’ things – a necessary detachment often used to justify slavery. The musicality echoes Sonia Boyce’s noisy exhibitions, but here, the bell is tolled in a more sinister manner, as though to call in school children from their breaks, but nod too to the funeral bell, and their premature deaths.
The name of Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I, hints at the artist’s primary interest in performance. But beyond Barber Shop Chronicles, the artist installs a beauty salon, with the sounds of women talking about their artistic practices in hushed tones, which whisper from a CD player. It’s more fucsia than rose-tinted, warm without nostalgia, and whilst with Whittle she wears red, this show is clad purple, a nod to the royalty we find inside. In New York, she’s pals with Carrie Mae Weems, and the respect for those who came before her crosses borders too: ‘Ingrid Pollard was there!’, a contributor remarks, in one of the audio pieces.
Royalty – or perhaps aristocracy - graces New Town’s Ingleby Gallery too. Frank Walter (or, Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter) styled himself as the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a Ding Nook. Despite his grandeur, Ingleby’s 2013 exhibition of the artist, curated with art historian Barbara Paca, marked the first ever of this twentieth-century titan, and total artist, from Antigua.
In the ten years since, Walter’s position as one of the most distinctive Caribbean artists has been consolidated with a series of exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with Antigua and Barbuda’s first-ever pavilion (also curated by Paca). A second at Ingleby, Music of the Spheres, was central to the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, the first showing of his visionary ‘spool’ paintings, circular tondos which speak to his inventive practice.
Still, Walter remains lesser known than his white, Scots-born contemporaries; an upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum in London may help remedy this historic negligence, but in their work, we find traces of his influence. It was the first Walter exhibition that would connect Ingleby with Peter Doig – for a time, the market record-holder for a living European artist - who got in touch about this artist from the Caribbean who thought himself Scottish, his own situation in reverse.
Oft travelling from his birthplace of Edinburgh, Doig temporarily relocated to Trinidad, practising in a studio that was part of the former Fernandes Rum Factory complex in Port of Spain. He actively participated in the local community, painting surrealistic scenes steeped as much in soca music, and still consciously from his perspective as an outsider. During the Festival, more contemporary colonial landscapes can be found at Nat Raha’s epistolary (on carceral islands) and Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots.
Doig’s encounter with Walter came not in the Caribbean, but back in Glasgow. He was introduced to Walter by his friend and fellow artist, Andrew Cranston, now on display at Ingleby Gallery. Cranston’s diverse practice, perhaps more than Doig’s, reflects the impact of Caribbean cultures on Scottish art – as much, if not more so, than the Western European interiors and impressionistic fashions typically read of his work. His deft employ of hazy, pastel shades, novel use of media, and scenes which exist in-between the imaginary and actuality, speak to Trinidadian traditions which so inspired the two that they are soon to release a talk about it.
Cranston’s exhibition comes ten years after the Gallery relocated to Glasite Meeting House, a former place of worship of its titular Scottish religious sect. Small and strict in practice, the group found enlightenment in areas void of conspicuous decoration; during the 19th century, the House was known as Kail Kirk, in recognition of the communal meal of kale soup served at all-day services. Here, the building becomes part of the work, a stark contrast between Cranston’s lurid hues, and the House’s austere architecture, reflecting a show both historical in character, and contemporary in vision.
More ornate Gothic gargoyles and abandoned stone carvings are to be found at Trinity Apse, a kirk hidden away near Waverley Station, which played host to Platform: 2023, the Festival’s annual group exhibition. All four of this year’s artists touched on themes of colonialism, but Crystal Bennes stands out for her multidisciplinary installation of maps, textiles, and milk soap sculptures – engagements with English imperialism in Ireland from the 1870s from plural perspectives. Dairy has a particular meaning for Bennes, speaking to the domestic and the use of women’s bodies as instruments of imperial control. One of the strategies by which English colonial administrators sought to ‘civilise’-as-Anglicise the Irish was through the ‘exchange of women’, sending poor English people over and into forced marriages. There, they became wives, mothers, and primary producers in stone-cold homes, constructed so as to churn out commodities like butter and cheese.
Bennes brings us back to the island of Ireland – the roots of Festival director Kim McAleese, and many members of Array Collective, Northern Ireland’s first Turner Prize-winners - but reckonings continue closer to home and beyond the Festival too. Based out of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie work in collaboration, and recently produced work in response to two Libyan sculptures separated in their display at the National Museum of Scotland. By photographing how these North African objects were branded Scottish possessions, with item numbers carved out of them by previous collectors, their contactless interventions document historic disrespect – a constructive approach to art and history-making with great promise for the future.
Hephzibah Israel: / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 30 September 2023.
Alberta Whittle: create dangerously is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 7 January 2024.
Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is on view at Edinburgh Printmakers until 17 September 2023.
Andrew Cranston: Never a Joiner is on view at Ingleby Gallery until 16 September 2023. An expanded exhibition, What Made You Stop Here?, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield on 25 November 2023.
The Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023 was on view at Trinity Apse, Edinburgh, supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
All exhibitions were also part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
‘Empires are built on crossing borders on one’s own terms,’ provokes Hephzibah Israel, a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Journeying between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, her cursive scripts lay above two more exhibitions currently on show at the city’s Talbot Rice Gallery, in a poetic navigation of nationality and nationalism – something previously tapped into in a post-Brexit collaboration with Emeka Ogboh.
Referencing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Israel’s words chime with a wider effort by the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, to connect with places beyond the city – like Birmingham, but even more so, Ireland – and particularly, with Caribbean, and shared colonial, histories.
Born in 1980 in Bridgetown, Barbados, Alberta Whittle also first moved to Birmingham, before pursuing study at the Glasgow School of Art. Moving back and forth between Celtic and Caribbean locales, Whittle’s work is cited time and again, in Scottish Women Artists, and in a powerful performance at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall, where she strides a floor scattered with conches, cutlasses, and coconut shells.
But only her career-spanning survey at the Modern has enough space for her multidisciplinary practice. It goes beyond the digital collages for which she is best-known – and gives them context, highlighting the role of collage, masquerade, and calypso music in the Caribbean – adding newly commissioned textiles, gates kept from her Venice Biennale pavilion (2022), plus punctuation seats, giving pause to we participants. Whittle’s ‘Living Room’ is a highlight, where resin tiles cast with the artist’s own footprints encourage us to walk in, or perhaps follow, her way. It comes at a time of total rehang across the National Galleries of Scotland, from which its regional cousins in London, at the Tate Britain and National Portrait Gallery, could learn a thing or two.
Having made her way to Scotland more recently, the American artist Christian Noelle Charles is as embedded in Glasgow’s artistic community. In the Parliament Hall performance, The Last Born, she acts as Whittle’s ‘accomplice’, and vocalises with words which speak to the vulnerable, ‘soft’ bodies of Black children in particular. It’s a direct assault on colonial stereotypes of Black strength, resisting the transformation of human bodies into ‘callous’ things – a necessary detachment often used to justify slavery. The musicality echoes Sonia Boyce’s noisy exhibitions, but here, the bell is tolled in a more sinister manner, as though to call in school children from their breaks, but nod too to the funeral bell, and their premature deaths.
The name of Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I, hints at the artist’s primary interest in performance. But beyond Barber Shop Chronicles, the artist installs a beauty salon, with the sounds of women talking about their artistic practices in hushed tones, which whisper from a CD player. It’s more fucsia than rose-tinted, warm without nostalgia, and whilst with Whittle she wears red, this show is clad purple, a nod to the royalty we find inside. In New York, she’s pals with Carrie Mae Weems, and the respect for those who came before her crosses borders too: ‘Ingrid Pollard was there!’, a contributor remarks, in one of the audio pieces.
Royalty – or perhaps aristocracy - graces New Town’s Ingleby Gallery too. Frank Walter (or, Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter) styled himself as the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a Ding Nook. Despite his grandeur, Ingleby’s 2013 exhibition of the artist, curated with art historian Barbara Paca, marked the first ever of this twentieth-century titan, and total artist, from Antigua.
In the ten years since, Walter’s position as one of the most distinctive Caribbean artists has been consolidated with a series of exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with Antigua and Barbuda’s first-ever pavilion (also curated by Paca). A second at Ingleby, Music of the Spheres, was central to the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, the first showing of his visionary ‘spool’ paintings, circular tondos which speak to his inventive practice.
Still, Walter remains lesser known than his white, Scots-born contemporaries; an upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum in London may help remedy this historic negligence, but in their work, we find traces of his influence. It was the first Walter exhibition that would connect Ingleby with Peter Doig – for a time, the market record-holder for a living European artist - who got in touch about this artist from the Caribbean who thought himself Scottish, his own situation in reverse.
Oft travelling from his birthplace of Edinburgh, Doig temporarily relocated to Trinidad, practising in a studio that was part of the former Fernandes Rum Factory complex in Port of Spain. He actively participated in the local community, painting surrealistic scenes steeped as much in soca music, and still consciously from his perspective as an outsider. During the Festival, more contemporary colonial landscapes can be found at Nat Raha’s epistolary (on carceral islands) and Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots.
Doig’s encounter with Walter came not in the Caribbean, but back in Glasgow. He was introduced to Walter by his friend and fellow artist, Andrew Cranston, now on display at Ingleby Gallery. Cranston’s diverse practice, perhaps more than Doig’s, reflects the impact of Caribbean cultures on Scottish art – as much, if not more so, than the Western European interiors and impressionistic fashions typically read of his work. His deft employ of hazy, pastel shades, novel use of media, and scenes which exist in-between the imaginary and actuality, speak to Trinidadian traditions which so inspired the two that they are soon to release a talk about it.
Cranston’s exhibition comes ten years after the Gallery relocated to Glasite Meeting House, a former place of worship of its titular Scottish religious sect. Small and strict in practice, the group found enlightenment in areas void of conspicuous decoration; during the 19th century, the House was known as Kail Kirk, in recognition of the communal meal of kale soup served at all-day services. Here, the building becomes part of the work, a stark contrast between Cranston’s lurid hues, and the House’s austere architecture, reflecting a show both historical in character, and contemporary in vision.
