Moyna Flannigan Archives

A Parliament of Lines: Aspects of Contemporary Drawing

28 June 2012 at 6pm

Our July event will take place at the City Art Centre to see a survey of contemporary Scottish drawing showcasing fifteen artists work, all of whom use drawing as an important element in their practice. Artists include: Charles Avery, Moyna Flannigan, Nathalie de Briey, Paul Chiappe, Euan Gray, Alan Johnston, Andrew MacKenzie and David Shrigley.

A Parliament Of Lines gets its name from social anthropologist Tim Ingold’s studies of growth and movement, in particular his observation that ‘everything is a parliament of lines .  . . to study both people and things is to study the lines they are made of.’ The exhibition is built around five broad themes: The Body, Architecture/Landscape, Minimal Abstraction, Reproduction/Photography and Sculptural Investigation.

Curated by artist Euan Gray, most of the work has been created specifically for the show and includes Nathalie de Briey’s watercolour drawings of incinerated objects from the Hiroshima bomb site drawn on delicate paper; Paul Chiappe’s extraordinary miniature reproductions of old-school photographs; Shrigley animation entitled Friends; Andrew MacKenzie’s meticulous layered images of landscapes and trees; Moyna Flannigan’s new suite of six drawings in ink and gouache depicting the story of Adam and Eve;  and a site specific wall drawing by Alan Johnston.

Drawing is not, as it once was, the foundation on which everything else is built. It is just one option among many, but it has certain intrinsic characteristics, which make it attractive to artists with very different preoccupations.

Joining us to explore these different areas of enquiry will be one of the exhibiting artists, Andrew MacKenzie. Andrew is a painter and an MFA graduate from Edinburgh College of Art. He lives and works in the Scottish Borders and has exhibited with The Contemporary Art Society, London, The Talbot Rice Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Leeds and The Paul Khun Gallery in Calgary, Canada.

Private Collector Visit: Kirstie Skinner

31 July 2009 at 6pm

This month we will be visiting the home of Kirstie Skinner, founder of Spin and Programme Co-ordinator from 2003 until 2005, to see her private collection of contemporary art. Works range from a Jessica Harrison degree show piece from the collection ‘Motor Mouth’, a painting from Edinburgh based artist Andrew McKenzie and a Ruth Claxton postcard; to a baroque inspired painting by Moyna Flannigan, a Craig Mullholland etching from last year’s ‘Grandes et Petites Machines’ exhibition at Glasgow School of Art and a Charles Avery Triptych from ‘The Islanders’.

Kirstie Skinner specialises in the interpretation, mediation and research of contemporary art. She completed her PhD, Spectres of Minimalism, in May 2009 at Edinburgh College of Art, where she also taught for many years. Her articles have been published in books, journals and exhibition catalogues. Since 2000, she has devised conferences and talks programmes for National Galleries of Scotland and Glasgow City Council, and regularly organises and leads foreign professional development tours on behalf of the Scottish Arts Council. Recent projects have included the creation of a website for the National Collecting Scheme for Scotland (a catalogue of over 130 acquisitions, accompanied by filmed interviews with participating curators), and Vocal, an action research project at the Collective Gallery focussing on gallery interpretation. From 2005 to 2009, she was a specialist advisor for the Scottish Arts Council.

We will be joining Kirstie in discussions about what draws her to individual works and how she approaches collecting contemporary art for a domestic setting.

Moyna Flannigan

27 May 2004 at 6pm

This exhibition is a fine example of the National Galleries of Scotland finding new and stimulating ways to work with contemporary artists. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery Director, James Holloway, thinks it crucial, for the longevity and quality of the collection, to commission portraits by the most prominent artists of our day. This enlightened approach offers interesting and topical challenges to Scotland’s most prominent artists. You may have seen the recent portrait of specialists at Dundee’s Oncology Unit by Ken Currie and Wendy McMurdo’s photographs of members of the Roslin Institute, in which case you will know that they are significant pieces of contemporary art in their own right.

For this exhibition, the idea sprang from the artist’s interests rather than the institution’s remit. Moyna Flannigan is one of Scotland’s leading artists. She is a lecturer in Painting at Glasgow School of Art, and is represented by doggerfisher. She is renowned for her strange and surprising fictional portraits, which have been bought by Saatchi and Deutsche Bank as well as the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the City Art Centre in Edinburgh. In the last year or so, Moyna has undertaken a radical shift in scale, and has been painting miniatures – a familiar form in 17th- and 18th-century art and almost entirely absent within modernism. This gave her the desire to look more closely at the miniatures in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery collection (and it is rather fun to revisit that collection again through her eyes).

The miniature is not just a very small portrait, but rather it suggests an intimate form of portraiture – the keepsake, or the lover’s cameo, or even the memento mori. The implied combinations of vanity, age, anxiety, desire and death are so well suited to Flannigan’s style and themes that you get the feeling she was born to paint miniatures. The results are fantastical, intriguing, captivating, not least because their painterly quality rivals Watteau’s rococo brushstrokes for seductive finesse.

This is a great opportunity to ask Moyna about her work, and see the weird collection of faces and characters she has conjured.