%2C%20Andrew%20Mackenzie%20(2022)-min.png)
Edinburgh's Environmental Exhibitions: The Local
In part two of our series, we visit the exhibitions spotlighting the changing ecological landscape of Edinburgh itself...
January 23, 2024
Though globally interconnected, Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent’s foundations are geological, and deeply rooted in the city of Edinburgh. There are nods to Arthur’s Seat, its dormant volcano, Salisbury Crags, and, in an installation co-organised by University Professor of Political Theory Mihaela Mihai, sticks borrowed from the woodlands of Jupiter Artland.
The exhibition is punctuated by the materials of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers who developed the theory of deep time, here grappled with by contemporary artists in entirely different contexts. These works are carefully placed alongside fragments of rock, a means of grounding detached museum collections also deployed by the curators of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Lyell’s particular fascination with the columns of the Roman temple of Serapis, continually submerged and raised by volcanic eruptions, is another subtle link to the enduring architecture of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Indeed, these journals, texts, and sketchy illustrations serve as evidence of just how long the past has been used to understand the present.
.jpg)
These histories are also articulated in more modern fashions. Angelica Mesiti’s The rain that fell in the faint light of the young Sun (2022) is a series of fossilised rain prints, sourced from various archives including the University’s Charles Lyell Collection. With bold colour and audio, Mesiti reproduces rains and storms which took place millions of years ago for contemporary audiences. Parallels can be drawn with British artists like Amy Stephens, who undertake a similar documentary practice, directly in the field.
Katie Paterson’s embroidery Evergreen (2022) stays closer to the ground; with silk thread on linen, she stitches every single extinct flower, exposing how twice the amount of plants have disappeared in this (sixth) mass extinction than all the birds, mammals, amphibians put together. Paterson plays on the delicacy and fragility of the medium, a textile whose beauty and design belies its shroud-like, funereal symbolism.
For its fatalism, The Recent retains hope through collaboration and comings together. Evergreen (2022) is one example, with the Scottish artist working with embroiderers at The Royal School of Needlework in London to make a natural design evocative of the Art and Crafts movement, itself deeply rooted in Glasgow.
.jpg)
Katie Paterson’s other work in the exhibition, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), is also presented at City Art Centre, a short walk away from the Gallery. In both spaces sit two small incense sticks, scented as the ‘first-ever’ forests on earth, which grew in modern-day Cairo, New York State, and the last, the Amazon, now at threat of being lost in the age of the climate crisis.
The display at Talbot Rice is more reactive; while the incense ceremonies are held every day, a wildfire with a radiative power of 1000mw takes place somewhere on Earth. This real-time tracking is made possible by collaboration, with university wildfire experts Rory Hadden and Sergio Vargas Córdoba, who have created an electronic alert to record all major wildfires using satellites orbiting the planet.
Still, Deep Rooted is an exception at City Art Centre; situated above Shifting Vistas and the Scottish Landscape Awards 2024 - more conventional landscape exhibitions - are a plurality of works and artists, which centre on trees as a vital plant form, which sustains human existence.
Andrew Mackenzie traverses two of these floors, with works guided by his personal experiences. The four paintings in Deep Rooted are more complex, constructed from notes, drawings, and photographs made before Storm Arwen in November 2021, which felled all of his subjects in one night, completely transforming the once-familiar landscape.
Mackenzie’s stark architectural interventions of line and colour are intended not to contrast, but to complement the organic environment. ‘I present human and non-human as entangled, overlapping, inextricably linked,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘I’m not presenting an opposition, but rather…a sympathetic relationship, the potential of a symbiotic co-existence.’
Dalziel + Scullion also adopt a documentary approach, here to depict the ‘nations-of-beings’ with whom we cohabit. Their Unknown Pines series (2007) of inkjet prints are individually named, often after places and countries, highlighting non-human migrations across borders.
.jpg)
Naomi Mcintosh names each sculpture in her Quiet Garden series (2021) too, though with something more local; a Scots word, relative to the weather on the day of their production, transforming her beech wooden forms into a record of their own making.
In the accompanying book, we see these works in situ in the Cairngorms National Park. In the exhibition space, they could be detached from their place of display. However, these plural exhibitions inspire us to draw different connections; in the museum, these sculptures seem inextricably shaped by the work of San Francisco-based sculptor Ruth Asawa.
.jpg)
But we needn’t travel so far to find transnational connections. In the works of Lost Song (2021), Mcintosh turns the songs of birds on the RSPB ‘red list’ into vessels, transforming linear data from sound recordings into blackened feathers and nest-like structures. In sight, sound, and year, the series bears a striking connection with Hanna Tuulikki’s under forest cover / metsänpeiton alla (2021) which, though tucked away in a black box, is still Deep Rooted’s standout work.
Inside, we are lost within a life-size installation of silver birch tree trunks, surround sound audio, and a digital choreography, which transposes the Finnish folkloric concept of going missing in the forest, to the emotional trauma of gaining an ecological awareness.
.jpg)
Tuulikki appears as a hologram, glitchy and disembodied. Cut off from her body, her hands, when placed carefully atop the leaves, look more like crow’s feet, collapsing the binary between human and non-human forms. A voice chants ‘Come back!’ in Finnish, but the call comes as a bird-like screech, perhaps even a bark, more than a welcome home.
Commissioned for the Helsinki Biennial in 2021, Tuulikki’s under forest cover is also a political exposé. Though we like to think of Finland’s forests as rich, untouched wildernesses, most are monoculture plantations, landscapes onto which idealised, romantic nationalisms are often projected. Indeed, photographs do not do this work any justice; they must be experienced, in the forest and in the flesh.
Based in Glasgow, like Tuulikki, Thomas Abercromby critically engages with even more local landscapes. His film John (2023), recently on view at Collective Gallery, contrasts stereotypical images of Scotland - coastal castles, thistles, and Ben Lomond, another extinct volcano - with real working-class experiences of work, joy, and loss. Anchoring the narrative work are two performers, who take slow and purposeful strides amongst the classical paintings of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and then outside, seemingly as comfortable within the institution as they are outside of it.
More sharp is the contrast between the everyday cast: the high-rise flats, for instance, which foreground the spectacle of Arthur’s Seat. This disparity is also made clear in the urban photographs of Making Space: Photographs of Architecture at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait, notably Sylvia Grace Borda’s series, Westwood neighbourhood, East Kilbride (2005-2017).
.png)
Both The Recent and Deep Rooted connect with the unsettling nature of the COVID pandemic, which prompted significant behavioural changes, and brought some to reconnect with their locales. Whether of environments rural or urban, of land or sea, these exhibitions all constitute promising changes in Edinburgh’s art landscape - let us hope they are sustained.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
Though globally interconnected, Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent’s foundations are geological, and deeply rooted in the city of Edinburgh. There are nods to Arthur’s Seat, its dormant volcano, Salisbury Crags, and, in an installation co-organised by University Professor of Political Theory Mihaela Mihai, sticks borrowed from the woodlands of Jupiter Artland.
The exhibition is punctuated by the materials of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers who developed the theory of deep time, here grappled with by contemporary artists in entirely different contexts. These works are carefully placed alongside fragments of rock, a means of grounding detached museum collections also deployed by the curators of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Lyell’s particular fascination with the columns of the Roman temple of Serapis, continually submerged and raised by volcanic eruptions, is another subtle link to the enduring architecture of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Indeed, these journals, texts, and sketchy illustrations serve as evidence of just how long the past has been used to understand the present.
These histories are also articulated in more modern fashions. Angelica Mesiti’s The rain that fell in the faint light of the young Sun (2022) is a series of fossilised rain prints, sourced from various archives including the University’s Charles Lyell Collection. With bold colour and audio, Mesiti reproduces rains and storms which took place millions of years ago for contemporary audiences. Parallels can be drawn with British artists like Amy Stephens, who undertake a similar documentary practice, directly in the field.
Katie Paterson’s embroidery Evergreen (2022) stays closer to the ground; with silk thread on linen, she stitches every single extinct flower, exposing how twice the amount of plants have disappeared in this (sixth) mass extinction than all the birds, mammals, amphibians put together. Paterson plays on the delicacy and fragility of the medium, a textile whose beauty and design belies its shroud-like, funereal symbolism.
For its fatalism, The Recent retains hope through collaboration and comings together. Evergreen (2022) is one example, with the Scottish artist working with embroiderers at The Royal School of Needlework in London to make a natural design evocative of the Art and Crafts movement, itself deeply rooted in Glasgow.
Katie Paterson’s other work in the exhibition, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), is also presented at City Art Centre, a short walk away from the Gallery. In both spaces sit two small incense sticks, scented as the ‘first-ever’ forests on earth, which grew in modern-day Cairo, New York State, and the last, the Amazon, now at threat of being lost in the age of the climate crisis.
