Edinburgh's Environmental Exhibitions: The Global
In the first of two articles, we visit some of the ecologically-focused exhibitions showing now in Scotland's capital...
January 22, 2024
The great deluge of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2023 did not lift all boats. Rising Tide is one such exhibition that risked being washed over when it opened in August, relegated to the National Museum of Scotland’s second gallery space (in the first, ironically, Beyond the Little Black Dress spoke of fashion as ‘one of the most energy-consuming, polluting and wasteful of modern industries’). It’s a wonderful display which, with a diverse range of contemporary Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists, engages us to reconsider our own relationship to the natural environment.
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Great installations of upcycled plastic waste loom over quieter, more unsettling works about the climate crisis (no longer simply ‘climate change’). In Holding On (2015), a film also represented at Frieze London in Sullivan+Strumpf’s group exhibition, Story, Place, artist Angela Tiatia lets the rising water levels of the Pacific submerge her, embodying the precarious status of islands like Tuvalu, which sit just three metres above sea level. As self-representation, it plays with an artistic convention of using women’s bodies as a canvas onto which to project ideas of the nation and landscape – but not for any kind of reclamation. By challenging the binary between human and nature – connecting the human body, and the global body of water – Holding On hints at something more radical, the dissolution of nation-states altogether.
Like Tiatia, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is of Sāmoan heritage. Born on the island, and identifying as a fa'afafine, the third gender of Samoa, Kihara’s practice navigates complex racial and gender relations. Their individual person, though, is more often confined to simplistic categories outside of Oceania, readily boxed and consumed as, for instance, the first New Zealander and Pacific Islander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Kihara’s particular experiences are often claimed as representative of ‘Polynesia’ as a whole, comprising over one thousand islands with different, and sometimes connected, colonial and non-colonial histories. The Oceanic subregion includes islands as diverse as the US state of Hawaii to Tahiti, an independent kingdom, then ‘protectorate’ and colony of France – all of which remain archipelagos in mainstream art institutions and history.
Kihara is also of Japanese descent, and their ‘interracial’ identity is referenced (as ‘lived experience’) in their textile installation at Rising Tide. In five overlapping (layered) kimono, they tell a story of a tsunami threatening to submerge a beach. Produced in collaboration with designers, artisans, and family members across islands, the work uses 60 metres of siapo (barkcloth), and features motifs found on both the barkcloth, Japanese nihonga illustrations, and omoshirogara (novelty pattern) kimono, often used in Asia to reflect global entanglements.
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The artist plays with the novelty tradition, using dark humour to highlight the serious issue of environmental change. The textiles are littered with art historical references, reimagined in contemporary fashions. A sequin-crusted skull bears great resemblance to the skeletons of Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the allusion to Katsushika Hokusai, another 19th-century ukiyo-e artist, is implicit in the title. Beneath the great wave are an abundance of small treasures – a found claw, a perfectly stitched plastic bag, and a crushed, red aluminium can, universally identifiable as Coca-Cola despite being presented without its label.
‘The work aims to reframe the Vā (space that connects) between Japan and the Pacific and specifically Sāmoa,’ says Kihara, ‘taking an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Pacific identity, history, and the environment.’ Typical of their research-based practice, this work is the first in a five-year project, which will consist of twenty siapo kimono presented in four sets of ‘Kimono Systems’, each with a specific theme. Vasa (Ocean) is but one cycle in an odyssey which will also consider gender, and reconsider the position of Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia – stories which will hopefully travel to Scotland’s shores too.
This iteration has recently been acquired by the National Museum; importantly, the exhibition also incorporates historical material from its permanent collection. Senior Curator Dr. Ali Clark has long challenged the typical, segregated display of objects by geography, pausing over woodblock prints and coral netsuke as artefacts of two-way exchanges. Here, spear points from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, made by Aboriginal men from discarded glass bottles, challenge the ongoing possession of ‘sustainable’ practices as the preserve of the contemporary Western world.
Part of curation demands better respecting the past. Clark co-leads the Museum’s Entangled Knowledges project, whose efforts include relabelling the Museum’s illustrations of fish with their Indigenous names, mirroring the moves of large botanical institutions. Artist photographs and context-setting captions also permeate this temporary exhibition; here are less didactic, and more accessible introductions, which speak respectfully of ‘cultural resilience’.
It also means carrying this history into our present and future, to connect global and local issues through community engagement. Rising Tide takes inspiration from its neighbours at the V&A Dundee, collaborating with Scottish schools to collect plastic waste for a generative installation, a jellyfish designed from inception to be dismantled, reused, but still, ultimately, recycled. Still, these ripples can become tidal waves if the permanent collection does ride them forward.
Nearby - in fact, practically semi-detached from the Museum - Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent explores time as an evolutionary, human, and environmental construct, using art to help stretch our imagination and thinking towards the future.
Otobong Nkanga’s opening textile work plunges the viewer into the unknowable depths of the ocean, a seascape disrupted by aggressive mineral abstraction. Strange human limbs are strewn about, littering the floor like dismembered dolls, recalling the human lives brutally lost during ocean crossings, and now morphing into plant life.
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Tied to the Other Side, and its careful curation, also embodies the strength of this exhibition, another triumph for Talbot Rice. Though short, the wall texts are speculative and inconclusive, utilising emotive language rather than detached, scientific terminology, and asking questions to provoke personal engagement.
There’s no direct reference to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, nor the drowning of ‘undesirable’ Black bodies en route, in the description of Nkanga’s tapestry. And there’s no need, for it’s woven within the tapestry, and the artist’s wider practice between Nigeria, their birthplace, and Belgium. Instead, the curators offer an allusion, that ‘not everyone has benefitted equally from modernity’.
It’s no cop-out, but an honest acknowledgement that these complex problems remain without resolution - a more didactic offering would merely be false comfort in the face of these entangled crises, transforming the exhibition into a performance in which both institution and viewer pretend there’s a single, simple way out. Rather, The Recent is a serious exhibition that takes its viewers seriously, as participants and individuals lost at sea.
Regina de Miguel’s EXVOTO, REEF (2021) takes to the equally vast seascape of the Great Barrier Reef. Like Tiatia, she explores the vulnerability of South Pacific islands like Tuvalu, here in a series of small paintings. Best are the dark blue and black works with ambiguous forms, which could be nerve endings or fragments of coral, connecting human and non-human bodies.
De Miguel’s larger works are more surrealistic, at times borrowing from Leonora Carrington (a mainstay of the nearby Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), and others, the abstracted faces and masks typical of that 20th century milieu. Her ‘Empusa, Medusa, Medea’ (2023) is a religious offering, but one presented in a small, anti-devotional space. Here, it stands testament to how art serves as a coping strategy for her eco-anxiety, ‘emotional entanglement with politics’, and sense of isolation heightened by the COVID pandemic.
_%20Empusa%2C%20Medusa%2C%20Medea%20(2023)%2C%20Regina%20de%20Miguel.jpg)
These three bodies of de Miguel’s work subvert the place of their display; they flow along the long corridors of the former natural history museum, a space which, in the right hands, has proven surprisingly fertile for transformation. From Hephzibah Israel’s the nature of difference, Talbot Rice here connects with the building’s founding purpose as a catalogue of flora and fauna, a quiet conversation with De Miguel’s motifs which works well alongside more monumental interventions.
Dorothy Cross’ film Stalactite (2010) and Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012) are projected back-to-back on a great shard of fabric, which cuts through the centre of the architecture. Beneath it, we are reduced to size, simultaneously aware of the small scale - and great negative impact - human activity can have. The slow destruction of the subjects on either side - Cross’ titular ice form, and Mangan’s fragmented zircon, the oldest material on the planet - is made even more deafening by the silence in which we stand, confronted.
Much noise is made about putting seemingly ‘local’ subjects on global stages, with presentations often backed by national embassies and councils. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Songs for the Compost (2020) is a collaborative film shot wandering in Lithuania’s Curonian Spit. As alien in the landscape are the hazmat-clad figures of Micol Roubini’s four-channel video, which presents plural perspectives on a disused asbestos mine in Balangero, Italy. Others, such as Helen Cammock, express transnational solidarity, connecting people and struggles across continents.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent: Eglė Budvytytė, Helen Cammock, Dorothy Cross, Regina de Miguel, Mikala Dwyer, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson, Micol Roubini and Simon Starling is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted: Dalziel + Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Mackenzie, Naomi Mcintosh, Katie Paterson, Hanna Tuulikki is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
The great deluge of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2023 did not lift all boats. Rising Tide is one such exhibition that risked being washed over when it opened in August, relegated to the National Museum of Scotland’s second gallery space (in the first, ironically, Beyond the Little Black Dress spoke of fashion as ‘one of the most energy-consuming, polluting and wasteful of modern industries’). It’s a wonderful display which, with a diverse range of contemporary Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists, engages us to reconsider our own relationship to the natural environment.
Great installations of upcycled plastic waste loom over quieter, more unsettling works about the climate crisis (no longer simply ‘climate change’). In Holding On (2015), a film also represented at Frieze London in Sullivan+Strumpf’s group exhibition, Story, Place, artist Angela Tiatia lets the rising water levels of the Pacific submerge her, embodying the precarious status of islands like Tuvalu, which sit just three metres above sea level. As self-representation, it plays with an artistic convention of using women’s bodies as a canvas onto which to project ideas of the nation and landscape – but not for any kind of reclamation. By challenging the binary between human and nature – connecting the human body, and the global body of water – Holding On hints at something more radical, the dissolution of nation-states altogether.
Like Tiatia, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is of Sāmoan heritage. Born on the island, and identifying as a fa'afafine, the third gender of Samoa, Kihara’s practice navigates complex racial and gender relations. Their individual person, though, is more often confined to simplistic categories outside of Oceania, readily boxed and consumed as, for instance, the first New Zealander and Pacific Islander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Kihara’s particular experiences are often claimed as representative of ‘Polynesia’ as a whole, comprising over one thousand islands with different, and sometimes connected, colonial and non-colonial histories. The Oceanic subregion includes islands as diverse as the US state of Hawaii to Tahiti, an independent kingdom, then ‘protectorate’ and colony of France – all of which remain archipelagos in mainstream art institutions and history.
Kihara is also of Japanese descent, and their ‘interracial’ identity is referenced (as ‘lived experience’) in their textile installation at Rising Tide. In five overlapping (layered) kimono, they tell a story of a tsunami threatening to submerge a beach. Produced in collaboration with designers, artisans, and family members across islands, the work uses 60 metres of siapo (barkcloth), and features motifs found on both the barkcloth, Japanese nihonga illustrations, and omoshirogara (novelty pattern) kimono, often used in Asia to reflect global entanglements.
The artist plays with the novelty tradition, using dark humour to highlight the serious issue of environmental change. The textiles are littered with art historical references, reimagined in contemporary fashions. A sequin-crusted skull bears great resemblance to the skeletons of Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the allusion to Katsushika Hokusai, another 19th-century ukiyo-e artist, is implicit in the title. Beneath the great wave are an abundance of small treasures – a found claw, a perfectly stitched plastic bag, and a crushed, red aluminium can, universally identifiable as Coca-Cola despite being presented without its label.