More ornate Gothic gargoyles and abandoned stone carvings are to be found at Trinity Apse, a kirk hidden away near Waverley Station, which played host to Platform: 2023, the Festival’s annual group exhibition. All four of this year’s artists touched on themes of colonialism, but Crystal Bennes stands out for her multidisciplinary installation of maps, textiles, and milk soap sculptures – engagements with English imperialism in Ireland from the 1870s from plural perspectives. Dairy has a particular meaning for Bennes, speaking to the domestic and the use of women’s bodies as instruments of imperial control. One of the strategies by which English colonial administrators sought to ‘civilise’-as-Anglicise the Irish was through the ‘exchange of women’, sending poor English people over and into forced marriages. There, they became wives, mothers, and primary producers in stone-cold homes, constructed so as to churn out commodities like butter and cheese.
Bennes brings us back to the island of Ireland – the roots of Festival director Kim McAleese, and many members of Array Collective, Northern Ireland’s first Turner Prize-winners - but reckonings continue closer to home and beyond the Festival too. Based out of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie work in collaboration, and recently produced work in response to two Libyan sculptures separated in their display at the National Museum of Scotland. By photographing how these North African objects were branded Scottish possessions, with item numbers carved out of them by previous collectors, their contactless interventions document historic disrespect – a constructive approach to art and history-making with great promise for the future.
Hephzibah Israel: / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 30 September 2023.
Alberta Whittle: create dangerously is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 7 January 2024.
Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is on view at Edinburgh Printmakers until 17 September 2023.
Andrew Cranston: Never a Joiner is on view at Ingleby Gallery until 16 September 2023. An expanded exhibition, What Made You Stop Here?, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield on 25 November 2023.
The Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023 was on view at Trinity Apse, Edinburgh, supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
All exhibitions were also part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
‘Empires are built on crossing borders on one’s own terms,’ provokes Hephzibah Israel, a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Journeying between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, her cursive scripts lay above two more exhibitions currently on show at the city’s Talbot Rice Gallery, in a poetic navigation of nationality and nationalism – something previously tapped into in a post-Brexit collaboration with Emeka Ogboh.
Referencing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Israel’s words chime with a wider effort by the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, to connect with places beyond the city – like Birmingham, but even more so, Ireland – and particularly, with Caribbean, and shared colonial, histories.
Born in 1980 in Bridgetown, Barbados, Alberta Whittle also first moved to Birmingham, before pursuing study at the Glasgow School of Art. Moving back and forth between Celtic and Caribbean locales, Whittle’s work is cited time and again, in Scottish Women Artists, and in a powerful performance at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall, where she strides a floor scattered with conches, cutlasses, and coconut shells.
But only her career-spanning survey at the Modern has enough space for her multidisciplinary practice. It goes beyond the digital collages for which she is best-known – and gives them context, highlighting the role of collage, masquerade, and calypso music in the Caribbean – adding newly commissioned textiles, gates kept from her Venice Biennale pavilion (2022), plus punctuation seats, giving pause to we participants. Whittle’s ‘Living Room’ is a highlight, where resin tiles cast with the artist’s own footprints encourage us to walk in, or perhaps follow, her way. It comes at a time of total rehang across the National Galleries of Scotland, from which its regional cousins in London, at the Tate Britain and National Portrait Gallery, could learn a thing or two.
Having made her way to Scotland more recently, the American artist Christian Noelle Charles is as embedded in Glasgow’s artistic community. In the Parliament Hall performance, The Last Born, she acts as Whittle’s ‘accomplice’, and vocalises with words which speak to the vulnerable, ‘soft’ bodies of Black children in particular. It’s a direct assault on colonial stereotypes of Black strength, resisting the transformation of human bodies into ‘callous’ things – a necessary detachment often used to justify slavery. The musicality echoes Sonia Boyce’s noisy exhibitions, but here, the bell is tolled in a more sinister manner, as though to call in school children from their breaks, but nod too to the funeral bell, and their premature deaths.
The name of Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I, hints at the artist’s primary interest in performance. But beyond Barber Shop Chronicles, the artist installs a beauty salon, with the sounds of women talking about their artistic practices in hushed tones, which whisper from a CD player. It’s more fucsia than rose-tinted, warm without nostalgia, and whilst with Whittle she wears red, this show is clad purple, a nod to the royalty we find inside. In New York, she’s pals with Carrie Mae Weems, and the respect for those who came before her crosses borders too: ‘Ingrid Pollard was there!’, a contributor remarks, in one of the audio pieces.
Royalty – or perhaps aristocracy - graces New Town’s Ingleby Gallery too. Frank Walter (or, Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter) styled himself as the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a Ding Nook. Despite his grandeur, Ingleby’s 2013 exhibition of the artist, curated with art historian Barbara Paca, marked the first ever of this twentieth-century titan, and total artist, from Antigua.