The display at Talbot Rice is more reactive; while the incense ceremonies are held every day, a wildfire with a radiative power of 1000mw takes place somewhere on Earth. This real-time tracking is made possible by collaboration, with university wildfire experts Rory Hadden and Sergio Vargas Córdoba, who have created an electronic alert to record all major wildfires using satellites orbiting the planet.
Still, Deep Rooted is an exception at City Art Centre; situated above Shifting Vistas and the Scottish Landscape Awards 2024 - more conventional landscape exhibitions - are a plurality of works and artists, which centre on trees as a vital plant form, which sustains human existence.
Andrew Mackenzie traverses two of these floors, with works guided by his personal experiences. The four paintings in Deep Rooted are more complex, constructed from notes, drawings, and photographs made before Storm Arwen in November 2021, which felled all of his subjects in one night, completely transforming the once-familiar landscape.
Mackenzie’s stark architectural interventions of line and colour are intended not to contrast, but to complement the organic environment. ‘I present human and non-human as entangled, overlapping, inextricably linked,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘I’m not presenting an opposition, but rather…a sympathetic relationship, the potential of a symbiotic co-existence.’
Dalziel + Scullion also adopt a documentary approach, here to depict the ‘nations-of-beings’ with whom we cohabit. Their Unknown Pines series (2007) of inkjet prints are individually named, often after places and countries, highlighting non-human migrations across borders.
Naomi Mcintosh names each sculpture in her Quiet Garden series (2021) too, though with something more local; a Scots word, relative to the weather on the day of their production, transforming her beech wooden forms into a record of their own making.
In the accompanying book, we see these works in situ in the Cairngorms National Park. In the exhibition space, they could be detached from their place of display. However, these plural exhibitions inspire us to draw different connections; in the museum, these sculptures seem inextricably shaped by the work of San Francisco-based sculptor Ruth Asawa.
But we needn’t travel so far to find transnational connections. In the works of Lost Song (2021), Mcintosh turns the songs of birds on the RSPB ‘red list’ into vessels, transforming linear data from sound recordings into blackened feathers and nest-like structures. In sight, sound, and year, the series bears a striking connection with Hanna Tuulikki’s under forest cover / metsänpeiton alla (2021) which, though tucked away in a black box, is still Deep Rooted’s standout work.
Inside, we are lost within a life-size installation of silver birch tree trunks, surround sound audio, and a digital choreography, which transposes the Finnish folkloric concept of going missing in the forest, to the emotional trauma of gaining an ecological awareness.
Tuulikki appears as a hologram, glitchy and disembodied. Cut off from her body, her hands, when placed carefully atop the leaves, look more like crow’s feet, collapsing the binary between human and non-human forms. A voice chants ‘Come back!’ in Finnish, but the call comes as a bird-like screech, perhaps even a bark, more than a welcome home.
Commissioned for the Helsinki Biennial in 2021, Tuulikki’s under forest cover is also a political exposé. Though we like to think of Finland’s forests as rich, untouched wildernesses, most are monoculture plantations, landscapes onto which idealised, romantic nationalisms are often projected. Indeed, photographs do not do this work any justice; they must be experienced, in the forest and in the flesh.
Based in Glasgow, like Tuulikki, Thomas Abercromby critically engages with even more local landscapes. His film John (2023), recently on view at Collective Gallery, contrasts stereotypical images of Scotland - coastal castles, thistles, and Ben Lomond, another extinct volcano - with real working-class experiences of work, joy, and loss. Anchoring the narrative work are two performers, who take slow and purposeful strides amongst the classical paintings of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and then outside, seemingly as comfortable within the institution as they are outside of it.
More sharp is the contrast between the everyday cast: the high-rise flats, for instance, which foreground the spectacle of Arthur’s Seat. This disparity is also made clear in the urban photographs of Making Space: Photographs of Architecture at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait, notably Sylvia Grace Borda’s series, Westwood neighbourhood, East Kilbride (2005-2017).
Both The Recent and Deep Rooted connect with the unsettling nature of the COVID pandemic, which prompted significant behavioural changes, and brought some to reconnect with their locales. Whether of environments rural or urban, of land or sea, these exhibitions all constitute promising changes in Edinburgh’s art landscape - let us hope they are sustained.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
Though globally interconnected, Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent’s foundations are geological, and deeply rooted in the city of Edinburgh. There are nods to Arthur’s Seat, its dormant volcano, Salisbury Crags, and, in an installation co-organised by University Professor of Political Theory Mihaela Mihai, sticks borrowed from the woodlands of Jupiter Artland.
The exhibition is punctuated by the materials of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers who developed the theory of deep time, here grappled with by contemporary artists in entirely different contexts. These works are carefully placed alongside fragments of rock, a means of grounding detached museum collections also deployed by the curators of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Lyell’s particular fascination with the columns of the Roman temple of Serapis, continually submerged and raised by volcanic eruptions, is another subtle link to the enduring architecture of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Indeed, these journals, texts, and sketchy illustrations serve as evidence of just how long the past has been used to understand the present.
These histories are also articulated in more modern fashions. Angelica Mesiti’s The rain that fell in the faint light of the young Sun (2022) is a series of fossilised rain prints, sourced from various archives including the University’s Charles Lyell Collection. With bold colour and audio, Mesiti reproduces rains and storms which took place millions of years ago for contemporary audiences. Parallels can be drawn with British artists like Amy Stephens, who undertake a similar documentary practice, directly in the field.
Katie Paterson’s embroidery Evergreen (2022) stays closer to the ground; with silk thread on linen, she stitches every single extinct flower, exposing how twice the amount of plants have disappeared in this (sixth) mass extinction than all the birds, mammals, amphibians put together. Paterson plays on the delicacy and fragility of the medium, a textile whose beauty and design belies its shroud-like, funereal symbolism.
For its fatalism, The Recent retains hope through collaboration and comings together. Evergreen (2022) is one example, with the Scottish artist working with embroiderers at The Royal School of Needlework in London to make a natural design evocative of the Art and Crafts movement, itself deeply rooted in Glasgow.
Katie Paterson’s other work in the exhibition, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), is also presented at City Art Centre, a short walk away from the Gallery. In both spaces sit two small incense sticks, scented as the ‘first-ever’ forests on earth, which grew in modern-day Cairo, New York State, and the last, the Amazon, now at threat of being lost in the age of the climate crisis.
The display at Talbot Rice is more reactive; while the incense ceremonies are held every day, a wildfire with a radiative power of 1000mw takes place somewhere on Earth. This real-time tracking is made possible by collaboration, with university wildfire experts Rory Hadden and Sergio Vargas Córdoba, who have created an electronic alert to record all major wildfires using satellites orbiting the planet.
Still, Deep Rooted is an exception at City Art Centre; situated above Shifting Vistas and the Scottish Landscape Awards 2024 - more conventional landscape exhibitions - are a plurality of works and artists, which centre on trees as a vital plant form, which sustains human existence.
Andrew Mackenzie traverses two of these floors, with works guided by his personal experiences. The four paintings in Deep Rooted are more complex, constructed from notes, drawings, and photographs made before Storm Arwen in November 2021, which felled all of his subjects in one night, completely transforming the once-familiar landscape.
Mackenzie’s stark architectural interventions of line and colour are intended not to contrast, but to complement the organic environment. ‘I present human and non-human as entangled, overlapping, inextricably linked,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘I’m not presenting an opposition, but rather…a sympathetic relationship, the potential of a symbiotic co-existence.’
Dalziel + Scullion also adopt a documentary approach, here to depict the ‘nations-of-beings’ with whom we cohabit. Their Unknown Pines series (2007) of inkjet prints are individually named, often after places and countries, highlighting non-human migrations across borders.
Naomi Mcintosh names each sculpture in her Quiet Garden series (2021) too, though with something more local; a Scots word, relative to the weather on the day of their production, transforming her beech wooden forms into a record of their own making.
In the accompanying book, we see these works in situ in the Cairngorms National Park. In the exhibition space, they could be detached from their place of display. However, these plural exhibitions inspire us to draw different connections; in the museum, these sculptures seem inextricably shaped by the work of San Francisco-based sculptor Ruth Asawa.
But we needn’t travel so far to find transnational connections. In the works of Lost Song (2021), Mcintosh turns the songs of birds on the RSPB ‘red list’ into vessels, transforming linear data from sound recordings into blackened feathers and nest-like structures. In sight, sound, and year, the series bears a striking connection with Hanna Tuulikki’s under forest cover / metsänpeiton alla (2021) which, though tucked away in a black box, is still Deep Rooted’s standout work.
Inside, we are lost within a life-size installation of silver birch tree trunks, surround sound audio, and a digital choreography, which transposes the Finnish folkloric concept of going missing in the forest, to the emotional trauma of gaining an ecological awareness.