‘The work aims to reframe the Vā (space that connects) between Japan and the Pacific and specifically Sāmoa,’ says Kihara, ‘taking an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Pacific identity, history, and the environment.’ Typical of their research-based practice, this work is the first in a five-year project, which will consist of twenty siapo kimono presented in four sets of ‘Kimono Systems’, each with a specific theme. Vasa (Ocean) is but one cycle in an odyssey which will also consider gender, and reconsider the position of Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia – stories which will hopefully travel to Scotland’s shores too.
This iteration has recently been acquired by the National Museum; importantly, the exhibition also incorporates historical material from its permanent collection. Senior Curator Dr. Ali Clark has long challenged the typical, segregated display of objects by geography, pausing over woodblock prints and coral netsuke as artefacts of two-way exchanges. Here, spear points from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, made by Aboriginal men from discarded glass bottles, challenge the ongoing possession of ‘sustainable’ practices as the preserve of the contemporary Western world.
Part of curation demands better respecting the past. Clark co-leads the Museum’s Entangled Knowledges project, whose efforts include relabelling the Museum’s illustrations of fish with their Indigenous names, mirroring the moves of large botanical institutions. Artist photographs and context-setting captions also permeate this temporary exhibition; here are less didactic, and more accessible introductions, which speak respectfully of ‘cultural resilience’.
It also means carrying this history into our present and future, to connect global and local issues through community engagement. Rising Tide takes inspiration from its neighbours at the V&A Dundee, collaborating with Scottish schools to collect plastic waste for a generative installation, a jellyfish designed from inception to be dismantled, reused, but still, ultimately, recycled. Still, these ripples can become tidal waves if the permanent collection does ride them forward.
Nearby - in fact, practically semi-detached from the Museum - Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent explores time as an evolutionary, human, and environmental construct, using art to help stretch our imagination and thinking towards the future.
Otobong Nkanga’s opening textile work plunges the viewer into the unknowable depths of the ocean, a seascape disrupted by aggressive mineral abstraction. Strange human limbs are strewn about, littering the floor like dismembered dolls, recalling the human lives brutally lost during ocean crossings, and now morphing into plant life.
Tied to the Other Side, and its careful curation, also embodies the strength of this exhibition, another triumph for Talbot Rice. Though short, the wall texts are speculative and inconclusive, utilising emotive language rather than detached, scientific terminology, and asking questions to provoke personal engagement.
There’s no direct reference to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, nor the drowning of ‘undesirable’ Black bodies en route, in the description of Nkanga’s tapestry. And there’s no need, for it’s woven within the tapestry, and the artist’s wider practice between Nigeria, their birthplace, and Belgium. Instead, the curators offer an allusion, that ‘not everyone has benefitted equally from modernity’.
It’s no cop-out, but an honest acknowledgement that these complex problems remain without resolution - a more didactic offering would merely be false comfort in the face of these entangled crises, transforming the exhibition into a performance in which both institution and viewer pretend there’s a single, simple way out. Rather, The Recent is a serious exhibition that takes its viewers seriously, as participants and individuals lost at sea.
Regina de Miguel’s EXVOTO, REEF (2021) takes to the equally vast seascape of the Great Barrier Reef. Like Tiatia, she explores the vulnerability of South Pacific islands like Tuvalu, here in a series of small paintings. Best are the dark blue and black works with ambiguous forms, which could be nerve endings or fragments of coral, connecting human and non-human bodies.
De Miguel’s larger works are more surrealistic, at times borrowing from Leonora Carrington (a mainstay of the nearby Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), and others, the abstracted faces and masks typical of that 20th century milieu. Her ‘Empusa, Medusa, Medea’ (2023) is a religious offering, but one presented in a small, anti-devotional space. Here, it stands testament to how art serves as a coping strategy for her eco-anxiety, ‘emotional entanglement with politics’, and sense of isolation heightened by the COVID pandemic.
These three bodies of de Miguel’s work subvert the place of their display; they flow along the long corridors of the former natural history museum, a space which, in the right hands, has proven surprisingly fertile for transformation. From Hephzibah Israel’s the nature of difference, Talbot Rice here connects with the building’s founding purpose as a catalogue of flora and fauna, a quiet conversation with De Miguel’s motifs which works well alongside more monumental interventions.
Dorothy Cross’ film Stalactite (2010) and Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012) are projected back-to-back on a great shard of fabric, which cuts through the centre of the architecture. Beneath it, we are reduced to size, simultaneously aware of the small scale - and great negative impact - human activity can have. The slow destruction of the subjects on either side - Cross’ titular ice form, and Mangan’s fragmented zircon, the oldest material on the planet - is made even more deafening by the silence in which we stand, confronted.
Much noise is made about putting seemingly ‘local’ subjects on global stages, with presentations often backed by national embassies and councils. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Songs for the Compost (2020) is a collaborative film shot wandering in Lithuania’s Curonian Spit. As alien in the landscape are the hazmat-clad figures of Micol Roubini’s four-channel video, which presents plural perspectives on a disused asbestos mine in Balangero, Italy. Others, such as Helen Cammock, express transnational solidarity, connecting people and struggles across continents.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent: Eglė Budvytytė, Helen Cammock, Dorothy Cross, Regina de Miguel, Mikala Dwyer, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson, Micol Roubini and Simon Starling is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted: Dalziel + Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Mackenzie, Naomi Mcintosh, Katie Paterson, Hanna Tuulikki is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
The great deluge of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2023 did not lift all boats. Rising Tide is one such exhibition that risked being washed over when it opened in August, relegated to the National Museum of Scotland’s second gallery space (in the first, ironically, Beyond the Little Black Dress spoke of fashion as ‘one of the most energy-consuming, polluting and wasteful of modern industries’). It’s a wonderful display which, with a diverse range of contemporary Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists, engages us to reconsider our own relationship to the natural environment.
Great installations of upcycled plastic waste loom over quieter, more unsettling works about the climate crisis (no longer simply ‘climate change’). In Holding On (2015), a film also represented at Frieze London in Sullivan+Strumpf’s group exhibition, Story, Place, artist Angela Tiatia lets the rising water levels of the Pacific submerge her, embodying the precarious status of islands like Tuvalu, which sit just three metres above sea level. As self-representation, it plays with an artistic convention of using women’s bodies as a canvas onto which to project ideas of the nation and landscape – but not for any kind of reclamation. By challenging the binary between human and nature – connecting the human body, and the global body of water – Holding On hints at something more radical, the dissolution of nation-states altogether.
Like Tiatia, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is of Sāmoan heritage. Born on the island, and identifying as a fa'afafine, the third gender of Samoa, Kihara’s practice navigates complex racial and gender relations. Their individual person, though, is more often confined to simplistic categories outside of Oceania, readily boxed and consumed as, for instance, the first New Zealander and Pacific Islander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Kihara’s particular experiences are often claimed as representative of ‘Polynesia’ as a whole, comprising over one thousand islands with different, and sometimes connected, colonial and non-colonial histories. The Oceanic subregion includes islands as diverse as the US state of Hawaii to Tahiti, an independent kingdom, then ‘protectorate’ and colony of France – all of which remain archipelagos in mainstream art institutions and history.
Kihara is also of Japanese descent, and their ‘interracial’ identity is referenced (as ‘lived experience’) in their textile installation at Rising Tide. In five overlapping (layered) kimono, they tell a story of a tsunami threatening to submerge a beach. Produced in collaboration with designers, artisans, and family members across islands, the work uses 60 metres of siapo (barkcloth), and features motifs found on both the barkcloth, Japanese nihonga illustrations, and omoshirogara (novelty pattern) kimono, often used in Asia to reflect global entanglements.
The artist plays with the novelty tradition, using dark humour to highlight the serious issue of environmental change. The textiles are littered with art historical references, reimagined in contemporary fashions. A sequin-crusted skull bears great resemblance to the skeletons of Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the allusion to Katsushika Hokusai, another 19th-century ukiyo-e artist, is implicit in the title. Beneath the great wave are an abundance of small treasures – a found claw, a perfectly stitched plastic bag, and a crushed, red aluminium can, universally identifiable as Coca-Cola despite being presented without its label.
‘The work aims to reframe the Vā (space that connects) between Japan and the Pacific and specifically Sāmoa,’ says Kihara, ‘taking an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Pacific identity, history, and the environment.’ Typical of their research-based practice, this work is the first in a five-year project, which will consist of twenty siapo kimono presented in four sets of ‘Kimono Systems’, each with a specific theme. Vasa (Ocean) is but one cycle in an odyssey which will also consider gender, and reconsider the position of Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia – stories which will hopefully travel to Scotland’s shores too.
This iteration has recently been acquired by the National Museum; importantly, the exhibition also incorporates historical material from its permanent collection. Senior Curator Dr. Ali Clark has long challenged the typical, segregated display of objects by geography, pausing over woodblock prints and coral netsuke as artefacts of two-way exchanges. Here, spear points from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, made by Aboriginal men from discarded glass bottles, challenge the ongoing possession of ‘sustainable’ practices as the preserve of the contemporary Western world.
Part of curation demands better respecting the past. Clark co-leads the Museum’s Entangled Knowledges project, whose efforts include relabelling the Museum’s illustrations of fish with their Indigenous names, mirroring the moves of large botanical institutions. Artist photographs and context-setting captions also permeate this temporary exhibition; here are less didactic, and more accessible introductions, which speak respectfully of ‘cultural resilience’.
It also means carrying this history into our present and future, to connect global and local issues through community engagement. Rising Tide takes inspiration from its neighbours at the V&A Dundee, collaborating with Scottish schools to collect plastic waste for a generative installation, a jellyfish designed from inception to be dismantled, reused, but still, ultimately, recycled. Still, these ripples can become tidal waves if the permanent collection does ride them forward.
Nearby - in fact, practically semi-detached from the Museum - Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent explores time as an evolutionary, human, and environmental construct, using art to help stretch our imagination and thinking towards the future.
Otobong Nkanga’s opening textile work plunges the viewer into the unknowable depths of the ocean, a seascape disrupted by aggressive mineral abstraction. Strange human limbs are strewn about, littering the floor like dismembered dolls, recalling the human lives brutally lost during ocean crossings, and now morphing into plant life.
Tied to the Other Side, and its careful curation, also embodies the strength of this exhibition, another triumph for Talbot Rice. Though short, the wall texts are speculative and inconclusive, utilising emotive language rather than detached, scientific terminology, and asking questions to provoke personal engagement.
There’s no direct reference to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, nor the drowning of ‘undesirable’ Black bodies en route, in the description of Nkanga’s tapestry. And there’s no need, for it’s woven within the tapestry, and the artist’s wider practice between Nigeria, their birthplace, and Belgium. Instead, the curators offer an allusion, that ‘not everyone has benefitted equally from modernity’.
It’s no cop-out, but an honest acknowledgement that these complex problems remain without resolution - a more didactic offering would merely be false comfort in the face of these entangled crises, transforming the exhibition into a performance in which both institution and viewer pretend there’s a single, simple way out. Rather, The Recent is a serious exhibition that takes its viewers seriously, as participants and individuals lost at sea.
Regina de Miguel’s EXVOTO, REEF (2021) takes to the equally vast seascape of the Great Barrier Reef. Like Tiatia, she explores the vulnerability of South Pacific islands like Tuvalu, here in a series of small paintings. Best are the dark blue and black works with ambiguous forms, which could be nerve endings or fragments of coral, connecting human and non-human bodies.
