24 November 2011 at 6pm
Hiding in Full View is a new series of paintings by Alison Watt in which she has been looking at the work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-98), taking indirect inspiration from the almost hypnotic imagery of Woodman’s intense and dreamlike tableaux.
In the spring of last year Alison Watt was commissioned by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to make a work for their celebrated collection of self-portraits by women artists. This was an unusual commission, not least because it came nearly 15 years after Watt had last painted the human figure. Since relinquishing the figure in 1997, she has edged towards abstraction, painting swathes of fabric suggestive of both a human presence and absence. During her time spent at the Uffizi Gallery, Watt found herself looking closely at the photographs of Woodman, fascinated by the way that she used the object in her self portraits and how the two elements of self and object often merge.
If it was possible to create a painting that was difficult to identify and at the same time incredibly intimate, that was what I wanted to do – Alison Watt
Joining us in discussion will be Roberta McGrath who is Associate Lecturer in Photographic Theory and Criticism at Edinburgh Napier University. Roberta has published widely on the theory of the image and questions of representation, and has published “Seeing Her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body” (Manchester University Press, 2002) which focuses on issues of sexed subjectivity through visual representations of the reproductive female body made between 1750-1910.
22 February 2007 at 6pm
Dark Light is ‘a painting that can literally be stepped into’. Scottish painter Alison Watt, who is currently artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in London, has created a room within a room in the form of a metal cube. Step inside and eloquent paintings of black cloth are revealed.
In previous solo exhibitions, namely Fold at the Fruitmarket Gallery in 1997, Watt presented diptychs of fabric and figure. Three years later in Shift at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, only the fabric and the suggestion of a human form remained. In 2004, she created Still, a composite of four 6ft paintings suspended in the Memorial Chapel of Old St Pauls Church. This personal homage to this extraordinary space was one of the highlights of the Edinburgh Festival of 2004, and is now on permanent display.
As Watt’s paintings have become increasingly engulfing and abstract, Dark Light is the fruits of her ambition to create an installation piece, made as a result of her Creative Scotland Award.
We will be looking at this exciting new work and will also consider the shift from figurative painting to abstraction which is ever prominent in contemporary art, as well as focusing on the relationship between the dealer and the artist.
14 August 2004
Exploring the physical and conceptual boundaries between public space, we toured around contemporary artworks situated in a stately home, a corporate space, a humble flat, a reclaimed commercial property, and visited special environments constructed in a church and on a classic American bus. The Festival is a time when Edinburgh showcases home-grown talent alongside internationally renowned artistic figures, and this tour took in everything from energetic recent graduates exhibiting on a shoestring, to ambitious site-specific installations created by major artists.
We were accompanied on the bus by Juliet Dean, Director of PACE (public art commissions and exhibitions), and Helen Watson (Outreach Officer at the National Galleries of Scotland). We viewed the permanent installations by Elizabeth Oglivie, Shauna McMullan, Keiko Mukaide and Adam Barker-Mill, sited by PACE at the BT Headquarters at the Gyle. Then we visited Newhailes, a National Trust house in Musselburgh where Helen had recently organised a project and exhibition: artist Nicky Bird had worked with a group of retired people to produce a series of evocative photographs and text called Below Stairs at Newhailes.
We got a glimpse of two of the group shows in Annuale – a mini-festival of emerging and international artists exhibiting in domestic and artist-run spaces: Repro Tableau at the Embassy Gallery and Brainchild at Magnifitat (a Bruntsfield flat).
And we finished with the two special temporary installations created for the Festival: Alison Watt’s piece at Old St Pauls Church and Mike Nelson’s Pumpkin Palace, a Collective Gallery off-site project. Along the way we met and chatted to curators Kim Coleman (Embassy and Magnifitat), Sarah Munro (Collective Gallery) and artist Jonathan Owen.