Tuulikki appears as a hologram, glitchy and disembodied. Cut off from her body, her hands, when placed carefully atop the leaves, look more like crow’s feet, collapsing the binary between human and non-human forms. A voice chants ‘Come back!’ in Finnish, but the call comes as a bird-like screech, perhaps even a bark, more than a welcome home.
Commissioned for the Helsinki Biennial in 2021, Tuulikki’s under forest cover is also a political exposé. Though we like to think of Finland’s forests as rich, untouched wildernesses, most are monoculture plantations, landscapes onto which idealised, romantic nationalisms are often projected. Indeed, photographs do not do this work any justice; they must be experienced, in the forest and in the flesh.
Based in Glasgow, like Tuulikki, Thomas Abercromby critically engages with even more local landscapes. His film John (2023), recently on view at Collective Gallery, contrasts stereotypical images of Scotland - coastal castles, thistles, and Ben Lomond, another extinct volcano - with real working-class experiences of work, joy, and loss. Anchoring the narrative work are two performers, who take slow and purposeful strides amongst the classical paintings of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and then outside, seemingly as comfortable within the institution as they are outside of it.
More sharp is the contrast between the everyday cast: the high-rise flats, for instance, which foreground the spectacle of Arthur’s Seat. This disparity is also made clear in the urban photographs of Making Space: Photographs of Architecture at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait, notably Sylvia Grace Borda’s series, Westwood neighbourhood, East Kilbride (2005-2017).
Both The Recent and Deep Rooted connect with the unsettling nature of the COVID pandemic, which prompted significant behavioural changes, and brought some to reconnect with their locales. Whether of environments rural or urban, of land or sea, these exhibitions all constitute promising changes in Edinburgh’s art landscape - let us hope they are sustained.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
Though globally interconnected, Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent’s foundations are geological, and deeply rooted in the city of Edinburgh. There are nods to Arthur’s Seat, its dormant volcano, Salisbury Crags, and, in an installation co-organised by University Professor of Political Theory Mihaela Mihai, sticks borrowed from the woodlands of Jupiter Artland.
The exhibition is punctuated by the materials of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers who developed the theory of deep time, here grappled with by contemporary artists in entirely different contexts. These works are carefully placed alongside fragments of rock, a means of grounding detached museum collections also deployed by the curators of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Lyell’s particular fascination with the columns of the Roman temple of Serapis, continually submerged and raised by volcanic eruptions, is another subtle link to the enduring architecture of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Indeed, these journals, texts, and sketchy illustrations serve as evidence of just how long the past has been used to understand the present.
These histories are also articulated in more modern fashions. Angelica Mesiti’s The rain that fell in the faint light of the young Sun (2022) is a series of fossilised rain prints, sourced from various archives including the University’s Charles Lyell Collection. With bold colour and audio, Mesiti reproduces rains and storms which took place millions of years ago for contemporary audiences. Parallels can be drawn with British artists like Amy Stephens, who undertake a similar documentary practice, directly in the field.
Katie Paterson’s embroidery Evergreen (2022) stays closer to the ground; with silk thread on linen, she stitches every single extinct flower, exposing how twice the amount of plants have disappeared in this (sixth) mass extinction than all the birds, mammals, amphibians put together. Paterson plays on the delicacy and fragility of the medium, a textile whose beauty and design belies its shroud-like, funereal symbolism.
For its fatalism, The Recent retains hope through collaboration and comings together. Evergreen (2022) is one example, with the Scottish artist working with embroiderers at The Royal School of Needlework in London to make a natural design evocative of the Art and Crafts movement, itself deeply rooted in Glasgow.
Katie Paterson’s other work in the exhibition, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), is also presented at City Art Centre, a short walk away from the Gallery. In both spaces sit two small incense sticks, scented as the ‘first-ever’ forests on earth, which grew in modern-day Cairo, New York State, and the last, the Amazon, now at threat of being lost in the age of the climate crisis.
The display at Talbot Rice is more reactive; while the incense ceremonies are held every day, a wildfire with a radiative power of 1000mw takes place somewhere on Earth. This real-time tracking is made possible by collaboration, with university wildfire experts Rory Hadden and Sergio Vargas Córdoba, who have created an electronic alert to record all major wildfires using satellites orbiting the planet.
Still, Deep Rooted is an exception at City Art Centre; situated above Shifting Vistas and the Scottish Landscape Awards 2024 - more conventional landscape exhibitions - are a plurality of works and artists, which centre on trees as a vital plant form, which sustains human existence.
Andrew Mackenzie traverses two of these floors, with works guided by his personal experiences. The four paintings in Deep Rooted are more complex, constructed from notes, drawings, and photographs made before Storm Arwen in November 2021, which felled all of his subjects in one night, completely transforming the once-familiar landscape.
Mackenzie’s stark architectural interventions of line and colour are intended not to contrast, but to complement the organic environment. ‘I present human and non-human as entangled, overlapping, inextricably linked,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘I’m not presenting an opposition, but rather…a sympathetic relationship, the potential of a symbiotic co-existence.’
Dalziel + Scullion also adopt a documentary approach, here to depict the ‘nations-of-beings’ with whom we cohabit. Their Unknown Pines series (2007) of inkjet prints are individually named, often after places and countries, highlighting non-human migrations across borders.
Naomi Mcintosh names each sculpture in her Quiet Garden series (2021) too, though with something more local; a Scots word, relative to the weather on the day of their production, transforming her beech wooden forms into a record of their own making.
In the accompanying book, we see these works in situ in the Cairngorms National Park. In the exhibition space, they could be detached from their place of display. However, these plural exhibitions inspire us to draw different connections; in the museum, these sculptures seem inextricably shaped by the work of San Francisco-based sculptor Ruth Asawa.
But we needn’t travel so far to find transnational connections. In the works of Lost Song (2021), Mcintosh turns the songs of birds on the RSPB ‘red list’ into vessels, transforming linear data from sound recordings into blackened feathers and nest-like structures. In sight, sound, and year, the series bears a striking connection with Hanna Tuulikki’s under forest cover / metsänpeiton alla (2021) which, though tucked away in a black box, is still Deep Rooted’s standout work.
Inside, we are lost within a life-size installation of silver birch tree trunks, surround sound audio, and a digital choreography, which transposes the Finnish folkloric concept of going missing in the forest, to the emotional trauma of gaining an ecological awareness.
Tuulikki appears as a hologram, glitchy and disembodied. Cut off from her body, her hands, when placed carefully atop the leaves, look more like crow’s feet, collapsing the binary between human and non-human forms. A voice chants ‘Come back!’ in Finnish, but the call comes as a bird-like screech, perhaps even a bark, more than a welcome home.
Commissioned for the Helsinki Biennial in 2021, Tuulikki’s under forest cover is also a political exposé. Though we like to think of Finland’s forests as rich, untouched wildernesses, most are monoculture plantations, landscapes onto which idealised, romantic nationalisms are often projected. Indeed, photographs do not do this work any justice; they must be experienced, in the forest and in the flesh.
Based in Glasgow, like Tuulikki, Thomas Abercromby critically engages with even more local landscapes. His film John (2023), recently on view at Collective Gallery, contrasts stereotypical images of Scotland - coastal castles, thistles, and Ben Lomond, another extinct volcano - with real working-class experiences of work, joy, and loss. Anchoring the narrative work are two performers, who take slow and purposeful strides amongst the classical paintings of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and then outside, seemingly as comfortable within the institution as they are outside of it.
More sharp is the contrast between the everyday cast: the high-rise flats, for instance, which foreground the spectacle of Arthur’s Seat. This disparity is also made clear in the urban photographs of Making Space: Photographs of Architecture at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait, notably Sylvia Grace Borda’s series, Westwood neighbourhood, East Kilbride (2005-2017).
Both The Recent and Deep Rooted connect with the unsettling nature of the COVID pandemic, which prompted significant behavioural changes, and brought some to reconnect with their locales. Whether of environments rural or urban, of land or sea, these exhibitions all constitute promising changes in Edinburgh’s art landscape - let us hope they are sustained.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
Though globally interconnected, Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent’s foundations are geological, and deeply rooted in the city of Edinburgh. There are nods to Arthur’s Seat, its dormant volcano, Salisbury Crags, and, in an installation co-organised by University Professor of Political Theory Mihaela Mihai, sticks borrowed from the woodlands of Jupiter Artland.
The exhibition is punctuated by the materials of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers who developed the theory of deep time, here grappled with by contemporary artists in entirely different contexts. These works are carefully placed alongside fragments of rock, a means of grounding detached museum collections also deployed by the curators of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Lyell’s particular fascination with the columns of the Roman temple of Serapis, continually submerged and raised by volcanic eruptions, is another subtle link to the enduring architecture of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Indeed, these journals, texts, and sketchy illustrations serve as evidence of just how long the past has been used to understand the present.