De Miguel’s larger works are more surrealistic, at times borrowing from Leonora Carrington (a mainstay of the nearby Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), and others, the abstracted faces and masks typical of that 20th century milieu. Her ‘Empusa, Medusa, Medea’ (2023) is a religious offering, but one presented in a small, anti-devotional space. Here, it stands testament to how art serves as a coping strategy for her eco-anxiety, ‘emotional entanglement with politics’, and sense of isolation heightened by the COVID pandemic.
These three bodies of de Miguel’s work subvert the place of their display; they flow along the long corridors of the former natural history museum, a space which, in the right hands, has proven surprisingly fertile for transformation. From Hephzibah Israel’s the nature of difference, Talbot Rice here connects with the building’s founding purpose as a catalogue of flora and fauna, a quiet conversation with De Miguel’s motifs which works well alongside more monumental interventions.
Dorothy Cross’ film Stalactite (2010) and Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012) are projected back-to-back on a great shard of fabric, which cuts through the centre of the architecture. Beneath it, we are reduced to size, simultaneously aware of the small scale - and great negative impact - human activity can have. The slow destruction of the subjects on either side - Cross’ titular ice form, and Mangan’s fragmented zircon, the oldest material on the planet - is made even more deafening by the silence in which we stand, confronted.
Much noise is made about putting seemingly ‘local’ subjects on global stages, with presentations often backed by national embassies and councils. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Songs for the Compost (2020) is a collaborative film shot wandering in Lithuania’s Curonian Spit. As alien in the landscape are the hazmat-clad figures of Micol Roubini’s four-channel video, which presents plural perspectives on a disused asbestos mine in Balangero, Italy. Others, such as Helen Cammock, express transnational solidarity, connecting people and struggles across continents.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent: Eglė Budvytytė, Helen Cammock, Dorothy Cross, Regina de Miguel, Mikala Dwyer, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson, Micol Roubini and Simon Starling is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted: Dalziel + Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Mackenzie, Naomi Mcintosh, Katie Paterson, Hanna Tuulikki is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
The great deluge of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2023 did not lift all boats. Rising Tide is one such exhibition that risked being washed over when it opened in August, relegated to the National Museum of Scotland’s second gallery space (in the first, ironically, Beyond the Little Black Dress spoke of fashion as ‘one of the most energy-consuming, polluting and wasteful of modern industries’). It’s a wonderful display which, with a diverse range of contemporary Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists, engages us to reconsider our own relationship to the natural environment.
Great installations of upcycled plastic waste loom over quieter, more unsettling works about the climate crisis (no longer simply ‘climate change’). In Holding On (2015), a film also represented at Frieze London in Sullivan+Strumpf’s group exhibition, Story, Place, artist Angela Tiatia lets the rising water levels of the Pacific submerge her, embodying the precarious status of islands like Tuvalu, which sit just three metres above sea level. As self-representation, it plays with an artistic convention of using women’s bodies as a canvas onto which to project ideas of the nation and landscape – but not for any kind of reclamation. By challenging the binary between human and nature – connecting the human body, and the global body of water – Holding On hints at something more radical, the dissolution of nation-states altogether.
Like Tiatia, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is of Sāmoan heritage. Born on the island, and identifying as a fa'afafine, the third gender of Samoa, Kihara’s practice navigates complex racial and gender relations. Their individual person, though, is more often confined to simplistic categories outside of Oceania, readily boxed and consumed as, for instance, the first New Zealander and Pacific Islander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Kihara’s particular experiences are often claimed as representative of ‘Polynesia’ as a whole, comprising over one thousand islands with different, and sometimes connected, colonial and non-colonial histories. The Oceanic subregion includes islands as diverse as the US state of Hawaii to Tahiti, an independent kingdom, then ‘protectorate’ and colony of France – all of which remain archipelagos in mainstream art institutions and history.
Kihara is also of Japanese descent, and their ‘interracial’ identity is referenced (as ‘lived experience’) in their textile installation at Rising Tide. In five overlapping (layered) kimono, they tell a story of a tsunami threatening to submerge a beach. Produced in collaboration with designers, artisans, and family members across islands, the work uses 60 metres of siapo (barkcloth), and features motifs found on both the barkcloth, Japanese nihonga illustrations, and omoshirogara (novelty pattern) kimono, often used in Asia to reflect global entanglements.
The artist plays with the novelty tradition, using dark humour to highlight the serious issue of environmental change. The textiles are littered with art historical references, reimagined in contemporary fashions. A sequin-crusted skull bears great resemblance to the skeletons of Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the allusion to Katsushika Hokusai, another 19th-century ukiyo-e artist, is implicit in the title. Beneath the great wave are an abundance of small treasures – a found claw, a perfectly stitched plastic bag, and a crushed, red aluminium can, universally identifiable as Coca-Cola despite being presented without its label.
‘The work aims to reframe the Vā (space that connects) between Japan and the Pacific and specifically Sāmoa,’ says Kihara, ‘taking an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Pacific identity, history, and the environment.’ Typical of their research-based practice, this work is the first in a five-year project, which will consist of twenty siapo kimono presented in four sets of ‘Kimono Systems’, each with a specific theme. Vasa (Ocean) is but one cycle in an odyssey which will also consider gender, and reconsider the position of Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia – stories which will hopefully travel to Scotland’s shores too.
This iteration has recently been acquired by the National Museum; importantly, the exhibition also incorporates historical material from its permanent collection. Senior Curator Dr. Ali Clark has long challenged the typical, segregated display of objects by geography, pausing over woodblock prints and coral netsuke as artefacts of two-way exchanges. Here, spear points from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, made by Aboriginal men from discarded glass bottles, challenge the ongoing possession of ‘sustainable’ practices as the preserve of the contemporary Western world.
Part of curation demands better respecting the past. Clark co-leads the Museum’s Entangled Knowledges project, whose efforts include relabelling the Museum’s illustrations of fish with their Indigenous names, mirroring the moves of large botanical institutions. Artist photographs and context-setting captions also permeate this temporary exhibition; here are less didactic, and more accessible introductions, which speak respectfully of ‘cultural resilience’.
It also means carrying this history into our present and future, to connect global and local issues through community engagement. Rising Tide takes inspiration from its neighbours at the V&A Dundee, collaborating with Scottish schools to collect plastic waste for a generative installation, a jellyfish designed from inception to be dismantled, reused, but still, ultimately, recycled. Still, these ripples can become tidal waves if the permanent collection does ride them forward.
Nearby - in fact, practically semi-detached from the Museum - Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent explores time as an evolutionary, human, and environmental construct, using art to help stretch our imagination and thinking towards the future.
Otobong Nkanga’s opening textile work plunges the viewer into the unknowable depths of the ocean, a seascape disrupted by aggressive mineral abstraction. Strange human limbs are strewn about, littering the floor like dismembered dolls, recalling the human lives brutally lost during ocean crossings, and now morphing into plant life.
Tied to the Other Side, and its careful curation, also embodies the strength of this exhibition, another triumph for Talbot Rice. Though short, the wall texts are speculative and inconclusive, utilising emotive language rather than detached, scientific terminology, and asking questions to provoke personal engagement.
There’s no direct reference to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, nor the drowning of ‘undesirable’ Black bodies en route, in the description of Nkanga’s tapestry. And there’s no need, for it’s woven within the tapestry, and the artist’s wider practice between Nigeria, their birthplace, and Belgium. Instead, the curators offer an allusion, that ‘not everyone has benefitted equally from modernity’.
It’s no cop-out, but an honest acknowledgement that these complex problems remain without resolution - a more didactic offering would merely be false comfort in the face of these entangled crises, transforming the exhibition into a performance in which both institution and viewer pretend there’s a single, simple way out. Rather, The Recent is a serious exhibition that takes its viewers seriously, as participants and individuals lost at sea.
Regina de Miguel’s EXVOTO, REEF (2021) takes to the equally vast seascape of the Great Barrier Reef. Like Tiatia, she explores the vulnerability of South Pacific islands like Tuvalu, here in a series of small paintings. Best are the dark blue and black works with ambiguous forms, which could be nerve endings or fragments of coral, connecting human and non-human bodies.
De Miguel’s larger works are more surrealistic, at times borrowing from Leonora Carrington (a mainstay of the nearby Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), and others, the abstracted faces and masks typical of that 20th century milieu. Her ‘Empusa, Medusa, Medea’ (2023) is a religious offering, but one presented in a small, anti-devotional space. Here, it stands testament to how art serves as a coping strategy for her eco-anxiety, ‘emotional entanglement with politics’, and sense of isolation heightened by the COVID pandemic.
These three bodies of de Miguel’s work subvert the place of their display; they flow along the long corridors of the former natural history museum, a space which, in the right hands, has proven surprisingly fertile for transformation. From Hephzibah Israel’s the nature of difference, Talbot Rice here connects with the building’s founding purpose as a catalogue of flora and fauna, a quiet conversation with De Miguel’s motifs which works well alongside more monumental interventions.
Dorothy Cross’ film Stalactite (2010) and Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012) are projected back-to-back on a great shard of fabric, which cuts through the centre of the architecture. Beneath it, we are reduced to size, simultaneously aware of the small scale - and great negative impact - human activity can have. The slow destruction of the subjects on either side - Cross’ titular ice form, and Mangan’s fragmented zircon, the oldest material on the planet - is made even more deafening by the silence in which we stand, confronted.
Much noise is made about putting seemingly ‘local’ subjects on global stages, with presentations often backed by national embassies and councils. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Songs for the Compost (2020) is a collaborative film shot wandering in Lithuania’s Curonian Spit. As alien in the landscape are the hazmat-clad figures of Micol Roubini’s four-channel video, which presents plural perspectives on a disused asbestos mine in Balangero, Italy. Others, such as Helen Cammock, express transnational solidarity, connecting people and struggles across continents.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent: Eglė Budvytytė, Helen Cammock, Dorothy Cross, Regina de Miguel, Mikala Dwyer, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson, Micol Roubini and Simon Starling is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted: Dalziel + Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Mackenzie, Naomi Mcintosh, Katie Paterson, Hanna Tuulikki is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
The great deluge of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2023 did not lift all boats. Rising Tide is one such exhibition that risked being washed over when it opened in August, relegated to the National Museum of Scotland’s second gallery space (in the first, ironically, Beyond the Little Black Dress spoke of fashion as ‘one of the most energy-consuming, polluting and wasteful of modern industries’). It’s a wonderful display which, with a diverse range of contemporary Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists, engages us to reconsider our own relationship to the natural environment.
Great installations of upcycled plastic waste loom over quieter, more unsettling works about the climate crisis (no longer simply ‘climate change’). In Holding On (2015), a film also represented at Frieze London in Sullivan+Strumpf’s group exhibition, Story, Place, artist Angela Tiatia lets the rising water levels of the Pacific submerge her, embodying the precarious status of islands like Tuvalu, which sit just three metres above sea level. As self-representation, it plays with an artistic convention of using women’s bodies as a canvas onto which to project ideas of the nation and landscape – but not for any kind of reclamation. By challenging the binary between human and nature – connecting the human body, and the global body of water – Holding On hints at something more radical, the dissolution of nation-states altogether.