In the ten years since, Walter’s position as one of the most distinctive Caribbean artists has been consolidated with a series of exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with Antigua and Barbuda’s first-ever pavilion (also curated by Paca). A second at Ingleby, Music of the Spheres, was central to the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, the first showing of his visionary ‘spool’ paintings, circular tondos which speak to his inventive practice.
Still, Walter remains lesser known than his white, Scots-born contemporaries; an upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum in London may help remedy this historic negligence, but in their work, we find traces of his influence. It was the first Walter exhibition that would connect Ingleby with Peter Doig – for a time, the market record-holder for a living European artist - who got in touch about this artist from the Caribbean who thought himself Scottish, his own situation in reverse.
Oft travelling from his birthplace of Edinburgh, Doig temporarily relocated to Trinidad, practising in a studio that was part of the former Fernandes Rum Factory complex in Port of Spain. He actively participated in the local community, painting surrealistic scenes steeped as much in soca music, and still consciously from his perspective as an outsider. During the Festival, more contemporary colonial landscapes can be found at Nat Raha’s epistolary (on carceral islands) and Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots.
Doig’s encounter with Walter came not in the Caribbean, but back in Glasgow. He was introduced to Walter by his friend and fellow artist, Andrew Cranston, now on display at Ingleby Gallery. Cranston’s diverse practice, perhaps more than Doig’s, reflects the impact of Caribbean cultures on Scottish art – as much, if not more so, than the Western European interiors and impressionistic fashions typically read of his work. His deft employ of hazy, pastel shades, novel use of media, and scenes which exist in-between the imaginary and actuality, speak to Trinidadian traditions which so inspired the two that they are soon to release a talk about it.
Cranston’s exhibition comes ten years after the Gallery relocated to Glasite Meeting House, a former place of worship of its titular Scottish religious sect. Small and strict in practice, the group found enlightenment in areas void of conspicuous decoration; during the 19th century, the House was known as Kail Kirk, in recognition of the communal meal of kale soup served at all-day services. Here, the building becomes part of the work, a stark contrast between Cranston’s lurid hues, and the House’s austere architecture, reflecting a show both historical in character, and contemporary in vision.
More ornate Gothic gargoyles and abandoned stone carvings are to be found at Trinity Apse, a kirk hidden away near Waverley Station, which played host to Platform: 2023, the Festival’s annual group exhibition. All four of this year’s artists touched on themes of colonialism, but Crystal Bennes stands out for her multidisciplinary installation of maps, textiles, and milk soap sculptures – engagements with English imperialism in Ireland from the 1870s from plural perspectives. Dairy has a particular meaning for Bennes, speaking to the domestic and the use of women’s bodies as instruments of imperial control. One of the strategies by which English colonial administrators sought to ‘civilise’-as-Anglicise the Irish was through the ‘exchange of women’, sending poor English people over and into forced marriages. There, they became wives, mothers, and primary producers in stone-cold homes, constructed so as to churn out commodities like butter and cheese.
Bennes brings us back to the island of Ireland – the roots of Festival director Kim McAleese, and many members of Array Collective, Northern Ireland’s first Turner Prize-winners - but reckonings continue closer to home and beyond the Festival too. Based out of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie work in collaboration, and recently produced work in response to two Libyan sculptures separated in their display at the National Museum of Scotland. By photographing how these North African objects were branded Scottish possessions, with item numbers carved out of them by previous collectors, their contactless interventions document historic disrespect – a constructive approach to art and history-making with great promise for the future.
Hephzibah Israel: / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 30 September 2023.
Alberta Whittle: create dangerously is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 7 January 2024.
Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is on view at Edinburgh Printmakers until 17 September 2023.
Andrew Cranston: Never a Joiner is on view at Ingleby Gallery until 16 September 2023. An expanded exhibition, What Made You Stop Here?, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield on 25 November 2023.
The Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023 was on view at Trinity Apse, Edinburgh, supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
All exhibitions were also part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
‘Empires are built on crossing borders on one’s own terms,’ provokes Hephzibah Israel, a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Journeying between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, her cursive scripts lay above two more exhibitions currently on show at the city’s Talbot Rice Gallery, in a poetic navigation of nationality and nationalism – something previously tapped into in a post-Brexit collaboration with Emeka Ogboh.
Referencing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Israel’s words chime with a wider effort by the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, to connect with places beyond the city – like Birmingham, but even more so, Ireland – and particularly, with Caribbean, and shared colonial, histories.
Born in 1980 in Bridgetown, Barbados, Alberta Whittle also first moved to Birmingham, before pursuing study at the Glasgow School of Art. Moving back and forth between Celtic and Caribbean locales, Whittle’s work is cited time and again, in Scottish Women Artists, and in a powerful performance at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall, where she strides a floor scattered with conches, cutlasses, and coconut shells.
But only her career-spanning survey at the Modern has enough space for her multidisciplinary practice. It goes beyond the digital collages for which she is best-known – and gives them context, highlighting the role of collage, masquerade, and calypso music in the Caribbean – adding newly commissioned textiles, gates kept from her Venice Biennale pavilion (2022), plus punctuation seats, giving pause to we participants. Whittle’s ‘Living Room’ is a highlight, where resin tiles cast with the artist’s own footprints encourage us to walk in, or perhaps follow, her way. It comes at a time of total rehang across the National Galleries of Scotland, from which its regional cousins in London, at the Tate Britain and National Portrait Gallery, could learn a thing or two.