These histories are also articulated in more modern fashions. Angelica Mesiti’s The rain that fell in the faint light of the young Sun (2022) is a series of fossilised rain prints, sourced from various archives including the University’s Charles Lyell Collection. With bold colour and audio, Mesiti reproduces rains and storms which took place millions of years ago for contemporary audiences. Parallels can be drawn with British artists like Amy Stephens, who undertake a similar documentary practice, directly in the field.
Katie Paterson’s embroidery Evergreen (2022) stays closer to the ground; with silk thread on linen, she stitches every single extinct flower, exposing how twice the amount of plants have disappeared in this (sixth) mass extinction than all the birds, mammals, amphibians put together. Paterson plays on the delicacy and fragility of the medium, a textile whose beauty and design belies its shroud-like, funereal symbolism.
For its fatalism, The Recent retains hope through collaboration and comings together. Evergreen (2022) is one example, with the Scottish artist working with embroiderers at The Royal School of Needlework in London to make a natural design evocative of the Art and Crafts movement, itself deeply rooted in Glasgow.
Katie Paterson’s other work in the exhibition, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), is also presented at City Art Centre, a short walk away from the Gallery. In both spaces sit two small incense sticks, scented as the ‘first-ever’ forests on earth, which grew in modern-day Cairo, New York State, and the last, the Amazon, now at threat of being lost in the age of the climate crisis.
The display at Talbot Rice is more reactive; while the incense ceremonies are held every day, a wildfire with a radiative power of 1000mw takes place somewhere on Earth. This real-time tracking is made possible by collaboration, with university wildfire experts Rory Hadden and Sergio Vargas Córdoba, who have created an electronic alert to record all major wildfires using satellites orbiting the planet.
Still, Deep Rooted is an exception at City Art Centre; situated above Shifting Vistas and the Scottish Landscape Awards 2024 - more conventional landscape exhibitions - are a plurality of works and artists, which centre on trees as a vital plant form, which sustains human existence.
Andrew Mackenzie traverses two of these floors, with works guided by his personal experiences. The four paintings in Deep Rooted are more complex, constructed from notes, drawings, and photographs made before Storm Arwen in November 2021, which felled all of his subjects in one night, completely transforming the once-familiar landscape.
Mackenzie’s stark architectural interventions of line and colour are intended not to contrast, but to complement the organic environment. ‘I present human and non-human as entangled, overlapping, inextricably linked,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘I’m not presenting an opposition, but rather…a sympathetic relationship, the potential of a symbiotic co-existence.’
Dalziel + Scullion also adopt a documentary approach, here to depict the ‘nations-of-beings’ with whom we cohabit. Their Unknown Pines series (2007) of inkjet prints are individually named, often after places and countries, highlighting non-human migrations across borders.
Naomi Mcintosh names each sculpture in her Quiet Garden series (2021) too, though with something more local; a Scots word, relative to the weather on the day of their production, transforming her beech wooden forms into a record of their own making.
In the accompanying book, we see these works in situ in the Cairngorms National Park. In the exhibition space, they could be detached from their place of display. However, these plural exhibitions inspire us to draw different connections; in the museum, these sculptures seem inextricably shaped by the work of San Francisco-based sculptor Ruth Asawa.
But we needn’t travel so far to find transnational connections. In the works of Lost Song (2021), Mcintosh turns the songs of birds on the RSPB ‘red list’ into vessels, transforming linear data from sound recordings into blackened feathers and nest-like structures. In sight, sound, and year, the series bears a striking connection with Hanna Tuulikki’s under forest cover / metsänpeiton alla (2021) which, though tucked away in a black box, is still Deep Rooted’s standout work.
Inside, we are lost within a life-size installation of silver birch tree trunks, surround sound audio, and a digital choreography, which transposes the Finnish folkloric concept of going missing in the forest, to the emotional trauma of gaining an ecological awareness.
Tuulikki appears as a hologram, glitchy and disembodied. Cut off from her body, her hands, when placed carefully atop the leaves, look more like crow’s feet, collapsing the binary between human and non-human forms. A voice chants ‘Come back!’ in Finnish, but the call comes as a bird-like screech, perhaps even a bark, more than a welcome home.
Commissioned for the Helsinki Biennial in 2021, Tuulikki’s under forest cover is also a political exposé. Though we like to think of Finland’s forests as rich, untouched wildernesses, most are monoculture plantations, landscapes onto which idealised, romantic nationalisms are often projected. Indeed, photographs do not do this work any justice; they must be experienced, in the forest and in the flesh.
Based in Glasgow, like Tuulikki, Thomas Abercromby critically engages with even more local landscapes. His film John (2023), recently on view at Collective Gallery, contrasts stereotypical images of Scotland - coastal castles, thistles, and Ben Lomond, another extinct volcano - with real working-class experiences of work, joy, and loss. Anchoring the narrative work are two performers, who take slow and purposeful strides amongst the classical paintings of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and then outside, seemingly as comfortable within the institution as they are outside of it.
More sharp is the contrast between the everyday cast: the high-rise flats, for instance, which foreground the spectacle of Arthur’s Seat. This disparity is also made clear in the urban photographs of Making Space: Photographs of Architecture at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait, notably Sylvia Grace Borda’s series, Westwood neighbourhood, East Kilbride (2005-2017).
Both The Recent and Deep Rooted connect with the unsettling nature of the COVID pandemic, which prompted significant behavioural changes, and brought some to reconnect with their locales. Whether of environments rural or urban, of land or sea, these exhibitions all constitute promising changes in Edinburgh’s art landscape - let us hope they are sustained.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
Though globally interconnected, Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent’s foundations are geological, and deeply rooted in the city of Edinburgh. There are nods to Arthur’s Seat, its dormant volcano, Salisbury Crags, and, in an installation co-organised by University Professor of Political Theory Mihaela Mihai, sticks borrowed from the woodlands of Jupiter Artland.
The exhibition is punctuated by the materials of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers who developed the theory of deep time, here grappled with by contemporary artists in entirely different contexts. These works are carefully placed alongside fragments of rock, a means of grounding detached museum collections also deployed by the curators of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Lyell’s particular fascination with the columns of the Roman temple of Serapis, continually submerged and raised by volcanic eruptions, is another subtle link to the enduring architecture of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Indeed, these journals, texts, and sketchy illustrations serve as evidence of just how long the past has been used to understand the present.
These histories are also articulated in more modern fashions. Angelica Mesiti’s The rain that fell in the faint light of the young Sun (2022) is a series of fossilised rain prints, sourced from various archives including the University’s Charles Lyell Collection. With bold colour and audio, Mesiti reproduces rains and storms which took place millions of years ago for contemporary audiences. Parallels can be drawn with British artists like Amy Stephens, who undertake a similar documentary practice, directly in the field.
Katie Paterson’s embroidery Evergreen (2022) stays closer to the ground; with silk thread on linen, she stitches every single extinct flower, exposing how twice the amount of plants have disappeared in this (sixth) mass extinction than all the birds, mammals, amphibians put together. Paterson plays on the delicacy and fragility of the medium, a textile whose beauty and design belies its shroud-like, funereal symbolism.
For its fatalism, The Recent retains hope through collaboration and comings together. Evergreen (2022) is one example, with the Scottish artist working with embroiderers at The Royal School of Needlework in London to make a natural design evocative of the Art and Crafts movement, itself deeply rooted in Glasgow.
Katie Paterson’s other work in the exhibition, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), is also presented at City Art Centre, a short walk away from the Gallery. In both spaces sit two small incense sticks, scented as the ‘first-ever’ forests on earth, which grew in modern-day Cairo, New York State, and the last, the Amazon, now at threat of being lost in the age of the climate crisis.
The display at Talbot Rice is more reactive; while the incense ceremonies are held every day, a wildfire with a radiative power of 1000mw takes place somewhere on Earth. This real-time tracking is made possible by collaboration, with university wildfire experts Rory Hadden and Sergio Vargas Córdoba, who have created an electronic alert to record all major wildfires using satellites orbiting the planet.
Still, Deep Rooted is an exception at City Art Centre; situated above Shifting Vistas and the Scottish Landscape Awards 2024 - more conventional landscape exhibitions - are a plurality of works and artists, which centre on trees as a vital plant form, which sustains human existence.
Andrew Mackenzie traverses two of these floors, with works guided by his personal experiences. The four paintings in Deep Rooted are more complex, constructed from notes, drawings, and photographs made before Storm Arwen in November 2021, which felled all of his subjects in one night, completely transforming the once-familiar landscape.
Mackenzie’s stark architectural interventions of line and colour are intended not to contrast, but to complement the organic environment. ‘I present human and non-human as entangled, overlapping, inextricably linked,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘I’m not presenting an opposition, but rather…a sympathetic relationship, the potential of a symbiotic co-existence.’