Like Tiatia, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is of Sāmoan heritage. Born on the island, and identifying as a fa'afafine, the third gender of Samoa, Kihara’s practice navigates complex racial and gender relations. Their individual person, though, is more often confined to simplistic categories outside of Oceania, readily boxed and consumed as, for instance, the first New Zealander and Pacific Islander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Kihara’s particular experiences are often claimed as representative of ‘Polynesia’ as a whole, comprising over one thousand islands with different, and sometimes connected, colonial and non-colonial histories. The Oceanic subregion includes islands as diverse as the US state of Hawaii to Tahiti, an independent kingdom, then ‘protectorate’ and colony of France – all of which remain archipelagos in mainstream art institutions and history.
Kihara is also of Japanese descent, and their ‘interracial’ identity is referenced (as ‘lived experience’) in their textile installation at Rising Tide. In five overlapping (layered) kimono, they tell a story of a tsunami threatening to submerge a beach. Produced in collaboration with designers, artisans, and family members across islands, the work uses 60 metres of siapo (barkcloth), and features motifs found on both the barkcloth, Japanese nihonga illustrations, and omoshirogara (novelty pattern) kimono, often used in Asia to reflect global entanglements.
The artist plays with the novelty tradition, using dark humour to highlight the serious issue of environmental change. The textiles are littered with art historical references, reimagined in contemporary fashions. A sequin-crusted skull bears great resemblance to the skeletons of Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the allusion to Katsushika Hokusai, another 19th-century ukiyo-e artist, is implicit in the title. Beneath the great wave are an abundance of small treasures – a found claw, a perfectly stitched plastic bag, and a crushed, red aluminium can, universally identifiable as Coca-Cola despite being presented without its label.
‘The work aims to reframe the Vā (space that connects) between Japan and the Pacific and specifically Sāmoa,’ says Kihara, ‘taking an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Pacific identity, history, and the environment.’ Typical of their research-based practice, this work is the first in a five-year project, which will consist of twenty siapo kimono presented in four sets of ‘Kimono Systems’, each with a specific theme. Vasa (Ocean) is but one cycle in an odyssey which will also consider gender, and reconsider the position of Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia – stories which will hopefully travel to Scotland’s shores too.
This iteration has recently been acquired by the National Museum; importantly, the exhibition also incorporates historical material from its permanent collection. Senior Curator Dr. Ali Clark has long challenged the typical, segregated display of objects by geography, pausing over woodblock prints and coral netsuke as artefacts of two-way exchanges. Here, spear points from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, made by Aboriginal men from discarded glass bottles, challenge the ongoing possession of ‘sustainable’ practices as the preserve of the contemporary Western world.
Part of curation demands better respecting the past. Clark co-leads the Museum’s Entangled Knowledges project, whose efforts include relabelling the Museum’s illustrations of fish with their Indigenous names, mirroring the moves of large botanical institutions. Artist photographs and context-setting captions also permeate this temporary exhibition; here are less didactic, and more accessible introductions, which speak respectfully of ‘cultural resilience’.
It also means carrying this history into our present and future, to connect global and local issues through community engagement. Rising Tide takes inspiration from its neighbours at the V&A Dundee, collaborating with Scottish schools to collect plastic waste for a generative installation, a jellyfish designed from inception to be dismantled, reused, but still, ultimately, recycled. Still, these ripples can become tidal waves if the permanent collection does ride them forward.
Nearby - in fact, practically semi-detached from the Museum - Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent explores time as an evolutionary, human, and environmental construct, using art to help stretch our imagination and thinking towards the future.
Otobong Nkanga’s opening textile work plunges the viewer into the unknowable depths of the ocean, a seascape disrupted by aggressive mineral abstraction. Strange human limbs are strewn about, littering the floor like dismembered dolls, recalling the human lives brutally lost during ocean crossings, and now morphing into plant life.
Tied to the Other Side, and its careful curation, also embodies the strength of this exhibition, another triumph for Talbot Rice. Though short, the wall texts are speculative and inconclusive, utilising emotive language rather than detached, scientific terminology, and asking questions to provoke personal engagement.
There’s no direct reference to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, nor the drowning of ‘undesirable’ Black bodies en route, in the description of Nkanga’s tapestry. And there’s no need, for it’s woven within the tapestry, and the artist’s wider practice between Nigeria, their birthplace, and Belgium. Instead, the curators offer an allusion, that ‘not everyone has benefitted equally from modernity’.
It’s no cop-out, but an honest acknowledgement that these complex problems remain without resolution - a more didactic offering would merely be false comfort in the face of these entangled crises, transforming the exhibition into a performance in which both institution and viewer pretend there’s a single, simple way out. Rather, The Recent is a serious exhibition that takes its viewers seriously, as participants and individuals lost at sea.
Regina de Miguel’s EXVOTO, REEF (2021) takes to the equally vast seascape of the Great Barrier Reef. Like Tiatia, she explores the vulnerability of South Pacific islands like Tuvalu, here in a series of small paintings. Best are the dark blue and black works with ambiguous forms, which could be nerve endings or fragments of coral, connecting human and non-human bodies.
De Miguel’s larger works are more surrealistic, at times borrowing from Leonora Carrington (a mainstay of the nearby Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), and others, the abstracted faces and masks typical of that 20th century milieu. Her ‘Empusa, Medusa, Medea’ (2023) is a religious offering, but one presented in a small, anti-devotional space. Here, it stands testament to how art serves as a coping strategy for her eco-anxiety, ‘emotional entanglement with politics’, and sense of isolation heightened by the COVID pandemic.
These three bodies of de Miguel’s work subvert the place of their display; they flow along the long corridors of the former natural history museum, a space which, in the right hands, has proven surprisingly fertile for transformation. From Hephzibah Israel’s the nature of difference, Talbot Rice here connects with the building’s founding purpose as a catalogue of flora and fauna, a quiet conversation with De Miguel’s motifs which works well alongside more monumental interventions.
Dorothy Cross’ film Stalactite (2010) and Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012) are projected back-to-back on a great shard of fabric, which cuts through the centre of the architecture. Beneath it, we are reduced to size, simultaneously aware of the small scale - and great negative impact - human activity can have. The slow destruction of the subjects on either side - Cross’ titular ice form, and Mangan’s fragmented zircon, the oldest material on the planet - is made even more deafening by the silence in which we stand, confronted.
Much noise is made about putting seemingly ‘local’ subjects on global stages, with presentations often backed by national embassies and councils. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Songs for the Compost (2020) is a collaborative film shot wandering in Lithuania’s Curonian Spit. As alien in the landscape are the hazmat-clad figures of Micol Roubini’s four-channel video, which presents plural perspectives on a disused asbestos mine in Balangero, Italy. Others, such as Helen Cammock, express transnational solidarity, connecting people and struggles across continents.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent: Eglė Budvytytė, Helen Cammock, Dorothy Cross, Regina de Miguel, Mikala Dwyer, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson, Micol Roubini and Simon Starling is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted: Dalziel + Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Mackenzie, Naomi Mcintosh, Katie Paterson, Hanna Tuulikki is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
The great deluge of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2023 did not lift all boats. Rising Tide is one such exhibition that risked being washed over when it opened in August, relegated to the National Museum of Scotland’s second gallery space (in the first, ironically, Beyond the Little Black Dress spoke of fashion as ‘one of the most energy-consuming, polluting and wasteful of modern industries’). It’s a wonderful display which, with a diverse range of contemporary Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists, engages us to reconsider our own relationship to the natural environment.
Great installations of upcycled plastic waste loom over quieter, more unsettling works about the climate crisis (no longer simply ‘climate change’). In Holding On (2015), a film also represented at Frieze London in Sullivan+Strumpf’s group exhibition, Story, Place, artist Angela Tiatia lets the rising water levels of the Pacific submerge her, embodying the precarious status of islands like Tuvalu, which sit just three metres above sea level. As self-representation, it plays with an artistic convention of using women’s bodies as a canvas onto which to project ideas of the nation and landscape – but not for any kind of reclamation. By challenging the binary between human and nature – connecting the human body, and the global body of water – Holding On hints at something more radical, the dissolution of nation-states altogether.
Like Tiatia, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is of Sāmoan heritage. Born on the island, and identifying as a fa'afafine, the third gender of Samoa, Kihara’s practice navigates complex racial and gender relations. Their individual person, though, is more often confined to simplistic categories outside of Oceania, readily boxed and consumed as, for instance, the first New Zealander and Pacific Islander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Kihara’s particular experiences are often claimed as representative of ‘Polynesia’ as a whole, comprising over one thousand islands with different, and sometimes connected, colonial and non-colonial histories. The Oceanic subregion includes islands as diverse as the US state of Hawaii to Tahiti, an independent kingdom, then ‘protectorate’ and colony of France – all of which remain archipelagos in mainstream art institutions and history.
Kihara is also of Japanese descent, and their ‘interracial’ identity is referenced (as ‘lived experience’) in their textile installation at Rising Tide. In five overlapping (layered) kimono, they tell a story of a tsunami threatening to submerge a beach. Produced in collaboration with designers, artisans, and family members across islands, the work uses 60 metres of siapo (barkcloth), and features motifs found on both the barkcloth, Japanese nihonga illustrations, and omoshirogara (novelty pattern) kimono, often used in Asia to reflect global entanglements.
The artist plays with the novelty tradition, using dark humour to highlight the serious issue of environmental change. The textiles are littered with art historical references, reimagined in contemporary fashions. A sequin-crusted skull bears great resemblance to the skeletons of Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the allusion to Katsushika Hokusai, another 19th-century ukiyo-e artist, is implicit in the title. Beneath the great wave are an abundance of small treasures – a found claw, a perfectly stitched plastic bag, and a crushed, red aluminium can, universally identifiable as Coca-Cola despite being presented without its label.
‘The work aims to reframe the Vā (space that connects) between Japan and the Pacific and specifically Sāmoa,’ says Kihara, ‘taking an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Pacific identity, history, and the environment.’ Typical of their research-based practice, this work is the first in a five-year project, which will consist of twenty siapo kimono presented in four sets of ‘Kimono Systems’, each with a specific theme. Vasa (Ocean) is but one cycle in an odyssey which will also consider gender, and reconsider the position of Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia – stories which will hopefully travel to Scotland’s shores too.
This iteration has recently been acquired by the National Museum; importantly, the exhibition also incorporates historical material from its permanent collection. Senior Curator Dr. Ali Clark has long challenged the typical, segregated display of objects by geography, pausing over woodblock prints and coral netsuke as artefacts of two-way exchanges. Here, spear points from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, made by Aboriginal men from discarded glass bottles, challenge the ongoing possession of ‘sustainable’ practices as the preserve of the contemporary Western world.
Part of curation demands better respecting the past. Clark co-leads the Museum’s Entangled Knowledges project, whose efforts include relabelling the Museum’s illustrations of fish with their Indigenous names, mirroring the moves of large botanical institutions. Artist photographs and context-setting captions also permeate this temporary exhibition; here are less didactic, and more accessible introductions, which speak respectfully of ‘cultural resilience’.
