For our first post-festival Spin event we will be meeting at Ingleby Gallery to talk about their major solo exhibition of new work by Charles Avery entitled The People and Things of Onomatopoeia. The exhibition was a highlight of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival and included a temporary tree sculpture by Avery sited in Waverley Station during the festival (now relocated to the Parasol Unit gallery in London).
We will be joined by Susan Mansfield, The Scotsman’s Arts Correspondent who will join us to discuss the exhibition. In Avery’s work, the Island is located in the middle of an archipelago of innumerable constituents, and its heart is the port of Onomatopoeia. This town was once a stepping off point for pioneers and travellers, then a bustling boomtown, then a slum in a state of extended decline, and now in the fictional present, it is reborn as a regenerated city of culture and a tourist destination. This exhibition presents a new series of drawings alongside furniture, sculptures and all manner of imported artefacts that come together to describe the culture of Onomatopoeia’s inhabitants.
Elements of The Islanders project have previously been exhibited at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Parasol Unit, London and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. In 2007 Avery represented Scotland at the 52nd Venice Biennale. The exhibition runs until 3 October 2015.