Dalziel + Scullion also adopt a documentary approach, here to depict the ‘nations-of-beings’ with whom we cohabit. Their Unknown Pines series (2007) of inkjet prints are individually named, often after places and countries, highlighting non-human migrations across borders.
Naomi Mcintosh names each sculpture in her Quiet Garden series (2021) too, though with something more local; a Scots word, relative to the weather on the day of their production, transforming her beech wooden forms into a record of their own making.
In the accompanying book, we see these works in situ in the Cairngorms National Park. In the exhibition space, they could be detached from their place of display. However, these plural exhibitions inspire us to draw different connections; in the museum, these sculptures seem inextricably shaped by the work of San Francisco-based sculptor Ruth Asawa.
But we needn’t travel so far to find transnational connections. In the works of Lost Song (2021), Mcintosh turns the songs of birds on the RSPB ‘red list’ into vessels, transforming linear data from sound recordings into blackened feathers and nest-like structures. In sight, sound, and year, the series bears a striking connection with Hanna Tuulikki’s under forest cover / metsänpeiton alla (2021) which, though tucked away in a black box, is still Deep Rooted’s standout work.
Inside, we are lost within a life-size installation of silver birch tree trunks, surround sound audio, and a digital choreography, which transposes the Finnish folkloric concept of going missing in the forest, to the emotional trauma of gaining an ecological awareness.
Tuulikki appears as a hologram, glitchy and disembodied. Cut off from her body, her hands, when placed carefully atop the leaves, look more like crow’s feet, collapsing the binary between human and non-human forms. A voice chants ‘Come back!’ in Finnish, but the call comes as a bird-like screech, perhaps even a bark, more than a welcome home.
Commissioned for the Helsinki Biennial in 2021, Tuulikki’s under forest cover is also a political exposé. Though we like to think of Finland’s forests as rich, untouched wildernesses, most are monoculture plantations, landscapes onto which idealised, romantic nationalisms are often projected. Indeed, photographs do not do this work any justice; they must be experienced, in the forest and in the flesh.
Based in Glasgow, like Tuulikki, Thomas Abercromby critically engages with even more local landscapes. His film John (2023), recently on view at Collective Gallery, contrasts stereotypical images of Scotland - coastal castles, thistles, and Ben Lomond, another extinct volcano - with real working-class experiences of work, joy, and loss. Anchoring the narrative work are two performers, who take slow and purposeful strides amongst the classical paintings of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and then outside, seemingly as comfortable within the institution as they are outside of it.
More sharp is the contrast between the everyday cast: the high-rise flats, for instance, which foreground the spectacle of Arthur’s Seat. This disparity is also made clear in the urban photographs of Making Space: Photographs of Architecture at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait, notably Sylvia Grace Borda’s series, Westwood neighbourhood, East Kilbride (2005-2017).
Both The Recent and Deep Rooted connect with the unsettling nature of the COVID pandemic, which prompted significant behavioural changes, and brought some to reconnect with their locales. Whether of environments rural or urban, of land or sea, these exhibitions all constitute promising changes in Edinburgh’s art landscape - let us hope they are sustained.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
Though globally interconnected, Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent’s foundations are geological, and deeply rooted in the city of Edinburgh. There are nods to Arthur’s Seat, its dormant volcano, Salisbury Crags, and, in an installation co-organised by University Professor of Political Theory Mihaela Mihai, sticks borrowed from the woodlands of Jupiter Artland.
The exhibition is punctuated by the materials of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers who developed the theory of deep time, here grappled with by contemporary artists in entirely different contexts. These works are carefully placed alongside fragments of rock, a means of grounding detached museum collections also deployed by the curators of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Lyell’s particular fascination with the columns of the Roman temple of Serapis, continually submerged and raised by volcanic eruptions, is another subtle link to the enduring architecture of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Indeed, these journals, texts, and sketchy illustrations serve as evidence of just how long the past has been used to understand the present.
These histories are also articulated in more modern fashions. Angelica Mesiti’s The rain that fell in the faint light of the young Sun (2022) is a series of fossilised rain prints, sourced from various archives including the University’s Charles Lyell Collection. With bold colour and audio, Mesiti reproduces rains and storms which took place millions of years ago for contemporary audiences. Parallels can be drawn with British artists like Amy Stephens, who undertake a similar documentary practice, directly in the field.
Katie Paterson’s embroidery Evergreen (2022) stays closer to the ground; with silk thread on linen, she stitches every single extinct flower, exposing how twice the amount of plants have disappeared in this (sixth) mass extinction than all the birds, mammals, amphibians put together. Paterson plays on the delicacy and fragility of the medium, a textile whose beauty and design belies its shroud-like, funereal symbolism.
For its fatalism, The Recent retains hope through collaboration and comings together. Evergreen (2022) is one example, with the Scottish artist working with embroiderers at The Royal School of Needlework in London to make a natural design evocative of the Art and Crafts movement, itself deeply rooted in Glasgow.
Katie Paterson’s other work in the exhibition, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), is also presented at City Art Centre, a short walk away from the Gallery. In both spaces sit two small incense sticks, scented as the ‘first-ever’ forests on earth, which grew in modern-day Cairo, New York State, and the last, the Amazon, now at threat of being lost in the age of the climate crisis.
The display at Talbot Rice is more reactive; while the incense ceremonies are held every day, a wildfire with a radiative power of 1000mw takes place somewhere on Earth. This real-time tracking is made possible by collaboration, with university wildfire experts Rory Hadden and Sergio Vargas Córdoba, who have created an electronic alert to record all major wildfires using satellites orbiting the planet.
Still, Deep Rooted is an exception at City Art Centre; situated above Shifting Vistas and the Scottish Landscape Awards 2024 - more conventional landscape exhibitions - are a plurality of works and artists, which centre on trees as a vital plant form, which sustains human existence.
Andrew Mackenzie traverses two of these floors, with works guided by his personal experiences. The four paintings in Deep Rooted are more complex, constructed from notes, drawings, and photographs made before Storm Arwen in November 2021, which felled all of his subjects in one night, completely transforming the once-familiar landscape.
Mackenzie’s stark architectural interventions of line and colour are intended not to contrast, but to complement the organic environment. ‘I present human and non-human as entangled, overlapping, inextricably linked,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘I’m not presenting an opposition, but rather…a sympathetic relationship, the potential of a symbiotic co-existence.’
Dalziel + Scullion also adopt a documentary approach, here to depict the ‘nations-of-beings’ with whom we cohabit. Their Unknown Pines series (2007) of inkjet prints are individually named, often after places and countries, highlighting non-human migrations across borders.
Naomi Mcintosh names each sculpture in her Quiet Garden series (2021) too, though with something more local; a Scots word, relative to the weather on the day of their production, transforming her beech wooden forms into a record of their own making.
In the accompanying book, we see these works in situ in the Cairngorms National Park. In the exhibition space, they could be detached from their place of display. However, these plural exhibitions inspire us to draw different connections; in the museum, these sculptures seem inextricably shaped by the work of San Francisco-based sculptor Ruth Asawa.
But we needn’t travel so far to find transnational connections. In the works of Lost Song (2021), Mcintosh turns the songs of birds on the RSPB ‘red list’ into vessels, transforming linear data from sound recordings into blackened feathers and nest-like structures. In sight, sound, and year, the series bears a striking connection with Hanna Tuulikki’s under forest cover / metsänpeiton alla (2021) which, though tucked away in a black box, is still Deep Rooted’s standout work.
Inside, we are lost within a life-size installation of silver birch tree trunks, surround sound audio, and a digital choreography, which transposes the Finnish folkloric concept of going missing in the forest, to the emotional trauma of gaining an ecological awareness.
Tuulikki appears as a hologram, glitchy and disembodied. Cut off from her body, her hands, when placed carefully atop the leaves, look more like crow’s feet, collapsing the binary between human and non-human forms. A voice chants ‘Come back!’ in Finnish, but the call comes as a bird-like screech, perhaps even a bark, more than a welcome home.
Commissioned for the Helsinki Biennial in 2021, Tuulikki’s under forest cover is also a political exposé. Though we like to think of Finland’s forests as rich, untouched wildernesses, most are monoculture plantations, landscapes onto which idealised, romantic nationalisms are often projected. Indeed, photographs do not do this work any justice; they must be experienced, in the forest and in the flesh.
Based in Glasgow, like Tuulikki, Thomas Abercromby critically engages with even more local landscapes. His film John (2023), recently on view at Collective Gallery, contrasts stereotypical images of Scotland - coastal castles, thistles, and Ben Lomond, another extinct volcano - with real working-class experiences of work, joy, and loss. Anchoring the narrative work are two performers, who take slow and purposeful strides amongst the classical paintings of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and then outside, seemingly as comfortable within the institution as they are outside of it.