It also means carrying this history into our present and future, to connect global and local issues through community engagement. Rising Tide takes inspiration from its neighbours at the V&A Dundee, collaborating with Scottish schools to collect plastic waste for a generative installation, a jellyfish designed from inception to be dismantled, reused, but still, ultimately, recycled. Still, these ripples can become tidal waves if the permanent collection does ride them forward.
Nearby - in fact, practically semi-detached from the Museum - Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent explores time as an evolutionary, human, and environmental construct, using art to help stretch our imagination and thinking towards the future.
Otobong Nkanga’s opening textile work plunges the viewer into the unknowable depths of the ocean, a seascape disrupted by aggressive mineral abstraction. Strange human limbs are strewn about, littering the floor like dismembered dolls, recalling the human lives brutally lost during ocean crossings, and now morphing into plant life.
Tied to the Other Side, and its careful curation, also embodies the strength of this exhibition, another triumph for Talbot Rice. Though short, the wall texts are speculative and inconclusive, utilising emotive language rather than detached, scientific terminology, and asking questions to provoke personal engagement.
There’s no direct reference to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, nor the drowning of ‘undesirable’ Black bodies en route, in the description of Nkanga’s tapestry. And there’s no need, for it’s woven within the tapestry, and the artist’s wider practice between Nigeria, their birthplace, and Belgium. Instead, the curators offer an allusion, that ‘not everyone has benefitted equally from modernity’.
It’s no cop-out, but an honest acknowledgement that these complex problems remain without resolution - a more didactic offering would merely be false comfort in the face of these entangled crises, transforming the exhibition into a performance in which both institution and viewer pretend there’s a single, simple way out. Rather, The Recent is a serious exhibition that takes its viewers seriously, as participants and individuals lost at sea.
Regina de Miguel’s EXVOTO, REEF (2021) takes to the equally vast seascape of the Great Barrier Reef. Like Tiatia, she explores the vulnerability of South Pacific islands like Tuvalu, here in a series of small paintings. Best are the dark blue and black works with ambiguous forms, which could be nerve endings or fragments of coral, connecting human and non-human bodies.
De Miguel’s larger works are more surrealistic, at times borrowing from Leonora Carrington (a mainstay of the nearby Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), and others, the abstracted faces and masks typical of that 20th century milieu. Her ‘Empusa, Medusa, Medea’ (2023) is a religious offering, but one presented in a small, anti-devotional space. Here, it stands testament to how art serves as a coping strategy for her eco-anxiety, ‘emotional entanglement with politics’, and sense of isolation heightened by the COVID pandemic.
These three bodies of de Miguel’s work subvert the place of their display; they flow along the long corridors of the former natural history museum, a space which, in the right hands, has proven surprisingly fertile for transformation. From Hephzibah Israel’s the nature of difference, Talbot Rice here connects with the building’s founding purpose as a catalogue of flora and fauna, a quiet conversation with De Miguel’s motifs which works well alongside more monumental interventions.
Dorothy Cross’ film Stalactite (2010) and Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012) are projected back-to-back on a great shard of fabric, which cuts through the centre of the architecture. Beneath it, we are reduced to size, simultaneously aware of the small scale - and great negative impact - human activity can have. The slow destruction of the subjects on either side - Cross’ titular ice form, and Mangan’s fragmented zircon, the oldest material on the planet - is made even more deafening by the silence in which we stand, confronted.
Much noise is made about putting seemingly ‘local’ subjects on global stages, with presentations often backed by national embassies and councils. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Songs for the Compost (2020) is a collaborative film shot wandering in Lithuania’s Curonian Spit. As alien in the landscape are the hazmat-clad figures of Micol Roubini’s four-channel video, which presents plural perspectives on a disused asbestos mine in Balangero, Italy. Others, such as Helen Cammock, express transnational solidarity, connecting people and struggles across continents.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent: Eglė Budvytytė, Helen Cammock, Dorothy Cross, Regina de Miguel, Mikala Dwyer, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson, Micol Roubini and Simon Starling is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted: Dalziel + Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Mackenzie, Naomi Mcintosh, Katie Paterson, Hanna Tuulikki is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
The great deluge of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2023 did not lift all boats. Rising Tide is one such exhibition that risked being washed over when it opened in August, relegated to the National Museum of Scotland’s second gallery space (in the first, ironically, Beyond the Little Black Dress spoke of fashion as ‘one of the most energy-consuming, polluting and wasteful of modern industries’). It’s a wonderful display which, with a diverse range of contemporary Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists, engages us to reconsider our own relationship to the natural environment.
Great installations of upcycled plastic waste loom over quieter, more unsettling works about the climate crisis (no longer simply ‘climate change’). In Holding On (2015), a film also represented at Frieze London in Sullivan+Strumpf’s group exhibition, Story, Place, artist Angela Tiatia lets the rising water levels of the Pacific submerge her, embodying the precarious status of islands like Tuvalu, which sit just three metres above sea level. As self-representation, it plays with an artistic convention of using women’s bodies as a canvas onto which to project ideas of the nation and landscape – but not for any kind of reclamation. By challenging the binary between human and nature – connecting the human body, and the global body of water – Holding On hints at something more radical, the dissolution of nation-states altogether.
Like Tiatia, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is of Sāmoan heritage. Born on the island, and identifying as a fa'afafine, the third gender of Samoa, Kihara’s practice navigates complex racial and gender relations. Their individual person, though, is more often confined to simplistic categories outside of Oceania, readily boxed and consumed as, for instance, the first New Zealander and Pacific Islander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Kihara’s particular experiences are often claimed as representative of ‘Polynesia’ as a whole, comprising over one thousand islands with different, and sometimes connected, colonial and non-colonial histories. The Oceanic subregion includes islands as diverse as the US state of Hawaii to Tahiti, an independent kingdom, then ‘protectorate’ and colony of France – all of which remain archipelagos in mainstream art institutions and history.
Kihara is also of Japanese descent, and their ‘interracial’ identity is referenced (as ‘lived experience’) in their textile installation at Rising Tide. In five overlapping (layered) kimono, they tell a story of a tsunami threatening to submerge a beach. Produced in collaboration with designers, artisans, and family members across islands, the work uses 60 metres of siapo (barkcloth), and features motifs found on both the barkcloth, Japanese nihonga illustrations, and omoshirogara (novelty pattern) kimono, often used in Asia to reflect global entanglements.
The artist plays with the novelty tradition, using dark humour to highlight the serious issue of environmental change. The textiles are littered with art historical references, reimagined in contemporary fashions. A sequin-crusted skull bears great resemblance to the skeletons of Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the allusion to Katsushika Hokusai, another 19th-century ukiyo-e artist, is implicit in the title. Beneath the great wave are an abundance of small treasures – a found claw, a perfectly stitched plastic bag, and a crushed, red aluminium can, universally identifiable as Coca-Cola despite being presented without its label.
‘The work aims to reframe the Vā (space that connects) between Japan and the Pacific and specifically Sāmoa,’ says Kihara, ‘taking an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Pacific identity, history, and the environment.’ Typical of their research-based practice, this work is the first in a five-year project, which will consist of twenty siapo kimono presented in four sets of ‘Kimono Systems’, each with a specific theme. Vasa (Ocean) is but one cycle in an odyssey which will also consider gender, and reconsider the position of Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia – stories which will hopefully travel to Scotland’s shores too.
This iteration has recently been acquired by the National Museum; importantly, the exhibition also incorporates historical material from its permanent collection. Senior Curator Dr. Ali Clark has long challenged the typical, segregated display of objects by geography, pausing over woodblock prints and coral netsuke as artefacts of two-way exchanges. Here, spear points from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, made by Aboriginal men from discarded glass bottles, challenge the ongoing possession of ‘sustainable’ practices as the preserve of the contemporary Western world.
Part of curation demands better respecting the past. Clark co-leads the Museum’s Entangled Knowledges project, whose efforts include relabelling the Museum’s illustrations of fish with their Indigenous names, mirroring the moves of large botanical institutions. Artist photographs and context-setting captions also permeate this temporary exhibition; here are less didactic, and more accessible introductions, which speak respectfully of ‘cultural resilience’.
It also means carrying this history into our present and future, to connect global and local issues through community engagement. Rising Tide takes inspiration from its neighbours at the V&A Dundee, collaborating with Scottish schools to collect plastic waste for a generative installation, a jellyfish designed from inception to be dismantled, reused, but still, ultimately, recycled. Still, these ripples can become tidal waves if the permanent collection does ride them forward.
Nearby - in fact, practically semi-detached from the Museum - Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent explores time as an evolutionary, human, and environmental construct, using art to help stretch our imagination and thinking towards the future.
Otobong Nkanga’s opening textile work plunges the viewer into the unknowable depths of the ocean, a seascape disrupted by aggressive mineral abstraction. Strange human limbs are strewn about, littering the floor like dismembered dolls, recalling the human lives brutally lost during ocean crossings, and now morphing into plant life.
Tied to the Other Side, and its careful curation, also embodies the strength of this exhibition, another triumph for Talbot Rice. Though short, the wall texts are speculative and inconclusive, utilising emotive language rather than detached, scientific terminology, and asking questions to provoke personal engagement.
There’s no direct reference to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, nor the drowning of ‘undesirable’ Black bodies en route, in the description of Nkanga’s tapestry. And there’s no need, for it’s woven within the tapestry, and the artist’s wider practice between Nigeria, their birthplace, and Belgium. Instead, the curators offer an allusion, that ‘not everyone has benefitted equally from modernity’.
It’s no cop-out, but an honest acknowledgement that these complex problems remain without resolution - a more didactic offering would merely be false comfort in the face of these entangled crises, transforming the exhibition into a performance in which both institution and viewer pretend there’s a single, simple way out. Rather, The Recent is a serious exhibition that takes its viewers seriously, as participants and individuals lost at sea.
Regina de Miguel’s EXVOTO, REEF (2021) takes to the equally vast seascape of the Great Barrier Reef. Like Tiatia, she explores the vulnerability of South Pacific islands like Tuvalu, here in a series of small paintings. Best are the dark blue and black works with ambiguous forms, which could be nerve endings or fragments of coral, connecting human and non-human bodies.
De Miguel’s larger works are more surrealistic, at times borrowing from Leonora Carrington (a mainstay of the nearby Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), and others, the abstracted faces and masks typical of that 20th century milieu. Her ‘Empusa, Medusa, Medea’ (2023) is a religious offering, but one presented in a small, anti-devotional space. Here, it stands testament to how art serves as a coping strategy for her eco-anxiety, ‘emotional entanglement with politics’, and sense of isolation heightened by the COVID pandemic.
These three bodies of de Miguel’s work subvert the place of their display; they flow along the long corridors of the former natural history museum, a space which, in the right hands, has proven surprisingly fertile for transformation. From Hephzibah Israel’s the nature of difference, Talbot Rice here connects with the building’s founding purpose as a catalogue of flora and fauna, a quiet conversation with De Miguel’s motifs which works well alongside more monumental interventions.
Dorothy Cross’ film Stalactite (2010) and Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012) are projected back-to-back on a great shard of fabric, which cuts through the centre of the architecture. Beneath it, we are reduced to size, simultaneously aware of the small scale - and great negative impact - human activity can have. The slow destruction of the subjects on either side - Cross’ titular ice form, and Mangan’s fragmented zircon, the oldest material on the planet - is made even more deafening by the silence in which we stand, confronted.