Having made her way to Scotland more recently, the American artist Christian Noelle Charles is as embedded in Glasgow’s artistic community. In the Parliament Hall performance, The Last Born, she acts as Whittle’s ‘accomplice’, and vocalises with words which speak to the vulnerable, ‘soft’ bodies of Black children in particular. It’s a direct assault on colonial stereotypes of Black strength, resisting the transformation of human bodies into ‘callous’ things – a necessary detachment often used to justify slavery. The musicality echoes Sonia Boyce’s noisy exhibitions, but here, the bell is tolled in a more sinister manner, as though to call in school children from their breaks, but nod too to the funeral bell, and their premature deaths.
The name of Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I, hints at the artist’s primary interest in performance. But beyond Barber Shop Chronicles, the artist installs a beauty salon, with the sounds of women talking about their artistic practices in hushed tones, which whisper from a CD player. It’s more fucsia than rose-tinted, warm without nostalgia, and whilst with Whittle she wears red, this show is clad purple, a nod to the royalty we find inside. In New York, she’s pals with Carrie Mae Weems, and the respect for those who came before her crosses borders too: ‘Ingrid Pollard was there!’, a contributor remarks, in one of the audio pieces.
Royalty – or perhaps aristocracy - graces New Town’s Ingleby Gallery too. Frank Walter (or, Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter) styled himself as the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a Ding Nook. Despite his grandeur, Ingleby’s 2013 exhibition of the artist, curated with art historian Barbara Paca, marked the first ever of this twentieth-century titan, and total artist, from Antigua.
In the ten years since, Walter’s position as one of the most distinctive Caribbean artists has been consolidated with a series of exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with Antigua and Barbuda’s first-ever pavilion (also curated by Paca). A second at Ingleby, Music of the Spheres, was central to the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, the first showing of his visionary ‘spool’ paintings, circular tondos which speak to his inventive practice.
Still, Walter remains lesser known than his white, Scots-born contemporaries; an upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum in London may help remedy this historic negligence, but in their work, we find traces of his influence. It was the first Walter exhibition that would connect Ingleby with Peter Doig – for a time, the market record-holder for a living European artist - who got in touch about this artist from the Caribbean who thought himself Scottish, his own situation in reverse.
Oft travelling from his birthplace of Edinburgh, Doig temporarily relocated to Trinidad, practising in a studio that was part of the former Fernandes Rum Factory complex in Port of Spain. He actively participated in the local community, painting surrealistic scenes steeped as much in soca music, and still consciously from his perspective as an outsider. During the Festival, more contemporary colonial landscapes can be found at Nat Raha’s epistolary (on carceral islands) and Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots.
Doig’s encounter with Walter came not in the Caribbean, but back in Glasgow. He was introduced to Walter by his friend and fellow artist, Andrew Cranston, now on display at Ingleby Gallery. Cranston’s diverse practice, perhaps more than Doig’s, reflects the impact of Caribbean cultures on Scottish art – as much, if not more so, than the Western European interiors and impressionistic fashions typically read of his work. His deft employ of hazy, pastel shades, novel use of media, and scenes which exist in-between the imaginary and actuality, speak to Trinidadian traditions which so inspired the two that they are soon to release a talk about it.
Cranston’s exhibition comes ten years after the Gallery relocated to Glasite Meeting House, a former place of worship of its titular Scottish religious sect. Small and strict in practice, the group found enlightenment in areas void of conspicuous decoration; during the 19th century, the House was known as Kail Kirk, in recognition of the communal meal of kale soup served at all-day services. Here, the building becomes part of the work, a stark contrast between Cranston’s lurid hues, and the House’s austere architecture, reflecting a show both historical in character, and contemporary in vision.
More ornate Gothic gargoyles and abandoned stone carvings are to be found at Trinity Apse, a kirk hidden away near Waverley Station, which played host to Platform: 2023, the Festival’s annual group exhibition. All four of this year’s artists touched on themes of colonialism, but Crystal Bennes stands out for her multidisciplinary installation of maps, textiles, and milk soap sculptures – engagements with English imperialism in Ireland from the 1870s from plural perspectives. Dairy has a particular meaning for Bennes, speaking to the domestic and the use of women’s bodies as instruments of imperial control. One of the strategies by which English colonial administrators sought to ‘civilise’-as-Anglicise the Irish was through the ‘exchange of women’, sending poor English people over and into forced marriages. There, they became wives, mothers, and primary producers in stone-cold homes, constructed so as to churn out commodities like butter and cheese.
