25 June 2026
This month we’re heading to Collective Gallery for the summer exhibition by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, joined by curator Claire Craig. Commissioned for Folkestone Triennial 2025, and curated by Collective’s Director Sorcha Carey, this important new work will be shown in Scotland for the first time.
Afterlife brings together nearly 200 amulets in a sculptural installation designed in collaboration with Berlin-based architects, Zeller and Moye. Amulets are miniature talismanic objects, typically carved in stone. Appearing across millennia and cultures, they are small enough to be held in the hand or worn, and are generally considered protective.
Afterlife reimagines this tradition. Working with museums around the world, Paterson has recreated amulets from civilisations across the globe (including Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Viking, Islamic, Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Celtic, Greco-Roman and Pre-Columbian), using materials sourced from endangered landscapes and fragile ecosystems, to serve as a bridge between past and present.
31 March 2011 at 6pm
This month we will be looking at the work of Jean-Marc Bustamante, one of France’s senior artists and a major figure in the international art world.
Bustamante received critical acclaim with his contribution to the French pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2003. A key theme in his work is a linking of what Uta Grosenick has called the abstract space of the mind with the real space of nature and architecture. Though sitting outside recognisable trends in recent art, Bustamante’s work has a formal and conceptual contemporaneity, a freshness, that makes it relevant to the way art is made and looked at today. His clear, direct vision manifests itself in an almost bewildering array of materials and media – first photography, then sculpture, painting, architectural projects and installation. His work is unified and characterised by its calm intelligence and a kind of extraordinary ordinariness that helps us see its subject, the world around us, in a new way.
This exhibition includes classic work from the 1980s and 1990s – the large-scale photographs and sculptures with which Bustamante made his name and more recent works from 2000 onwards, in particular a series of paintings on Plexiglas made especially for The Fruitmarket Gallery and completed in 2010.
Joining us to explore how Bustamante continuously reinvents his ideas and artistic language will be Stacy Boldrick – Research and Interpretation Manager at The Fruitmarket Gallery.
22 July 2010 at 6pm
This month, we will be visiting WASPS studios on Albion Road to join artists Kevin McPhee, Katherine Aarrestad, Louise Fraser and Sharon Quigley in discussion about their practice and recent work.
Kevin McPhee works intuitively and uses a combination of lo-fi materials, found objects and paint to create installations that are evocative of a self-generated mythology. Sculptures manifest through the performance of making and are evocative of a shared belief.
Katherine Aarrestad focuses upon the translation of meaning through different points in time. She uses visual subject matter that is drawn from the past and creates a viewing experience which is very much of the present. Obscure visions of reality are created by juxtaposing images with titles which open up an alternative narrative for the viewer to read.
Louise Fraser creates work in response to the visual surroundings she lives in and looks for ways to translate the idea of architecture, nature, the process of change and the story within. Her work is an attempt to bring us closer to our ever-changing, often overlooked closest surroundings and the idea that we are honed and moulded by our environment.
Sharon Quigley explores the body, with its multitude of functions and its relationship with the material properties of paint, to explore subjects of physicality, intimacy and sensation. Working directly onto paper or oil primed boards to create intricately patterned surfaces, she fuses together a myriad of micro graphic and cellular structures to cultural references from Japanese Kimono designs, arabesques and nineteenth-century engravings, in an attempt to explore and reflect the correlation that exists between them all.
Over the last 30 years, WASPS has grown to become one of Scotland’s largest arts organisations, providing affordable studio space to over 750 artists each year at 17 locations throughout Scotland. Albion Road Studios is known as ‘Citizens Studios’ and has 22 studios over two floors for up to 30 artists at any one time.
24 September 2009 at 6pm
For this month’s Spin event, we will be visiting The Enlightenments at the Dean Gallery presented by the Edinburgh International Festival, to see works by acclaimed international contemporary artists Tacita Dean, Greg Creek, Gabrielle de Vietri, Lee Mingwei, Nathan Coley and Joshua Mosley.
Against the backdrop of Edinburgh and its philosophical history, the artworks that make up The Enlightenments offer contemporary observations on subjects including religion, philosophy, superstition, architecture, literature, natural history, the cosmos, scepticism, stoicism and social manners.
Highlights include a new commission by Glasgow-based, Turner Prize nominee Nathan Coley who has re-presented three gnarled tree trunks that supported the roof of a remote 19th century stone cottage in Perthshire. This new sculptural installation is described by curator Juliana Engberg as ‘like a forest but it’s not. It’s like a natural cathedral but it’s not. It’s like a sanctuary but perhaps it’s more spooky than that. It’s for the viewer to decide.’
Other highlights include Lee Mingwei’s Letter Writing Project which invites viewers to think about communicating with absent friends, family and loved ones by writing all the letters they always meant to. Joshua Mosley’s digital film of animated clay figures, presents a fictional encounter between two of history’s greatest thinkers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal as they journey through a forest and talk about God and nature. In The I Don’t Know Show: Philosophy for Kids, artist Gabrielle de Vietri has recorded interviews with eight to twelve-year-olds in which they answer fundamental philosophical questions about art and life.
Joining us in discussion will be art historian and curator, Bill Hare. Bill is an Honorary Fellow in Scottish art history at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Curator of the Universitys Fine Art Collection. He has also been a lecturer in modern art history and contemporary critical theory with Edinburgh College of Art for the past 30 years and has recently been apppointed Exhibition Curator of the ECA Cast Collection. He has curated many exhibitions working with major artists incuding Alan Davie, Eduardo Paolozzi and Boyle Family. His most recent exhibitions included Divided Selves-The Scottish Self-Portrait from the 17th Century to the Present (2006) at the Talbot Rice Gallery and Beyond Appearances-Painting and Picturing in Scottish Modern and Contemporary Painting (2007) at the City Art Centre.
18 February 2009 at 6.30pm
Join our SPIN host Alhena Katsof in a special opportunity to visit Toby Paterson’s studio.
Toby Paterson was born in Glasgow in 1974. He studied at Glasgow School of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, graduating from the former in 1995. In Glasgow, he is represented by The Modern Institute and in London, by Sutton Lane. Paterson won the 2002 Becks Futures Prize and received a Creative Scotland Award in 2006.
Recent projects include solo shows in The Hague and London, group exhibitions in San Francisco, Belgrade, Madrid and Middlesborough, and the commission of permanent works at Tramway in Glasgow, and at BBC Scotland’s new headquarters and on the campus of Warwick University. He is also developing work for the seven stations that constitute the Docklands Light Railways planned Stratford International Extension. Paterson’s interest in cities and their architecture is manifested throughout his work in the form of painting, sculpture and photography. He currently lives and works in Glasgow.