Much noise is made about putting seemingly ‘local’ subjects on global stages, with presentations often backed by national embassies and councils. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Songs for the Compost (2020) is a collaborative film shot wandering in Lithuania’s Curonian Spit. As alien in the landscape are the hazmat-clad figures of Micol Roubini’s four-channel video, which presents plural perspectives on a disused asbestos mine in Balangero, Italy. Others, such as Helen Cammock, express transnational solidarity, connecting people and struggles across continents.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent: Eglė Budvytytė, Helen Cammock, Dorothy Cross, Regina de Miguel, Mikala Dwyer, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson, Micol Roubini and Simon Starling is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted: Dalziel + Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Mackenzie, Naomi Mcintosh, Katie Paterson, Hanna Tuulikki is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
The great deluge of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2023 did not lift all boats. Rising Tide is one such exhibition that risked being washed over when it opened in August, relegated to the National Museum of Scotland’s second gallery space (in the first, ironically, Beyond the Little Black Dress spoke of fashion as ‘one of the most energy-consuming, polluting and wasteful of modern industries’). It’s a wonderful display which, with a diverse range of contemporary Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists, engages us to reconsider our own relationship to the natural environment.
Great installations of upcycled plastic waste loom over quieter, more unsettling works about the climate crisis (no longer simply ‘climate change’). In Holding On (2015), a film also represented at Frieze London in Sullivan+Strumpf’s group exhibition, Story, Place, artist Angela Tiatia lets the rising water levels of the Pacific submerge her, embodying the precarious status of islands like Tuvalu, which sit just three metres above sea level. As self-representation, it plays with an artistic convention of using women’s bodies as a canvas onto which to project ideas of the nation and landscape – but not for any kind of reclamation. By challenging the binary between human and nature – connecting the human body, and the global body of water – Holding On hints at something more radical, the dissolution of nation-states altogether.
Like Tiatia, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is of Sāmoan heritage. Born on the island, and identifying as a fa'afafine, the third gender of Samoa, Kihara’s practice navigates complex racial and gender relations. Their individual person, though, is more often confined to simplistic categories outside of Oceania, readily boxed and consumed as, for instance, the first New Zealander and Pacific Islander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Kihara’s particular experiences are often claimed as representative of ‘Polynesia’ as a whole, comprising over one thousand islands with different, and sometimes connected, colonial and non-colonial histories. The Oceanic subregion includes islands as diverse as the US state of Hawaii to Tahiti, an independent kingdom, then ‘protectorate’ and colony of France – all of which remain archipelagos in mainstream art institutions and history.
Kihara is also of Japanese descent, and their ‘interracial’ identity is referenced (as ‘lived experience’) in their textile installation at Rising Tide. In five overlapping (layered) kimono, they tell a story of a tsunami threatening to submerge a beach. Produced in collaboration with designers, artisans, and family members across islands, the work uses 60 metres of siapo (barkcloth), and features motifs found on both the barkcloth, Japanese nihonga illustrations, and omoshirogara (novelty pattern) kimono, often used in Asia to reflect global entanglements.
The artist plays with the novelty tradition, using dark humour to highlight the serious issue of environmental change. The textiles are littered with art historical references, reimagined in contemporary fashions. A sequin-crusted skull bears great resemblance to the skeletons of Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the allusion to Katsushika Hokusai, another 19th-century ukiyo-e artist, is implicit in the title. Beneath the great wave are an abundance of small treasures – a found claw, a perfectly stitched plastic bag, and a crushed, red aluminium can, universally identifiable as Coca-Cola despite being presented without its label.
‘The work aims to reframe the Vā (space that connects) between Japan and the Pacific and specifically Sāmoa,’ says Kihara, ‘taking an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Pacific identity, history, and the environment.’ Typical of their research-based practice, this work is the first in a five-year project, which will consist of twenty siapo kimono presented in four sets of ‘Kimono Systems’, each with a specific theme. Vasa (Ocean) is but one cycle in an odyssey which will also consider gender, and reconsider the position of Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia – stories which will hopefully travel to Scotland’s shores too.
This iteration has recently been acquired by the National Museum; importantly, the exhibition also incorporates historical material from its permanent collection. Senior Curator Dr. Ali Clark has long challenged the typical, segregated display of objects by geography, pausing over woodblock prints and coral netsuke as artefacts of two-way exchanges. Here, spear points from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, made by Aboriginal men from discarded glass bottles, challenge the ongoing possession of ‘sustainable’ practices as the preserve of the contemporary Western world.
Part of curation demands better respecting the past. Clark co-leads the Museum’s Entangled Knowledges project, whose efforts include relabelling the Museum’s illustrations of fish with their Indigenous names, mirroring the moves of large botanical institutions. Artist photographs and context-setting captions also permeate this temporary exhibition; here are less didactic, and more accessible introductions, which speak respectfully of ‘cultural resilience’.
It also means carrying this history into our present and future, to connect global and local issues through community engagement. Rising Tide takes inspiration from its neighbours at the V&A Dundee, collaborating with Scottish schools to collect plastic waste for a generative installation, a jellyfish designed from inception to be dismantled, reused, but still, ultimately, recycled. Still, these ripples can become tidal waves if the permanent collection does ride them forward.
Nearby - in fact, practically semi-detached from the Museum - Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent explores time as an evolutionary, human, and environmental construct, using art to help stretch our imagination and thinking towards the future.
Otobong Nkanga’s opening textile work plunges the viewer into the unknowable depths of the ocean, a seascape disrupted by aggressive mineral abstraction. Strange human limbs are strewn about, littering the floor like dismembered dolls, recalling the human lives brutally lost during ocean crossings, and now morphing into plant life.
Tied to the Other Side, and its careful curation, also embodies the strength of this exhibition, another triumph for Talbot Rice. Though short, the wall texts are speculative and inconclusive, utilising emotive language rather than detached, scientific terminology, and asking questions to provoke personal engagement.
There’s no direct reference to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, nor the drowning of ‘undesirable’ Black bodies en route, in the description of Nkanga’s tapestry. And there’s no need, for it’s woven within the tapestry, and the artist’s wider practice between Nigeria, their birthplace, and Belgium. Instead, the curators offer an allusion, that ‘not everyone has benefitted equally from modernity’.
It’s no cop-out, but an honest acknowledgement that these complex problems remain without resolution - a more didactic offering would merely be false comfort in the face of these entangled crises, transforming the exhibition into a performance in which both institution and viewer pretend there’s a single, simple way out. Rather, The Recent is a serious exhibition that takes its viewers seriously, as participants and individuals lost at sea.
Regina de Miguel’s EXVOTO, REEF (2021) takes to the equally vast seascape of the Great Barrier Reef. Like Tiatia, she explores the vulnerability of South Pacific islands like Tuvalu, here in a series of small paintings. Best are the dark blue and black works with ambiguous forms, which could be nerve endings or fragments of coral, connecting human and non-human bodies.
De Miguel’s larger works are more surrealistic, at times borrowing from Leonora Carrington (a mainstay of the nearby Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), and others, the abstracted faces and masks typical of that 20th century milieu. Her ‘Empusa, Medusa, Medea’ (2023) is a religious offering, but one presented in a small, anti-devotional space. Here, it stands testament to how art serves as a coping strategy for her eco-anxiety, ‘emotional entanglement with politics’, and sense of isolation heightened by the COVID pandemic.
These three bodies of de Miguel’s work subvert the place of their display; they flow along the long corridors of the former natural history museum, a space which, in the right hands, has proven surprisingly fertile for transformation. From Hephzibah Israel’s the nature of difference, Talbot Rice here connects with the building’s founding purpose as a catalogue of flora and fauna, a quiet conversation with De Miguel’s motifs which works well alongside more monumental interventions.
Dorothy Cross’ film Stalactite (2010) and Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012) are projected back-to-back on a great shard of fabric, which cuts through the centre of the architecture. Beneath it, we are reduced to size, simultaneously aware of the small scale - and great negative impact - human activity can have. The slow destruction of the subjects on either side - Cross’ titular ice form, and Mangan’s fragmented zircon, the oldest material on the planet - is made even more deafening by the silence in which we stand, confronted.
Much noise is made about putting seemingly ‘local’ subjects on global stages, with presentations often backed by national embassies and councils. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Songs for the Compost (2020) is a collaborative film shot wandering in Lithuania’s Curonian Spit. As alien in the landscape are the hazmat-clad figures of Micol Roubini’s four-channel video, which presents plural perspectives on a disused asbestos mine in Balangero, Italy. Others, such as Helen Cammock, express transnational solidarity, connecting people and struggles across continents.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent: Eglė Budvytytė, Helen Cammock, Dorothy Cross, Regina de Miguel, Mikala Dwyer, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson, Micol Roubini and Simon Starling is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted: Dalziel + Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Mackenzie, Naomi Mcintosh, Katie Paterson, Hanna Tuulikki is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
The great deluge of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2023 did not lift all boats. Rising Tide is one such exhibition that risked being washed over when it opened in August, relegated to the National Museum of Scotland’s second gallery space (in the first, ironically, Beyond the Little Black Dress spoke of fashion as ‘one of the most energy-consuming, polluting and wasteful of modern industries’). It’s a wonderful display which, with a diverse range of contemporary Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists, engages us to reconsider our own relationship to the natural environment.
Great installations of upcycled plastic waste loom over quieter, more unsettling works about the climate crisis (no longer simply ‘climate change’). In Holding On (2015), a film also represented at Frieze London in Sullivan+Strumpf’s group exhibition, Story, Place, artist Angela Tiatia lets the rising water levels of the Pacific submerge her, embodying the precarious status of islands like Tuvalu, which sit just three metres above sea level. As self-representation, it plays with an artistic convention of using women’s bodies as a canvas onto which to project ideas of the nation and landscape – but not for any kind of reclamation. By challenging the binary between human and nature – connecting the human body, and the global body of water – Holding On hints at something more radical, the dissolution of nation-states altogether.
Like Tiatia, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is of Sāmoan heritage. Born on the island, and identifying as a fa'afafine, the third gender of Samoa, Kihara’s practice navigates complex racial and gender relations. Their individual person, though, is more often confined to simplistic categories outside of Oceania, readily boxed and consumed as, for instance, the first New Zealander and Pacific Islander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Kihara’s particular experiences are often claimed as representative of ‘Polynesia’ as a whole, comprising over one thousand islands with different, and sometimes connected, colonial and non-colonial histories. The Oceanic subregion includes islands as diverse as the US state of Hawaii to Tahiti, an independent kingdom, then ‘protectorate’ and colony of France – all of which remain archipelagos in mainstream art institutions and history.
Kihara is also of Japanese descent, and their ‘interracial’ identity is referenced (as ‘lived experience’) in their textile installation at Rising Tide. In five overlapping (layered) kimono, they tell a story of a tsunami threatening to submerge a beach. Produced in collaboration with designers, artisans, and family members across islands, the work uses 60 metres of siapo (barkcloth), and features motifs found on both the barkcloth, Japanese nihonga illustrations, and omoshirogara (novelty pattern) kimono, often used in Asia to reflect global entanglements.
