Tag Archives: collage

The dead don’t go until we do

30 April 2026

Join us this month as we make our way to Talbot Rice Gallery for their group show The dead don’t go until we do, where we will be joined by curator James Clegg. 

The dead don’t go until we do brings together four artists who channel the strength of family, friends and communities. It is about the collective power that runs across generations. The title of these collective exhibitions takes its inspiration from a line in Jackie Kay’s poem Darling. 

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas celebrates her ancestral Roma community. Through colourful fabric collages, she takes control of the images made about people, past and present, to overcome centuries of prejudice.  

Amol K Patil follows his late father and grandfathers’ bold writing and performances. He uses his art and poetry to share the struggles of those living in poverty in the City of Mumbai.  

Kang Seung Lee begins with research into historical archives, looking at the way marginalised communities are erased. But he uses the gaps and absences to make space for both the living and dead, in this exhibition linking with historical queer sites across Edinburgh.  

MADEYOULOOK is a collaboration between Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho. They explore the landscapes shaped by the frequently displaced Koni people in South Africa. Working from the ancient earthworks left by the Bakoni, they think about alternative relationships to the land. 

Everlyn Nicodemus

27 February 2025

This month we delve into the powerful exhibition by Edinburgh-based artist Everlyn Nicodemus. Born in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania in 1954, this major retrospective covers her 40-year career as an artist.

Her work is in part a physical journey across continents and in part a voyage where she explores her narrative intellectually and emotionally as well as that of individuals and their experiences. Through painting, drawing and collage, she addresses racial perceptions, gender and trauma with beautiful eloquence and compassion. Leading us through the exhibition will be the curator Stephanie Straine who worked closely with Everlyn.

This is an incredible story about an artist who had to take a 25-year hiatus from painting due to practicalities but continued to work and was recently rediscovered by a London gallerist. In 2022, she was awarded a commission from the Freelands Foundation to create a new body of works which we will have the opportunity to survey. Everlyn’s work is deservedly receiving high praise from the critics, it is a ‘must see’ show.

Alberta Whittle: created dangerously

29 June 2023

This month we will be heading to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One) for their new exhibition Alberta Whittle: create dangerously. We will be joined by curator Leila Riszko, whom some will remember as Leila joined Spin in 2022 for both our visit to Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life and Conversations with the Collection. 

 In her works, Alberta addresses the brutality and harm caused by colonialism, the Transatlantic trade in enslaved people, and the ongoing climate crisis. Through richly symbolic artworks, she pulls apart the belief that ’racism and police brutality is [just] an English problem or an American problem’. Instead she underlines Scotland’s complicity in the structures of white supremacy. Often deeply personal, weaving stories of family and belonging, Alberta ultimately offers a message of hope, asking us to imagine a world outside of these damaging systems and ways of thinking. 

This is the largest showing of Alberta’s works to date, with sculptures, digital collages, watercolours and new paintings, made especially for the show, taking over the ground floor of Modern One. Alongside never-before-seen artworks, the exhibition offers you the opportunity to see Alberta’s extraordinary tapestry, Entanglement is more than blood, and film installation, Lagareh – The Last Born – which the artist presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, commissioned by Scotland+Venice. 

Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi: I want to be a machine

31 January 2019

For our first event in 2019, we will explore the two parallel displays of work by Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi.

The exhibition shows the evolution of their art, revealing similarities as well as differences from their interest in popular culture and mass consumerisation to new technologies and the discovery of screen printing in the 1960s. The exhibition also reunites them as in 1968, Warhol and Paolozzi exhibited together as part of a five-person show at the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York.

The title of the exhibition comes from a quote by Andy Warhol when he discovered screen printing which enabled him to make works of art which almost made themselves. ‘That’s what I like, he [Warhol] famously said. I want to be a machine.’

Both artists captured images from photography and advertisements. Warhol traced his images while Paolozzi used collage until they both turned to screen printing to transform photographs into prints.

The exhibition includes rarely seen drawings by Warhol, as well as his famous prints of Marilyn Munroe. Works by Paolozzi include some of his early proto-Pop collages from the early 1950s and Metallization of a Dream in 1963 and key works from the famous 1952 Bunk lecture where he is credited with kick-starting Pop Art.

We will be joined by Dr Glyn Davis, Reader in Screen Studies at the University of Edinburgh to discuss the work of these icons of modern art.

NOW Monster Chetwynd, Henry Coobes, Moyna Flannigan, Betye Saar, Wael Shawky

25 October 2018

This month we will visit the fourth phase of the contemporary art exhibition series NOW which opens on Saturday 20 October at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Senior Curator Dan Brown will meet us there and offer us an insight into the production of this group exhibition and the practice of the artists represented.

Previous editions of NOW have shown work by Nathan Coley, Susan Philipsz and Jenny Saville (amongst many others), this instalment is built around the work of Turner Prize nominee (2012) Monster Chetwynd. Renowned for using diverse cultural and historical sources to create performative work, sculptural installation and video, Alalia Chetwynd was born in London in 1973; she later adopted the name Spartacus Chetwynd, then morphing into Marvin Gaye Chetwynd before earlier this year becoming Monster Chetwynd. She studied Anthropology and holds a BA in Fine Art from Slade School of Art (London). In 2002, she completed her studies with an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London.

Until 28 April 2019, Chetwynd’s work, including collage and painting, will be on show at Modern One surrounded by the work of four international contemporary artists: Moyna Flannigan (Scotland), Henry Coombes (Scotland), Betye Saar (USA) and Wael Shawky (Egypt). Although working in diverse mediums and with different approaches all these artists share a desire to challenge convention.

Hayley Tompkins and Luke Fowler

20 April 2011 at 6.30pm

A visit to The Modern Institutes new gallery space in Osborne Street, to discuss the work of Glasgow-based artists, Hayley Tompkins and Luke Fowler.