More sharp is the contrast between the everyday cast: the high-rise flats, for instance, which foreground the spectacle of Arthur’s Seat. This disparity is also made clear in the urban photographs of Making Space: Photographs of Architecture at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait, notably Sylvia Grace Borda’s series, Westwood neighbourhood, East Kilbride (2005-2017).
Both The Recent and Deep Rooted connect with the unsettling nature of the COVID pandemic, which prompted significant behavioural changes, and brought some to reconnect with their locales. Whether of environments rural or urban, of land or sea, these exhibitions all constitute promising changes in Edinburgh’s art landscape - let us hope they are sustained.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
Though globally interconnected, Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent’s foundations are geological, and deeply rooted in the city of Edinburgh. There are nods to Arthur’s Seat, its dormant volcano, Salisbury Crags, and, in an installation co-organised by University Professor of Political Theory Mihaela Mihai, sticks borrowed from the woodlands of Jupiter Artland.
The exhibition is punctuated by the materials of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers who developed the theory of deep time, here grappled with by contemporary artists in entirely different contexts. These works are carefully placed alongside fragments of rock, a means of grounding detached museum collections also deployed by the curators of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Lyell’s particular fascination with the columns of the Roman temple of Serapis, continually submerged and raised by volcanic eruptions, is another subtle link to the enduring architecture of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Indeed, these journals, texts, and sketchy illustrations serve as evidence of just how long the past has been used to understand the present.
These histories are also articulated in more modern fashions. Angelica Mesiti’s The rain that fell in the faint light of the young Sun (2022) is a series of fossilised rain prints, sourced from various archives including the University’s Charles Lyell Collection. With bold colour and audio, Mesiti reproduces rains and storms which took place millions of years ago for contemporary audiences. Parallels can be drawn with British artists like Amy Stephens, who undertake a similar documentary practice, directly in the field.
Katie Paterson’s embroidery Evergreen (2022) stays closer to the ground; with silk thread on linen, she stitches every single extinct flower, exposing how twice the amount of plants have disappeared in this (sixth) mass extinction than all the birds, mammals, amphibians put together. Paterson plays on the delicacy and fragility of the medium, a textile whose beauty and design belies its shroud-like, funereal symbolism.
For its fatalism, The Recent retains hope through collaboration and comings together. Evergreen (2022) is one example, with the Scottish artist working with embroiderers at The Royal School of Needlework in London to make a natural design evocative of the Art and Crafts movement, itself deeply rooted in Glasgow.
Katie Paterson’s other work in the exhibition, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), is also presented at City Art Centre, a short walk away from the Gallery. In both spaces sit two small incense sticks, scented as the ‘first-ever’ forests on earth, which grew in modern-day Cairo, New York State, and the last, the Amazon, now at threat of being lost in the age of the climate crisis.
The display at Talbot Rice is more reactive; while the incense ceremonies are held every day, a wildfire with a radiative power of 1000mw takes place somewhere on Earth. This real-time tracking is made possible by collaboration, with university wildfire experts Rory Hadden and Sergio Vargas Córdoba, who have created an electronic alert to record all major wildfires using satellites orbiting the planet.
Still, Deep Rooted is an exception at City Art Centre; situated above Shifting Vistas and the Scottish Landscape Awards 2024 - more conventional landscape exhibitions - are a plurality of works and artists, which centre on trees as a vital plant form, which sustains human existence.
Andrew Mackenzie traverses two of these floors, with works guided by his personal experiences. The four paintings in Deep Rooted are more complex, constructed from notes, drawings, and photographs made before Storm Arwen in November 2021, which felled all of his subjects in one night, completely transforming the once-familiar landscape.
Mackenzie’s stark architectural interventions of line and colour are intended not to contrast, but to complement the organic environment. ‘I present human and non-human as entangled, overlapping, inextricably linked,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘I’m not presenting an opposition, but rather…a sympathetic relationship, the potential of a symbiotic co-existence.’
Dalziel + Scullion also adopt a documentary approach, here to depict the ‘nations-of-beings’ with whom we cohabit. Their Unknown Pines series (2007) of inkjet prints are individually named, often after places and countries, highlighting non-human migrations across borders.
Naomi Mcintosh names each sculpture in her Quiet Garden series (2021) too, though with something more local; a Scots word, relative to the weather on the day of their production, transforming her beech wooden forms into a record of their own making.
In the accompanying book, we see these works in situ in the Cairngorms National Park. In the exhibition space, they could be detached from their place of display. However, these plural exhibitions inspire us to draw different connections; in the museum, these sculptures seem inextricably shaped by the work of San Francisco-based sculptor Ruth Asawa.
But we needn’t travel so far to find transnational connections. In the works of Lost Song (2021), Mcintosh turns the songs of birds on the RSPB ‘red list’ into vessels, transforming linear data from sound recordings into blackened feathers and nest-like structures. In sight, sound, and year, the series bears a striking connection with Hanna Tuulikki’s under forest cover / metsänpeiton alla (2021) which, though tucked away in a black box, is still Deep Rooted’s standout work.
Inside, we are lost within a life-size installation of silver birch tree trunks, surround sound audio, and a digital choreography, which transposes the Finnish folkloric concept of going missing in the forest, to the emotional trauma of gaining an ecological awareness.
Tuulikki appears as a hologram, glitchy and disembodied. Cut off from her body, her hands, when placed carefully atop the leaves, look more like crow’s feet, collapsing the binary between human and non-human forms. A voice chants ‘Come back!’ in Finnish, but the call comes as a bird-like screech, perhaps even a bark, more than a welcome home.
Commissioned for the Helsinki Biennial in 2021, Tuulikki’s under forest cover is also a political exposé. Though we like to think of Finland’s forests as rich, untouched wildernesses, most are monoculture plantations, landscapes onto which idealised, romantic nationalisms are often projected. Indeed, photographs do not do this work any justice; they must be experienced, in the forest and in the flesh.
Based in Glasgow, like Tuulikki, Thomas Abercromby critically engages with even more local landscapes. His film John (2023), recently on view at Collective Gallery, contrasts stereotypical images of Scotland - coastal castles, thistles, and Ben Lomond, another extinct volcano - with real working-class experiences of work, joy, and loss. Anchoring the narrative work are two performers, who take slow and purposeful strides amongst the classical paintings of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and then outside, seemingly as comfortable within the institution as they are outside of it.
More sharp is the contrast between the everyday cast: the high-rise flats, for instance, which foreground the spectacle of Arthur’s Seat. This disparity is also made clear in the urban photographs of Making Space: Photographs of Architecture at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait, notably Sylvia Grace Borda’s series, Westwood neighbourhood, East Kilbride (2005-2017).
Both The Recent and Deep Rooted connect with the unsettling nature of the COVID pandemic, which prompted significant behavioural changes, and brought some to reconnect with their locales. Whether of environments rural or urban, of land or sea, these exhibitions all constitute promising changes in Edinburgh’s art landscape - let us hope they are sustained.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
Though globally interconnected, Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent’s foundations are geological, and deeply rooted in the city of Edinburgh. There are nods to Arthur’s Seat, its dormant volcano, Salisbury Crags, and, in an installation co-organised by University Professor of Political Theory Mihaela Mihai, sticks borrowed from the woodlands of Jupiter Artland.
The exhibition is punctuated by the materials of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers who developed the theory of deep time, here grappled with by contemporary artists in entirely different contexts. These works are carefully placed alongside fragments of rock, a means of grounding detached museum collections also deployed by the curators of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Lyell’s particular fascination with the columns of the Roman temple of Serapis, continually submerged and raised by volcanic eruptions, is another subtle link to the enduring architecture of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Indeed, these journals, texts, and sketchy illustrations serve as evidence of just how long the past has been used to understand the present.
These histories are also articulated in more modern fashions. Angelica Mesiti’s The rain that fell in the faint light of the young Sun (2022) is a series of fossilised rain prints, sourced from various archives including the University’s Charles Lyell Collection. With bold colour and audio, Mesiti reproduces rains and storms which took place millions of years ago for contemporary audiences. Parallels can be drawn with British artists like Amy Stephens, who undertake a similar documentary practice, directly in the field.
Katie Paterson’s embroidery Evergreen (2022) stays closer to the ground; with silk thread on linen, she stitches every single extinct flower, exposing how twice the amount of plants have disappeared in this (sixth) mass extinction than all the birds, mammals, amphibians put together. Paterson plays on the delicacy and fragility of the medium, a textile whose beauty and design belies its shroud-like, funereal symbolism.
For its fatalism, The Recent retains hope through collaboration and comings together. Evergreen (2022) is one example, with the Scottish artist working with embroiderers at The Royal School of Needlework in London to make a natural design evocative of the Art and Crafts movement, itself deeply rooted in Glasgow.