The artist plays with the novelty tradition, using dark humour to highlight the serious issue of environmental change. The textiles are littered with art historical references, reimagined in contemporary fashions. A sequin-crusted skull bears great resemblance to the skeletons of Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the allusion to Katsushika Hokusai, another 19th-century ukiyo-e artist, is implicit in the title. Beneath the great wave are an abundance of small treasures – a found claw, a perfectly stitched plastic bag, and a crushed, red aluminium can, universally identifiable as Coca-Cola despite being presented without its label.
‘The work aims to reframe the Vā (space that connects) between Japan and the Pacific and specifically Sāmoa,’ says Kihara, ‘taking an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Pacific identity, history, and the environment.’ Typical of their research-based practice, this work is the first in a five-year project, which will consist of twenty siapo kimono presented in four sets of ‘Kimono Systems’, each with a specific theme. Vasa (Ocean) is but one cycle in an odyssey which will also consider gender, and reconsider the position of Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia – stories which will hopefully travel to Scotland’s shores too.
This iteration has recently been acquired by the National Museum; importantly, the exhibition also incorporates historical material from its permanent collection. Senior Curator Dr. Ali Clark has long challenged the typical, segregated display of objects by geography, pausing over woodblock prints and coral netsuke as artefacts of two-way exchanges. Here, spear points from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, made by Aboriginal men from discarded glass bottles, challenge the ongoing possession of ‘sustainable’ practices as the preserve of the contemporary Western world.
Part of curation demands better respecting the past. Clark co-leads the Museum’s Entangled Knowledges project, whose efforts include relabelling the Museum’s illustrations of fish with their Indigenous names, mirroring the moves of large botanical institutions. Artist photographs and context-setting captions also permeate this temporary exhibition; here are less didactic, and more accessible introductions, which speak respectfully of ‘cultural resilience’.
It also means carrying this history into our present and future, to connect global and local issues through community engagement. Rising Tide takes inspiration from its neighbours at the V&A Dundee, collaborating with Scottish schools to collect plastic waste for a generative installation, a jellyfish designed from inception to be dismantled, reused, but still, ultimately, recycled. Still, these ripples can become tidal waves if the permanent collection does ride them forward.
Nearby - in fact, practically semi-detached from the Museum - Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent explores time as an evolutionary, human, and environmental construct, using art to help stretch our imagination and thinking towards the future.
Otobong Nkanga’s opening textile work plunges the viewer into the unknowable depths of the ocean, a seascape disrupted by aggressive mineral abstraction. Strange human limbs are strewn about, littering the floor like dismembered dolls, recalling the human lives brutally lost during ocean crossings, and now morphing into plant life.
Tied to the Other Side, and its careful curation, also embodies the strength of this exhibition, another triumph for Talbot Rice. Though short, the wall texts are speculative and inconclusive, utilising emotive language rather than detached, scientific terminology, and asking questions to provoke personal engagement.
There’s no direct reference to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, nor the drowning of ‘undesirable’ Black bodies en route, in the description of Nkanga’s tapestry. And there’s no need, for it’s woven within the tapestry, and the artist’s wider practice between Nigeria, their birthplace, and Belgium. Instead, the curators offer an allusion, that ‘not everyone has benefitted equally from modernity’.
It’s no cop-out, but an honest acknowledgement that these complex problems remain without resolution - a more didactic offering would merely be false comfort in the face of these entangled crises, transforming the exhibition into a performance in which both institution and viewer pretend there’s a single, simple way out. Rather, The Recent is a serious exhibition that takes its viewers seriously, as participants and individuals lost at sea.
Regina de Miguel’s EXVOTO, REEF (2021) takes to the equally vast seascape of the Great Barrier Reef. Like Tiatia, she explores the vulnerability of South Pacific islands like Tuvalu, here in a series of small paintings. Best are the dark blue and black works with ambiguous forms, which could be nerve endings or fragments of coral, connecting human and non-human bodies.
De Miguel’s larger works are more surrealistic, at times borrowing from Leonora Carrington (a mainstay of the nearby Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), and others, the abstracted faces and masks typical of that 20th century milieu. Her ‘Empusa, Medusa, Medea’ (2023) is a religious offering, but one presented in a small, anti-devotional space. Here, it stands testament to how art serves as a coping strategy for her eco-anxiety, ‘emotional entanglement with politics’, and sense of isolation heightened by the COVID pandemic.
These three bodies of de Miguel’s work subvert the place of their display; they flow along the long corridors of the former natural history museum, a space which, in the right hands, has proven surprisingly fertile for transformation. From Hephzibah Israel’s the nature of difference, Talbot Rice here connects with the building’s founding purpose as a catalogue of flora and fauna, a quiet conversation with De Miguel’s motifs which works well alongside more monumental interventions.
Dorothy Cross’ film Stalactite (2010) and Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012) are projected back-to-back on a great shard of fabric, which cuts through the centre of the architecture. Beneath it, we are reduced to size, simultaneously aware of the small scale - and great negative impact - human activity can have. The slow destruction of the subjects on either side - Cross’ titular ice form, and Mangan’s fragmented zircon, the oldest material on the planet - is made even more deafening by the silence in which we stand, confronted.
Much noise is made about putting seemingly ‘local’ subjects on global stages, with presentations often backed by national embassies and councils. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Songs for the Compost (2020) is a collaborative film shot wandering in Lithuania’s Curonian Spit. As alien in the landscape are the hazmat-clad figures of Micol Roubini’s four-channel video, which presents plural perspectives on a disused asbestos mine in Balangero, Italy. Others, such as Helen Cammock, express transnational solidarity, connecting people and struggles across continents.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent: Eglė Budvytytė, Helen Cammock, Dorothy Cross, Regina de Miguel, Mikala Dwyer, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson, Micol Roubini and Simon Starling is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted: Dalziel + Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Mackenzie, Naomi Mcintosh, Katie Paterson, Hanna Tuulikki is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
The great deluge of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2023 did not lift all boats. Rising Tide is one such exhibition that risked being washed over when it opened in August, relegated to the National Museum of Scotland’s second gallery space (in the first, ironically, Beyond the Little Black Dress spoke of fashion as ‘one of the most energy-consuming, polluting and wasteful of modern industries’). It’s a wonderful display which, with a diverse range of contemporary Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists, engages us to reconsider our own relationship to the natural environment.
Great installations of upcycled plastic waste loom over quieter, more unsettling works about the climate crisis (no longer simply ‘climate change’). In Holding On (2015), a film also represented at Frieze London in Sullivan+Strumpf’s group exhibition, Story, Place, artist Angela Tiatia lets the rising water levels of the Pacific submerge her, embodying the precarious status of islands like Tuvalu, which sit just three metres above sea level. As self-representation, it plays with an artistic convention of using women’s bodies as a canvas onto which to project ideas of the nation and landscape – but not for any kind of reclamation. By challenging the binary between human and nature – connecting the human body, and the global body of water – Holding On hints at something more radical, the dissolution of nation-states altogether.
Like Tiatia, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is of Sāmoan heritage. Born on the island, and identifying as a fa'afafine, the third gender of Samoa, Kihara’s practice navigates complex racial and gender relations. Their individual person, though, is more often confined to simplistic categories outside of Oceania, readily boxed and consumed as, for instance, the first New Zealander and Pacific Islander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Kihara’s particular experiences are often claimed as representative of ‘Polynesia’ as a whole, comprising over one thousand islands with different, and sometimes connected, colonial and non-colonial histories. The Oceanic subregion includes islands as diverse as the US state of Hawaii to Tahiti, an independent kingdom, then ‘protectorate’ and colony of France – all of which remain archipelagos in mainstream art institutions and history.
Kihara is also of Japanese descent, and their ‘interracial’ identity is referenced (as ‘lived experience’) in their textile installation at Rising Tide. In five overlapping (layered) kimono, they tell a story of a tsunami threatening to submerge a beach. Produced in collaboration with designers, artisans, and family members across islands, the work uses 60 metres of siapo (barkcloth), and features motifs found on both the barkcloth, Japanese nihonga illustrations, and omoshirogara (novelty pattern) kimono, often used in Asia to reflect global entanglements.
The artist plays with the novelty tradition, using dark humour to highlight the serious issue of environmental change. The textiles are littered with art historical references, reimagined in contemporary fashions. A sequin-crusted skull bears great resemblance to the skeletons of Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the allusion to Katsushika Hokusai, another 19th-century ukiyo-e artist, is implicit in the title. Beneath the great wave are an abundance of small treasures – a found claw, a perfectly stitched plastic bag, and a crushed, red aluminium can, universally identifiable as Coca-Cola despite being presented without its label.
‘The work aims to reframe the Vā (space that connects) between Japan and the Pacific and specifically Sāmoa,’ says Kihara, ‘taking an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Pacific identity, history, and the environment.’ Typical of their research-based practice, this work is the first in a five-year project, which will consist of twenty siapo kimono presented in four sets of ‘Kimono Systems’, each with a specific theme. Vasa (Ocean) is but one cycle in an odyssey which will also consider gender, and reconsider the position of Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia – stories which will hopefully travel to Scotland’s shores too.
This iteration has recently been acquired by the National Museum; importantly, the exhibition also incorporates historical material from its permanent collection. Senior Curator Dr. Ali Clark has long challenged the typical, segregated display of objects by geography, pausing over woodblock prints and coral netsuke as artefacts of two-way exchanges. Here, spear points from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, made by Aboriginal men from discarded glass bottles, challenge the ongoing possession of ‘sustainable’ practices as the preserve of the contemporary Western world.
Part of curation demands better respecting the past. Clark co-leads the Museum’s Entangled Knowledges project, whose efforts include relabelling the Museum’s illustrations of fish with their Indigenous names, mirroring the moves of large botanical institutions. Artist photographs and context-setting captions also permeate this temporary exhibition; here are less didactic, and more accessible introductions, which speak respectfully of ‘cultural resilience’.
It also means carrying this history into our present and future, to connect global and local issues through community engagement. Rising Tide takes inspiration from its neighbours at the V&A Dundee, collaborating with Scottish schools to collect plastic waste for a generative installation, a jellyfish designed from inception to be dismantled, reused, but still, ultimately, recycled. Still, these ripples can become tidal waves if the permanent collection does ride them forward.
Nearby - in fact, practically semi-detached from the Museum - Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent explores time as an evolutionary, human, and environmental construct, using art to help stretch our imagination and thinking towards the future.
Otobong Nkanga’s opening textile work plunges the viewer into the unknowable depths of the ocean, a seascape disrupted by aggressive mineral abstraction. Strange human limbs are strewn about, littering the floor like dismembered dolls, recalling the human lives brutally lost during ocean crossings, and now morphing into plant life.
Tied to the Other Side, and its careful curation, also embodies the strength of this exhibition, another triumph for Talbot Rice. Though short, the wall texts are speculative and inconclusive, utilising emotive language rather than detached, scientific terminology, and asking questions to provoke personal engagement.
There’s no direct reference to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, nor the drowning of ‘undesirable’ Black bodies en route, in the description of Nkanga’s tapestry. And there’s no need, for it’s woven within the tapestry, and the artist’s wider practice between Nigeria, their birthplace, and Belgium. Instead, the curators offer an allusion, that ‘not everyone has benefitted equally from modernity’.