Bennes brings us back to the island of Ireland – the roots of Festival director Kim McAleese, and many members of Array Collective, Northern Ireland’s first Turner Prize-winners - but reckonings continue closer to home and beyond the Festival too. Based out of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie work in collaboration, and recently produced work in response to two Libyan sculptures separated in their display at the National Museum of Scotland. By photographing how these North African objects were branded Scottish possessions, with item numbers carved out of them by previous collectors, their contactless interventions document historic disrespect – a constructive approach to art and history-making with great promise for the future.
Hephzibah Israel: / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 30 September 2023.
Alberta Whittle: create dangerously is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 7 January 2024.
Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is on view at Edinburgh Printmakers until 17 September 2023.
Andrew Cranston: Never a Joiner is on view at Ingleby Gallery until 16 September 2023. An expanded exhibition, What Made You Stop Here?, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield on 25 November 2023.
The Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023 was on view at Trinity Apse, Edinburgh, supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
All exhibitions were also part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
‘Empires are built on crossing borders on one’s own terms,’ provokes Hephzibah Israel, a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Journeying between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, her cursive scripts lay above two more exhibitions currently on show at the city’s Talbot Rice Gallery, in a poetic navigation of nationality and nationalism – something previously tapped into in a post-Brexit collaboration with Emeka Ogboh.
Referencing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Israel’s words chime with a wider effort by the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, to connect with places beyond the city – like Birmingham, but even more so, Ireland – and particularly, with Caribbean, and shared colonial, histories.
Born in 1980 in Bridgetown, Barbados, Alberta Whittle also first moved to Birmingham, before pursuing study at the Glasgow School of Art. Moving back and forth between Celtic and Caribbean locales, Whittle’s work is cited time and again, in Scottish Women Artists, and in a powerful performance at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall, where she strides a floor scattered with conches, cutlasses, and coconut shells.
But only her career-spanning survey at the Modern has enough space for her multidisciplinary practice. It goes beyond the digital collages for which she is best-known – and gives them context, highlighting the role of collage, masquerade, and calypso music in the Caribbean – adding newly commissioned textiles, gates kept from her Venice Biennale pavilion (2022), plus punctuation seats, giving pause to we participants. Whittle’s ‘Living Room’ is a highlight, where resin tiles cast with the artist’s own footprints encourage us to walk in, or perhaps follow, her way. It comes at a time of total rehang across the National Galleries of Scotland, from which its regional cousins in London, at the Tate Britain and National Portrait Gallery, could learn a thing or two.
Having made her way to Scotland more recently, the American artist Christian Noelle Charles is as embedded in Glasgow’s artistic community. In the Parliament Hall performance, The Last Born, she acts as Whittle’s ‘accomplice’, and vocalises with words which speak to the vulnerable, ‘soft’ bodies of Black children in particular. It’s a direct assault on colonial stereotypes of Black strength, resisting the transformation of human bodies into ‘callous’ things – a necessary detachment often used to justify slavery. The musicality echoes Sonia Boyce’s noisy exhibitions, but here, the bell is tolled in a more sinister manner, as though to call in school children from their breaks, but nod too to the funeral bell, and their premature deaths.
The name of Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I, hints at the artist’s primary interest in performance. But beyond Barber Shop Chronicles, the artist installs a beauty salon, with the sounds of women talking about their artistic practices in hushed tones, which whisper from a CD player. It’s more fucsia than rose-tinted, warm without nostalgia, and whilst with Whittle she wears red, this show is clad purple, a nod to the royalty we find inside. In New York, she’s pals with Carrie Mae Weems, and the respect for those who came before her crosses borders too: ‘Ingrid Pollard was there!’, a contributor remarks, in one of the audio pieces.
Royalty – or perhaps aristocracy - graces New Town’s Ingleby Gallery too. Frank Walter (or, Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter) styled himself as the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a Ding Nook. Despite his grandeur, Ingleby’s 2013 exhibition of the artist, curated with art historian Barbara Paca, marked the first ever of this twentieth-century titan, and total artist, from Antigua.
In the ten years since, Walter’s position as one of the most distinctive Caribbean artists has been consolidated with a series of exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with Antigua and Barbuda’s first-ever pavilion (also curated by Paca). A second at Ingleby, Music of the Spheres, was central to the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, the first showing of his visionary ‘spool’ paintings, circular tondos which speak to his inventive practice.
Still, Walter remains lesser known than his white, Scots-born contemporaries; an upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum in London may help remedy this historic negligence, but in their work, we find traces of his influence. It was the first Walter exhibition that would connect Ingleby with Peter Doig – for a time, the market record-holder for a living European artist - who got in touch about this artist from the Caribbean who thought himself Scottish, his own situation in reverse.
Oft travelling from his birthplace of Edinburgh, Doig temporarily relocated to Trinidad, practising in a studio that was part of the former Fernandes Rum Factory complex in Port of Spain. He actively participated in the local community, painting surrealistic scenes steeped as much in soca music, and still consciously from his perspective as an outsider. During the Festival, more contemporary colonial landscapes can be found at Nat Raha’s epistolary (on carceral islands) and Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots.