Katie Paterson’s other work in the exhibition, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), is also presented at City Art Centre, a short walk away from the Gallery. In both spaces sit two small incense sticks, scented as the ‘first-ever’ forests on earth, which grew in modern-day Cairo, New York State, and the last, the Amazon, now at threat of being lost in the age of the climate crisis.
The display at Talbot Rice is more reactive; while the incense ceremonies are held every day, a wildfire with a radiative power of 1000mw takes place somewhere on Earth. This real-time tracking is made possible by collaboration, with university wildfire experts Rory Hadden and Sergio Vargas Córdoba, who have created an electronic alert to record all major wildfires using satellites orbiting the planet.
Still, Deep Rooted is an exception at City Art Centre; situated above Shifting Vistas and the Scottish Landscape Awards 2024 - more conventional landscape exhibitions - are a plurality of works and artists, which centre on trees as a vital plant form, which sustains human existence.
Andrew Mackenzie traverses two of these floors, with works guided by his personal experiences. The four paintings in Deep Rooted are more complex, constructed from notes, drawings, and photographs made before Storm Arwen in November 2021, which felled all of his subjects in one night, completely transforming the once-familiar landscape.
Mackenzie’s stark architectural interventions of line and colour are intended not to contrast, but to complement the organic environment. ‘I present human and non-human as entangled, overlapping, inextricably linked,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘I’m not presenting an opposition, but rather…a sympathetic relationship, the potential of a symbiotic co-existence.’
Dalziel + Scullion also adopt a documentary approach, here to depict the ‘nations-of-beings’ with whom we cohabit. Their Unknown Pines series (2007) of inkjet prints are individually named, often after places and countries, highlighting non-human migrations across borders.
Naomi Mcintosh names each sculpture in her Quiet Garden series (2021) too, though with something more local; a Scots word, relative to the weather on the day of their production, transforming her beech wooden forms into a record of their own making.
In the accompanying book, we see these works in situ in the Cairngorms National Park. In the exhibition space, they could be detached from their place of display. However, these plural exhibitions inspire us to draw different connections; in the museum, these sculptures seem inextricably shaped by the work of San Francisco-based sculptor Ruth Asawa.
But we needn’t travel so far to find transnational connections. In the works of Lost Song (2021), Mcintosh turns the songs of birds on the RSPB ‘red list’ into vessels, transforming linear data from sound recordings into blackened feathers and nest-like structures. In sight, sound, and year, the series bears a striking connection with Hanna Tuulikki’s under forest cover / metsänpeiton alla (2021) which, though tucked away in a black box, is still Deep Rooted’s standout work.
Inside, we are lost within a life-size installation of silver birch tree trunks, surround sound audio, and a digital choreography, which transposes the Finnish folkloric concept of going missing in the forest, to the emotional trauma of gaining an ecological awareness.
Tuulikki appears as a hologram, glitchy and disembodied. Cut off from her body, her hands, when placed carefully atop the leaves, look more like crow’s feet, collapsing the binary between human and non-human forms. A voice chants ‘Come back!’ in Finnish, but the call comes as a bird-like screech, perhaps even a bark, more than a welcome home.
Commissioned for the Helsinki Biennial in 2021, Tuulikki’s under forest cover is also a political exposé. Though we like to think of Finland’s forests as rich, untouched wildernesses, most are monoculture plantations, landscapes onto which idealised, romantic nationalisms are often projected. Indeed, photographs do not do this work any justice; they must be experienced, in the forest and in the flesh.
Based in Glasgow, like Tuulikki, Thomas Abercromby critically engages with even more local landscapes. His film John (2023), recently on view at Collective Gallery, contrasts stereotypical images of Scotland - coastal castles, thistles, and Ben Lomond, another extinct volcano - with real working-class experiences of work, joy, and loss. Anchoring the narrative work are two performers, who take slow and purposeful strides amongst the classical paintings of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and then outside, seemingly as comfortable within the institution as they are outside of it.
More sharp is the contrast between the everyday cast: the high-rise flats, for instance, which foreground the spectacle of Arthur’s Seat. This disparity is also made clear in the urban photographs of Making Space: Photographs of Architecture at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait, notably Sylvia Grace Borda’s series, Westwood neighbourhood, East Kilbride (2005-2017).
Both The Recent and Deep Rooted connect with the unsettling nature of the COVID pandemic, which prompted significant behavioural changes, and brought some to reconnect with their locales. Whether of environments rural or urban, of land or sea, these exhibitions all constitute promising changes in Edinburgh’s art landscape - let us hope they are sustained.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
Though globally interconnected, Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent’s foundations are geological, and deeply rooted in the city of Edinburgh. There are nods to Arthur’s Seat, its dormant volcano, Salisbury Crags, and, in an installation co-organised by University Professor of Political Theory Mihaela Mihai, sticks borrowed from the woodlands of Jupiter Artland.
The exhibition is punctuated by the materials of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers who developed the theory of deep time, here grappled with by contemporary artists in entirely different contexts. These works are carefully placed alongside fragments of rock, a means of grounding detached museum collections also deployed by the curators of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Lyell’s particular fascination with the columns of the Roman temple of Serapis, continually submerged and raised by volcanic eruptions, is another subtle link to the enduring architecture of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Indeed, these journals, texts, and sketchy illustrations serve as evidence of just how long the past has been used to understand the present.
These histories are also articulated in more modern fashions. Angelica Mesiti’s The rain that fell in the faint light of the young Sun (2022) is a series of fossilised rain prints, sourced from various archives including the University’s Charles Lyell Collection. With bold colour and audio, Mesiti reproduces rains and storms which took place millions of years ago for contemporary audiences. Parallels can be drawn with British artists like Amy Stephens, who undertake a similar documentary practice, directly in the field.
Katie Paterson’s embroidery Evergreen (2022) stays closer to the ground; with silk thread on linen, she stitches every single extinct flower, exposing how twice the amount of plants have disappeared in this (sixth) mass extinction than all the birds, mammals, amphibians put together. Paterson plays on the delicacy and fragility of the medium, a textile whose beauty and design belies its shroud-like, funereal symbolism.
For its fatalism, The Recent retains hope through collaboration and comings together. Evergreen (2022) is one example, with the Scottish artist working with embroiderers at The Royal School of Needlework in London to make a natural design evocative of the Art and Crafts movement, itself deeply rooted in Glasgow.
Katie Paterson’s other work in the exhibition, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), is also presented at City Art Centre, a short walk away from the Gallery. In both spaces sit two small incense sticks, scented as the ‘first-ever’ forests on earth, which grew in modern-day Cairo, New York State, and the last, the Amazon, now at threat of being lost in the age of the climate crisis.
The display at Talbot Rice is more reactive; while the incense ceremonies are held every day, a wildfire with a radiative power of 1000mw takes place somewhere on Earth. This real-time tracking is made possible by collaboration, with university wildfire experts Rory Hadden and Sergio Vargas Córdoba, who have created an electronic alert to record all major wildfires using satellites orbiting the planet.
Still, Deep Rooted is an exception at City Art Centre; situated above Shifting Vistas and the Scottish Landscape Awards 2024 - more conventional landscape exhibitions - are a plurality of works and artists, which centre on trees as a vital plant form, which sustains human existence.
Andrew Mackenzie traverses two of these floors, with works guided by his personal experiences. The four paintings in Deep Rooted are more complex, constructed from notes, drawings, and photographs made before Storm Arwen in November 2021, which felled all of his subjects in one night, completely transforming the once-familiar landscape.
Mackenzie’s stark architectural interventions of line and colour are intended not to contrast, but to complement the organic environment. ‘I present human and non-human as entangled, overlapping, inextricably linked,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘I’m not presenting an opposition, but rather…a sympathetic relationship, the potential of a symbiotic co-existence.’
Dalziel + Scullion also adopt a documentary approach, here to depict the ‘nations-of-beings’ with whom we cohabit. Their Unknown Pines series (2007) of inkjet prints are individually named, often after places and countries, highlighting non-human migrations across borders.
Naomi Mcintosh names each sculpture in her Quiet Garden series (2021) too, though with something more local; a Scots word, relative to the weather on the day of their production, transforming her beech wooden forms into a record of their own making.
In the accompanying book, we see these works in situ in the Cairngorms National Park. In the exhibition space, they could be detached from their place of display. However, these plural exhibitions inspire us to draw different connections; in the museum, these sculptures seem inextricably shaped by the work of San Francisco-based sculptor Ruth Asawa.
But we needn’t travel so far to find transnational connections. In the works of Lost Song (2021), Mcintosh turns the songs of birds on the RSPB ‘red list’ into vessels, transforming linear data from sound recordings into blackened feathers and nest-like structures. In sight, sound, and year, the series bears a striking connection with Hanna Tuulikki’s under forest cover / metsänpeiton alla (2021) which, though tucked away in a black box, is still Deep Rooted’s standout work.
