25 September 2025
After our month off we are back to explore one of the standout exhibitions of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years. Featuring over 200 works, the show includes stunning installations made in response to the iconic Royal Scottish Academy building, as well as drawings, photographs, films, sketchbooks and archival items dating back to the mid-1970s. To provide insight into the work we will be joined by Chief Curator Patrick Elliott.
Goldsworthy is internationally recognised for his work with natural materials such as clay, stones, reeds, branches, leaves, snow and ice. For over 50 years, he has created a unique and highly influential body of work that speaks of our relationship with the land.
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years has been conceived by the artist as a single immersive artwork in response to the space, materials and character of the RSA building. The interrelationship of humans and the working land is a recurrent theme in Goldsworthy’s art and in the exhibition. He often presents the land as a hard, hostile and brutal place. Fences and barriers feature prominently, in the form of rusted barbed wire stretched across a room, and a massive, cracked clay wall. As in nature, beauty and danger co-exist.
26 May 2005 at 6pm
Amber Roome’s gallery in Cumberland Street opened a few months ago, and since then everyone has been watching with interest as a vibrant programme of exhibitions has unfolded. Amber currently works with nine painters and photographers, and often shows the work of other artists who have caught her attention in her downstairs space (including the likes of Andrew Mackenzie, who was our guest speaker in March).
It is a particular pleasure to visit Amber Roome Contemporary Art for this latest exhibition. Shadows and Tall Trees brings together a new body of work by Alan Kilpatrick that is drawn from his experience of two different cultures. Alan spent part of his early life in India, and continues to be fascinated by the relationship between post-independence India and Scotland. As Amber explains, this show ‘chronicles the fusion of the two cultures by examining the landscape, industries, people and artisan culture of the north east frontier region of Assam where he once lived.’
Alan has been an important painter on the Edinburgh art scene since 1991. He shows internationally, and his works are owned by The Fleming Collection, Royal Bank of Scotland, Bank of Scotland, Turcan Connell, Hans Rausing, The Bonham and further collections in Italy, USA, France, Eire, Australia and Germany. For this exhibition, he has been given the run of the entire gallery and so has been able to explore some new strategies in his work. He is addressing the figure here for the first time, with a number of portraits and also clay and resin figures arranged in two related installations. Alongside these are enigmatic landscapes, which literally ‘use elements from the artisan culture,’ incorporating turmeric, paprika and henna into the painting. Alan is also rather good at telling stories, so I anticipate illumination and entertainment in equal measure.