Doig’s encounter with Walter came not in the Caribbean, but back in Glasgow. He was introduced to Walter by his friend and fellow artist, Andrew Cranston, now on display at Ingleby Gallery. Cranston’s diverse practice, perhaps more than Doig’s, reflects the impact of Caribbean cultures on Scottish art – as much, if not more so, than the Western European interiors and impressionistic fashions typically read of his work. His deft employ of hazy, pastel shades, novel use of media, and scenes which exist in-between the imaginary and actuality, speak to Trinidadian traditions which so inspired the two that they are soon to release a talk about it.
Cranston’s exhibition comes ten years after the Gallery relocated to Glasite Meeting House, a former place of worship of its titular Scottish religious sect. Small and strict in practice, the group found enlightenment in areas void of conspicuous decoration; during the 19th century, the House was known as Kail Kirk, in recognition of the communal meal of kale soup served at all-day services. Here, the building becomes part of the work, a stark contrast between Cranston’s lurid hues, and the House’s austere architecture, reflecting a show both historical in character, and contemporary in vision.
More ornate Gothic gargoyles and abandoned stone carvings are to be found at Trinity Apse, a kirk hidden away near Waverley Station, which played host to Platform: 2023, the Festival’s annual group exhibition. All four of this year’s artists touched on themes of colonialism, but Crystal Bennes stands out for her multidisciplinary installation of maps, textiles, and milk soap sculptures – engagements with English imperialism in Ireland from the 1870s from plural perspectives. Dairy has a particular meaning for Bennes, speaking to the domestic and the use of women’s bodies as instruments of imperial control. One of the strategies by which English colonial administrators sought to ‘civilise’-as-Anglicise the Irish was through the ‘exchange of women’, sending poor English people over and into forced marriages. There, they became wives, mothers, and primary producers in stone-cold homes, constructed so as to churn out commodities like butter and cheese.
Bennes brings us back to the island of Ireland – the roots of Festival director Kim McAleese, and many members of Array Collective, Northern Ireland’s first Turner Prize-winners - but reckonings continue closer to home and beyond the Festival too. Based out of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie work in collaboration, and recently produced work in response to two Libyan sculptures separated in their display at the National Museum of Scotland. By photographing how these North African objects were branded Scottish possessions, with item numbers carved out of them by previous collectors, their contactless interventions document historic disrespect – a constructive approach to art and history-making with great promise for the future.
Hephzibah Israel: / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 30 September 2023.
Alberta Whittle: create dangerously is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 7 January 2024.
Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is on view at Edinburgh Printmakers until 17 September 2023.
Andrew Cranston: Never a Joiner is on view at Ingleby Gallery until 16 September 2023. An expanded exhibition, What Made You Stop Here?, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield on 25 November 2023.
The Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023 was on view at Trinity Apse, Edinburgh, supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
All exhibitions were also part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
‘Empires are built on crossing borders on one’s own terms,’ provokes Hephzibah Israel, a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Journeying between Tamil, her native language, and Hindi and English, her cursive scripts lay above two more exhibitions currently on show at the city’s Talbot Rice Gallery, in a poetic navigation of nationality and nationalism – something previously tapped into in a post-Brexit collaboration with Emeka Ogboh.
Referencing Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, Israel’s words chime with a wider effort by the Edinburgh Art Festival 2023, to connect with places beyond the city – like Birmingham, but even more so, Ireland – and particularly, with Caribbean, and shared colonial, histories.
Born in 1980 in Bridgetown, Barbados, Alberta Whittle also first moved to Birmingham, before pursuing study at the Glasgow School of Art. Moving back and forth between Celtic and Caribbean locales, Whittle’s work is cited time and again, in Scottish Women Artists, and in a powerful performance at Edinburgh’s Parliament Hall, where she strides a floor scattered with conches, cutlasses, and coconut shells.
But only her career-spanning survey at the Modern has enough space for her multidisciplinary practice. It goes beyond the digital collages for which she is best-known – and gives them context, highlighting the role of collage, masquerade, and calypso music in the Caribbean – adding newly commissioned textiles, gates kept from her Venice Biennale pavilion (2022), plus punctuation seats, giving pause to we participants. Whittle’s ‘Living Room’ is a highlight, where resin tiles cast with the artist’s own footprints encourage us to walk in, or perhaps follow, her way. It comes at a time of total rehang across the National Galleries of Scotland, from which its regional cousins in London, at the Tate Britain and National Portrait Gallery, could learn a thing or two.
Having made her way to Scotland more recently, the American artist Christian Noelle Charles is as embedded in Glasgow’s artistic community. In the Parliament Hall performance, The Last Born, she acts as Whittle’s ‘accomplice’, and vocalises with words which speak to the vulnerable, ‘soft’ bodies of Black children in particular. It’s a direct assault on colonial stereotypes of Black strength, resisting the transformation of human bodies into ‘callous’ things – a necessary detachment often used to justify slavery. The musicality echoes Sonia Boyce’s noisy exhibitions, but here, the bell is tolled in a more sinister manner, as though to call in school children from their breaks, but nod too to the funeral bell, and their premature deaths.