Inside, we are lost within a life-size installation of silver birch tree trunks, surround sound audio, and a digital choreography, which transposes the Finnish folkloric concept of going missing in the forest, to the emotional trauma of gaining an ecological awareness.
Tuulikki appears as a hologram, glitchy and disembodied. Cut off from her body, her hands, when placed carefully atop the leaves, look more like crow’s feet, collapsing the binary between human and non-human forms. A voice chants ‘Come back!’ in Finnish, but the call comes as a bird-like screech, perhaps even a bark, more than a welcome home.
Commissioned for the Helsinki Biennial in 2021, Tuulikki’s under forest cover is also a political exposé. Though we like to think of Finland’s forests as rich, untouched wildernesses, most are monoculture plantations, landscapes onto which idealised, romantic nationalisms are often projected. Indeed, photographs do not do this work any justice; they must be experienced, in the forest and in the flesh.
Based in Glasgow, like Tuulikki, Thomas Abercromby critically engages with even more local landscapes. His film John (2023), recently on view at Collective Gallery, contrasts stereotypical images of Scotland - coastal castles, thistles, and Ben Lomond, another extinct volcano - with real working-class experiences of work, joy, and loss. Anchoring the narrative work are two performers, who take slow and purposeful strides amongst the classical paintings of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and then outside, seemingly as comfortable within the institution as they are outside of it.
More sharp is the contrast between the everyday cast: the high-rise flats, for instance, which foreground the spectacle of Arthur’s Seat. This disparity is also made clear in the urban photographs of Making Space: Photographs of Architecture at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait, notably Sylvia Grace Borda’s series, Westwood neighbourhood, East Kilbride (2005-2017).
Both The Recent and Deep Rooted connect with the unsettling nature of the COVID pandemic, which prompted significant behavioural changes, and brought some to reconnect with their locales. Whether of environments rural or urban, of land or sea, these exhibitions all constitute promising changes in Edinburgh’s art landscape - let us hope they are sustained.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
Though globally interconnected, Talbot Rice Gallery’s The Recent’s foundations are geological, and deeply rooted in the city of Edinburgh. There are nods to Arthur’s Seat, its dormant volcano, Salisbury Crags, and, in an installation co-organised by University Professor of Political Theory Mihaela Mihai, sticks borrowed from the woodlands of Jupiter Artland.
The exhibition is punctuated by the materials of James Hutton and Charles Lyell, eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers who developed the theory of deep time, here grappled with by contemporary artists in entirely different contexts. These works are carefully placed alongside fragments of rock, a means of grounding detached museum collections also deployed by the curators of The Trembling Museum at the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.
Lyell’s particular fascination with the columns of the Roman temple of Serapis, continually submerged and raised by volcanic eruptions, is another subtle link to the enduring architecture of the Talbot Rice Gallery. Indeed, these journals, texts, and sketchy illustrations serve as evidence of just how long the past has been used to understand the present.
These histories are also articulated in more modern fashions. Angelica Mesiti’s The rain that fell in the faint light of the young Sun (2022) is a series of fossilised rain prints, sourced from various archives including the University’s Charles Lyell Collection. With bold colour and audio, Mesiti reproduces rains and storms which took place millions of years ago for contemporary audiences. Parallels can be drawn with British artists like Amy Stephens, who undertake a similar documentary practice, directly in the field.
Katie Paterson’s embroidery Evergreen (2022) stays closer to the ground; with silk thread on linen, she stitches every single extinct flower, exposing how twice the amount of plants have disappeared in this (sixth) mass extinction than all the birds, mammals, amphibians put together. Paterson plays on the delicacy and fragility of the medium, a textile whose beauty and design belies its shroud-like, funereal symbolism.
For its fatalism, The Recent retains hope through collaboration and comings together. Evergreen (2022) is one example, with the Scottish artist working with embroiderers at The Royal School of Needlework in London to make a natural design evocative of the Art and Crafts movement, itself deeply rooted in Glasgow.
Katie Paterson’s other work in the exhibition, To Burn, Forest, Fire (2021), is also presented at City Art Centre, a short walk away from the Gallery. In both spaces sit two small incense sticks, scented as the ‘first-ever’ forests on earth, which grew in modern-day Cairo, New York State, and the last, the Amazon, now at threat of being lost in the age of the climate crisis.
The display at Talbot Rice is more reactive; while the incense ceremonies are held every day, a wildfire with a radiative power of 1000mw takes place somewhere on Earth. This real-time tracking is made possible by collaboration, with university wildfire experts Rory Hadden and Sergio Vargas Córdoba, who have created an electronic alert to record all major wildfires using satellites orbiting the planet.
Still, Deep Rooted is an exception at City Art Centre; situated above Shifting Vistas and the Scottish Landscape Awards 2024 - more conventional landscape exhibitions - are a plurality of works and artists, which centre on trees as a vital plant form, which sustains human existence.
Andrew Mackenzie traverses two of these floors, with works guided by his personal experiences. The four paintings in Deep Rooted are more complex, constructed from notes, drawings, and photographs made before Storm Arwen in November 2021, which felled all of his subjects in one night, completely transforming the once-familiar landscape.
Mackenzie’s stark architectural interventions of line and colour are intended not to contrast, but to complement the organic environment. ‘I present human and non-human as entangled, overlapping, inextricably linked,’ Mackenzie writes, ‘I’m not presenting an opposition, but rather…a sympathetic relationship, the potential of a symbiotic co-existence.’
Dalziel + Scullion also adopt a documentary approach, here to depict the ‘nations-of-beings’ with whom we cohabit. Their Unknown Pines series (2007) of inkjet prints are individually named, often after places and countries, highlighting non-human migrations across borders.
Naomi Mcintosh names each sculpture in her Quiet Garden series (2021) too, though with something more local; a Scots word, relative to the weather on the day of their production, transforming her beech wooden forms into a record of their own making.
In the accompanying book, we see these works in situ in the Cairngorms National Park. In the exhibition space, they could be detached from their place of display. However, these plural exhibitions inspire us to draw different connections; in the museum, these sculptures seem inextricably shaped by the work of San Francisco-based sculptor Ruth Asawa.
But we needn’t travel so far to find transnational connections. In the works of Lost Song (2021), Mcintosh turns the songs of birds on the RSPB ‘red list’ into vessels, transforming linear data from sound recordings into blackened feathers and nest-like structures. In sight, sound, and year, the series bears a striking connection with Hanna Tuulikki’s under forest cover / metsänpeiton alla (2021) which, though tucked away in a black box, is still Deep Rooted’s standout work.
Inside, we are lost within a life-size installation of silver birch tree trunks, surround sound audio, and a digital choreography, which transposes the Finnish folkloric concept of going missing in the forest, to the emotional trauma of gaining an ecological awareness.
Tuulikki appears as a hologram, glitchy and disembodied. Cut off from her body, her hands, when placed carefully atop the leaves, look more like crow’s feet, collapsing the binary between human and non-human forms. A voice chants ‘Come back!’ in Finnish, but the call comes as a bird-like screech, perhaps even a bark, more than a welcome home.
Commissioned for the Helsinki Biennial in 2021, Tuulikki’s under forest cover is also a political exposé. Though we like to think of Finland’s forests as rich, untouched wildernesses, most are monoculture plantations, landscapes onto which idealised, romantic nationalisms are often projected. Indeed, photographs do not do this work any justice; they must be experienced, in the forest and in the flesh.
Based in Glasgow, like Tuulikki, Thomas Abercromby critically engages with even more local landscapes. His film John (2023), recently on view at Collective Gallery, contrasts stereotypical images of Scotland - coastal castles, thistles, and Ben Lomond, another extinct volcano - with real working-class experiences of work, joy, and loss. Anchoring the narrative work are two performers, who take slow and purposeful strides amongst the classical paintings of the permanent collection of the National Gallery, and then outside, seemingly as comfortable within the institution as they are outside of it.
More sharp is the contrast between the everyday cast: the high-rise flats, for instance, which foreground the spectacle of Arthur’s Seat. This disparity is also made clear in the urban photographs of Making Space: Photographs of Architecture at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait, notably Sylvia Grace Borda’s series, Westwood neighbourhood, East Kilbride (2005-2017).
Both The Recent and Deep Rooted connect with the unsettling nature of the COVID pandemic, which prompted significant behavioural changes, and brought some to reconnect with their locales. Whether of environments rural or urban, of land or sea, these exhibitions all constitute promising changes in Edinburgh’s art landscape - let us hope they are sustained.
Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania is on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh until 14 April 2024.
The Recent is on view at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 17 February 2024.
Deep Rooted is on view at City Art Centre in Edinburgh until 25 February 2024.
Making Space: Photographs of Architecture is on view at the National Galleries of Scotland: Portrait in Edinburgh until 3 March 2024.