It’s no cop-out, but an honest acknowledgement that these complex problems remain without resolution - a more didactic offering would merely be false comfort in the face of these entangled crises, transforming the exhibition into a performance in which both institution and viewer pretend there’s a single, simple way out. Rather, The Recent is a serious exhibition that takes its viewers seriously, as participants and individuals lost at sea.
Regina de Miguel’s EXVOTO, REEF (2021) takes to the equally vast seascape of the Great Barrier Reef. Like Tiatia, she explores the vulnerability of South Pacific islands like Tuvalu, here in a series of small paintings. Best are the dark blue and black works with ambiguous forms, which could be nerve endings or fragments of coral, connecting human and non-human bodies.
De Miguel’s larger works are more surrealistic, at times borrowing from Leonora Carrington (a mainstay of the nearby Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), and others, the abstracted faces and masks typical of that 20th century milieu. Her ‘Empusa, Medusa, Medea’ (2023) is a religious offering, but one presented in a small, anti-devotional space. Here, it stands testament to how art serves as a coping strategy for her eco-anxiety, ‘emotional entanglement with politics’, and sense of isolation heightened by the COVID pandemic.
These three bodies of de Miguel’s work subvert the place of their display; they flow along the long corridors of the former natural history museum, a space which, in the right hands, has proven surprisingly fertile for transformation. From Hephzibah Israel’s the nature of difference, Talbot Rice here connects with the building’s founding purpose as a catalogue of flora and fauna, a quiet conversation with De Miguel’s motifs which works well alongside more monumental interventions.
Dorothy Cross’ film Stalactite (2010) and Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012) are projected back-to-back on a great shard of fabric, which cuts through the centre of the architecture. Beneath it, we are reduced to size, simultaneously aware of the small scale - and great negative impact - human activity can have. The slow destruction of the subjects on either side - Cross’ titular ice form, and Mangan’s fragmented zircon, the oldest material on the planet - is made even more deafening by the silence in which we stand, confronted.
Much noise is made about putting seemingly ‘local’ subjects on global stages, with presentations often backed by national embassies and councils. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Songs for the Compost (2020) is a collaborative film shot wandering in Lithuania’s Curonian Spit. As alien in the landscape are the hazmat-clad figures of Micol Roubini’s four-channel video, which presents plural perspectives on a disused asbestos mine in Balangero, Italy. Others, such as Helen Cammock, express transnational solidarity, connecting people and struggles across continents.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent: Eglė Budvytytė, Helen Cammock, Dorothy Cross, Regina de Miguel, Mikala Dwyer, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson, Micol Roubini and Simon Starling is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted: Dalziel + Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Mackenzie, Naomi Mcintosh, Katie Paterson, Hanna Tuulikki is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
The great deluge of the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2023 did not lift all boats. Rising Tide is one such exhibition that risked being washed over when it opened in August, relegated to the National Museum of Scotland’s second gallery space (in the first, ironically, Beyond the Little Black Dress spoke of fashion as ‘one of the most energy-consuming, polluting and wasteful of modern industries’). It’s a wonderful display which, with a diverse range of contemporary Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander artists, engages us to reconsider our own relationship to the natural environment.
Great installations of upcycled plastic waste loom over quieter, more unsettling works about the climate crisis (no longer simply ‘climate change’). In Holding On (2015), a film also represented at Frieze London in Sullivan+Strumpf’s group exhibition, Story, Place, artist Angela Tiatia lets the rising water levels of the Pacific submerge her, embodying the precarious status of islands like Tuvalu, which sit just three metres above sea level. As self-representation, it plays with an artistic convention of using women’s bodies as a canvas onto which to project ideas of the nation and landscape – but not for any kind of reclamation. By challenging the binary between human and nature – connecting the human body, and the global body of water – Holding On hints at something more radical, the dissolution of nation-states altogether.
Like Tiatia, interdisciplinary artist Yuki Kihara is of Sāmoan heritage. Born on the island, and identifying as a fa'afafine, the third gender of Samoa, Kihara’s practice navigates complex racial and gender relations. Their individual person, though, is more often confined to simplistic categories outside of Oceania, readily boxed and consumed as, for instance, the first New Zealander and Pacific Islander to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and representing the country at the Venice Biennale in 2022.
Kihara’s particular experiences are often claimed as representative of ‘Polynesia’ as a whole, comprising over one thousand islands with different, and sometimes connected, colonial and non-colonial histories. The Oceanic subregion includes islands as diverse as the US state of Hawaii to Tahiti, an independent kingdom, then ‘protectorate’ and colony of France – all of which remain archipelagos in mainstream art institutions and history.
Kihara is also of Japanese descent, and their ‘interracial’ identity is referenced (as ‘lived experience’) in their textile installation at Rising Tide. In five overlapping (layered) kimono, they tell a story of a tsunami threatening to submerge a beach. Produced in collaboration with designers, artisans, and family members across islands, the work uses 60 metres of siapo (barkcloth), and features motifs found on both the barkcloth, Japanese nihonga illustrations, and omoshirogara (novelty pattern) kimono, often used in Asia to reflect global entanglements.
The artist plays with the novelty tradition, using dark humour to highlight the serious issue of environmental change. The textiles are littered with art historical references, reimagined in contemporary fashions. A sequin-crusted skull bears great resemblance to the skeletons of Utagawa Kuniyoshi; the allusion to Katsushika Hokusai, another 19th-century ukiyo-e artist, is implicit in the title. Beneath the great wave are an abundance of small treasures – a found claw, a perfectly stitched plastic bag, and a crushed, red aluminium can, universally identifiable as Coca-Cola despite being presented without its label.
‘The work aims to reframe the Vā (space that connects) between Japan and the Pacific and specifically Sāmoa,’ says Kihara, ‘taking an Indigenous interpretation of trans-Pacific identity, history, and the environment.’ Typical of their research-based practice, this work is the first in a five-year project, which will consist of twenty siapo kimono presented in four sets of ‘Kimono Systems’, each with a specific theme. Vasa (Ocean) is but one cycle in an odyssey which will also consider gender, and reconsider the position of Paul Gauguin in French Polynesia – stories which will hopefully travel to Scotland’s shores too.
This iteration has recently been acquired by the National Museum; importantly, the exhibition also incorporates historical material from its permanent collection. Senior Curator Dr. Ali Clark has long challenged the typical, segregated display of objects by geography, pausing over woodblock prints and coral netsuke as artefacts of two-way exchanges. Here, spear points from the Kimberley region of Western Australia, made by Aboriginal men from discarded glass bottles, challenge the ongoing possession of ‘sustainable’ practices as the preserve of the contemporary Western world.
Part of curation demands better respecting the past. Clark co-leads the Museum’s Entangled Knowledges project, whose efforts include relabelling the Museum’s illustrations of fish with their Indigenous names, mirroring the moves of large botanical institutions. Artist photographs and context-setting captions also permeate this temporary exhibition; here are less didactic, and more accessible introductions, which speak respectfully of ‘cultural resilience’.
It also means carrying this history into our present and future, to connect global and local issues through community engagement. Rising Tide takes inspiration from its neighbours at the V&A Dundee, collaborating with Scottish schools to collect plastic waste for a generative installation, a jellyfish designed from inception to be dismantled, reused, but still, ultimately, recycled. Still, these ripples can become tidal waves if the permanent collection does ride them forward.
Nearby - in fact, practically semi-detached from the Museum - Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent explores time as an evolutionary, human, and environmental construct, using art to help stretch our imagination and thinking towards the future.
Otobong Nkanga’s opening textile work plunges the viewer into the unknowable depths of the ocean, a seascape disrupted by aggressive mineral abstraction. Strange human limbs are strewn about, littering the floor like dismembered dolls, recalling the human lives brutally lost during ocean crossings, and now morphing into plant life.
Tied to the Other Side, and its careful curation, also embodies the strength of this exhibition, another triumph for Talbot Rice. Though short, the wall texts are speculative and inconclusive, utilising emotive language rather than detached, scientific terminology, and asking questions to provoke personal engagement.
There’s no direct reference to the history of the transatlantic slave trade, nor the drowning of ‘undesirable’ Black bodies en route, in the description of Nkanga’s tapestry. And there’s no need, for it’s woven within the tapestry, and the artist’s wider practice between Nigeria, their birthplace, and Belgium. Instead, the curators offer an allusion, that ‘not everyone has benefitted equally from modernity’.
It’s no cop-out, but an honest acknowledgement that these complex problems remain without resolution - a more didactic offering would merely be false comfort in the face of these entangled crises, transforming the exhibition into a performance in which both institution and viewer pretend there’s a single, simple way out. Rather, The Recent is a serious exhibition that takes its viewers seriously, as participants and individuals lost at sea.
Regina de Miguel’s EXVOTO, REEF (2021) takes to the equally vast seascape of the Great Barrier Reef. Like Tiatia, she explores the vulnerability of South Pacific islands like Tuvalu, here in a series of small paintings. Best are the dark blue and black works with ambiguous forms, which could be nerve endings or fragments of coral, connecting human and non-human bodies.
De Miguel’s larger works are more surrealistic, at times borrowing from Leonora Carrington (a mainstay of the nearby Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art), and others, the abstracted faces and masks typical of that 20th century milieu. Her ‘Empusa, Medusa, Medea’ (2023) is a religious offering, but one presented in a small, anti-devotional space. Here, it stands testament to how art serves as a coping strategy for her eco-anxiety, ‘emotional entanglement with politics’, and sense of isolation heightened by the COVID pandemic.
These three bodies of de Miguel’s work subvert the place of their display; they flow along the long corridors of the former natural history museum, a space which, in the right hands, has proven surprisingly fertile for transformation. From Hephzibah Israel’s the nature of difference, Talbot Rice here connects with the building’s founding purpose as a catalogue of flora and fauna, a quiet conversation with De Miguel’s motifs which works well alongside more monumental interventions.
Dorothy Cross’ film Stalactite (2010) and Nicholas Mangan’s A World Undone (2012) are projected back-to-back on a great shard of fabric, which cuts through the centre of the architecture. Beneath it, we are reduced to size, simultaneously aware of the small scale - and great negative impact - human activity can have. The slow destruction of the subjects on either side - Cross’ titular ice form, and Mangan’s fragmented zircon, the oldest material on the planet - is made even more deafening by the silence in which we stand, confronted.
Much noise is made about putting seemingly ‘local’ subjects on global stages, with presentations often backed by national embassies and councils. Presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Songs for the Compost (2020) is a collaborative film shot wandering in Lithuania’s Curonian Spit. As alien in the landscape are the hazmat-clad figures of Micol Roubini’s four-channel video, which presents plural perspectives on a disused asbestos mine in Balangero, Italy. Others, such as Helen Cammock, express transnational solidarity, connecting people and struggles across continents.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent: Eglė Budvytytė, Helen Cammock, Dorothy Cross, Regina de Miguel, Mikala Dwyer, Nicholas Mangan, Angelica Mesiti, Otobong Nkanga, Katie Paterson, Micol Roubini and Simon Starling is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted: Dalziel + Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, Andrew Mackenzie, Naomi Mcintosh, Katie Paterson, Hanna Tuulikki is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