The name of Noelle Charles’ solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers, WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I, hints at the artist’s primary interest in performance. But beyond Barber Shop Chronicles, the artist installs a beauty salon, with the sounds of women talking about their artistic practices in hushed tones, which whisper from a CD player. It’s more fucsia than rose-tinted, warm without nostalgia, and whilst with Whittle she wears red, this show is clad purple, a nod to the royalty we find inside. In New York, she’s pals with Carrie Mae Weems, and the respect for those who came before her crosses borders too: ‘Ingrid Pollard was there!’, a contributor remarks, in one of the audio pieces.
Royalty – or perhaps aristocracy - graces New Town’s Ingleby Gallery too. Frank Walter (or, Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter) styled himself as the 7th Prince of the West Indies, Lord of Follies and the Ding-a Ding Nook. Despite his grandeur, Ingleby’s 2013 exhibition of the artist, curated with art historian Barbara Paca, marked the first ever of this twentieth-century titan, and total artist, from Antigua.
In the ten years since, Walter’s position as one of the most distinctive Caribbean artists has been consolidated with a series of exhibitions, including at the Venice Biennale in 2017, with Antigua and Barbuda’s first-ever pavilion (also curated by Paca). A second at Ingleby, Music of the Spheres, was central to the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, the first showing of his visionary ‘spool’ paintings, circular tondos which speak to his inventive practice.
Still, Walter remains lesser known than his white, Scots-born contemporaries; an upcoming exhibition at the Garden Museum in London may help remedy this historic negligence, but in their work, we find traces of his influence. It was the first Walter exhibition that would connect Ingleby with Peter Doig – for a time, the market record-holder for a living European artist - who got in touch about this artist from the Caribbean who thought himself Scottish, his own situation in reverse.
Oft travelling from his birthplace of Edinburgh, Doig temporarily relocated to Trinidad, practising in a studio that was part of the former Fernandes Rum Factory complex in Port of Spain. He actively participated in the local community, painting surrealistic scenes steeped as much in soca music, and still consciously from his perspective as an outsider. During the Festival, more contemporary colonial landscapes can be found at Nat Raha’s epistolary (on carceral islands) and Keg de Souza’s Shipping Roots.
Doig’s encounter with Walter came not in the Caribbean, but back in Glasgow. He was introduced to Walter by his friend and fellow artist, Andrew Cranston, now on display at Ingleby Gallery. Cranston’s diverse practice, perhaps more than Doig’s, reflects the impact of Caribbean cultures on Scottish art – as much, if not more so, than the Western European interiors and impressionistic fashions typically read of his work. His deft employ of hazy, pastel shades, novel use of media, and scenes which exist in-between the imaginary and actuality, speak to Trinidadian traditions which so inspired the two that they are soon to release a talk about it.
Cranston’s exhibition comes ten years after the Gallery relocated to Glasite Meeting House, a former place of worship of its titular Scottish religious sect. Small and strict in practice, the group found enlightenment in areas void of conspicuous decoration; during the 19th century, the House was known as Kail Kirk, in recognition of the communal meal of kale soup served at all-day services. Here, the building becomes part of the work, a stark contrast between Cranston’s lurid hues, and the House’s austere architecture, reflecting a show both historical in character, and contemporary in vision.
More ornate Gothic gargoyles and abandoned stone carvings are to be found at Trinity Apse, a kirk hidden away near Waverley Station, which played host to Platform: 2023, the Festival’s annual group exhibition. All four of this year’s artists touched on themes of colonialism, but Crystal Bennes stands out for her multidisciplinary installation of maps, textiles, and milk soap sculptures – engagements with English imperialism in Ireland from the 1870s from plural perspectives. Dairy has a particular meaning for Bennes, speaking to the domestic and the use of women’s bodies as instruments of imperial control. One of the strategies by which English colonial administrators sought to ‘civilise’-as-Anglicise the Irish was through the ‘exchange of women’, sending poor English people over and into forced marriages. There, they became wives, mothers, and primary producers in stone-cold homes, constructed so as to churn out commodities like butter and cheese.
Bennes brings us back to the island of Ireland – the roots of Festival director Kim McAleese, and many members of Array Collective, Northern Ireland’s first Turner Prize-winners - but reckonings continue closer to home and beyond the Festival too. Based out of Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie work in collaboration, and recently produced work in response to two Libyan sculptures separated in their display at the National Museum of Scotland. By photographing how these North African objects were branded Scottish possessions, with item numbers carved out of them by previous collectors, their contactless interventions document historic disrespect – a constructive approach to art and history-making with great promise for the future.
Hephzibah Israel: / மொழிபெயர்ப்பு / the nature of difference is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 30 September 2023.
Alberta Whittle: create dangerously is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Modern One until 7 January 2024.
Christian Noelle Charles: WHAT A FEELING! | ACT I is on view at Edinburgh Printmakers until 17 September 2023.
Andrew Cranston: Never a Joiner is on view at Ingleby Gallery until 16 September 2023. An expanded exhibition, What Made You Stop Here?, opens at the Hepworth Wakefield on 25 November 2023.
The Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2023 was on view at Trinity Apse, Edinburgh, supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
All exhibitions were also part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