For her latest show, Tompkins will exhibit a floor-based installation including colour photographs, plants, clay objects, watercolour paintings and other collected material. The work’s title, A Piece of Eight, refers to the silver Spanish coin, an early form of currency now often associated with piracy and lawlessness. Tompkins is interested in the cultural value of objects and their mutability. The use of plants and photographs within the work provide a tangible expression of the progression of time and the opportunity to imagine multiple realities.

Tompkins’ new work seeks to reproduce everyday sensory experience; replicating and heightening the visual and physical interactions we have with the world around us. Her work is an attempt to structure the objects, choices and ideas we encounter in our everyday life, and describe the slippage between our imagination, our perceptions and the reality we inhabit.

Also on show is self-with-other by Luke Fowler. The photographic works exhibited are part of Fowler’s ongoing photo archive. For five years, Fowler has been working with a half-frame camera to document his daily life, including events, friends, family and work. Due to the camera’s unusual frame size being obsolete – when printed within a standard 35mm frame – an accidental pairing of two images is created. In the group of works titled All Day Monday and Tuesday, Fowler presents new collages drawing on his photo archive, creating compositions covering an expanded time frame and canvas.

The sound piece Familial Readings by Luke Fowler & Toshiya Tsunoda was part of a work made at the 2008 Yokohama Triennale. Fowler asked his family and close friends to just read out a paragraph from whatever book you’re reading right now. These readings were then incorporated into a soundtrack for a film. A version of this can be heard here at The Modern Institute, and taken away on CD. Toshiya Tsunoda is respected in Japan as a field recording sensei, his work is widely known in the area of experimental music. Luke Fowler and Toshiya Tsunoda have collaborated on works including Composition For Flutter Screen and A Grammar For Listening Part 3.

Luke Fowler is known for his film portraits of socially radical figures; from the avant-garde composer turned political activist Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) to the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing (1927-1989).

Seventh Heaven by Raphael Danke

17 October 2007

A visit to Sorcha Dallas gallery to look at the exhibition Seventh Heaven by Berlin-based artist Raphael Danke (born 1970).

‘Although the legacy of Surrealism is everywhere traceable in the collages, photography and sculptures of Raphael Danke, he wittily re-envisages that legacy in the context of the society of the spectacle.’ (Sarah Lowndes)

Sorcha Dallas graduated from the Painting Department at The Glasgow School of Art in 1998. Between 1999-2004, she co-founded and curated the moving gallery space, Switchspace, working with property agents to deliver a programme of cutting-edge contemporary art within alternative environments throughout Glasgow.

In April 2004 she opened Sorcha Dallas, a permanent commercial gallery dedicated to representing and promoting Scottish artists on a local, national and international level. She has also written for (a-n) Magazine, Circa, The Fruitmarket Gallery and The List, has worked as an artist within education and worked in 2004 as a project coordinator on Reputations, an international public art project in Castlemilk.

Today your love, tomorrow the world

16 May 2007 at 6.30pm

For the next SPIN:Glasgow event, we will be visiting Lowsalt, a Glasgow-based, artist-led, not for profit organisation.

Still in its infancy, the organisation was set up in early 2006 with a fundamental focus on creativity and experimentation. Lowsalt aims to promote and facilitate emerging and established artists across a broad range of disciplines, and provides opportunities for artists to produce and exhibit their work within a free and professional environment. Lowsalt does not have a permanent space within the city, and has recently moved to these premises after having successfully exhibited work across the city in a disused shop front in the Saltmarket.

Lowsalt was established, and is run by, practising artists Kristy Schindler and Rebecca Anson-Armstrong, who act as programming and curatorial facilitators. Krisdy Schindler will be joining us to talk about the organisation and the exhibition.

Today your love, tomorrow the world is an exhibition of new work by four artists from around the world who are now based in Glasgow: Benjamin Merris, Hrafnhildur Hallsdottir, Alhena Katsof and Baldvin Ringsted. Loosely inspired by the Ramones song title, the exhibition comprises work that combines visions of post-rock melancholy with the bitter irony of songs of yore, featuring video, collage and drawing.

BENJAMIN MERRIS is an American artist living and working in Glasgow. Ben studied at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and moonlighted as a professional monster wrestler for three years. Romantic, unshakable childhood visions and the Glasgow School of Art MFA Course brought him to a new home. In the past year, he has exhibited and performed at intermedia in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and at CAFA in Beijing.

HRAFNHILDUR HALLSDOTTIR’s work strategically uses and abuses everyday materials. Her affinities lie with the stuff that others discard or disdain – cardboard, thread, string, cheap felt-tip pens and garishly coloured feathers. The many references to music, especially rock music, emphasises the artists desire to lose her self, and us, within the sonic architecture of a thunderous riff designed to obliterate rational thought and collapse the boundaries between art and life.

ALHENA KATSOF was born in Montreal, Canada. Alhena moved to Glasgow in 2005 to do an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. Alhena’s practice is directly informed by the conceptual and aesthetic sensibilities of collage, which are pertinent both in their visual quality and sociological implications. Embedded within her work is a fractured storytelling and an intimate, melancholic humour. Although not overtly feminist, Alhena’s work is indebted to a feminist dialogue and to all of the confusion and opportunity that it provides. Alhena has exhibited her work in Canada and the US, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and Beijing. Alhena has made a new video entitled For Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World.

BALDVIN RINGSTED exploits familiar or historically important found sounds and events in his work. His installations have included sculptures, sound, video, found objects, paintings and written manuscripts. Born in Akureyri in Iceland, he now lives and works in Glasgow. Ringsteds background is in music. He studied jazz theory and also worked as a rock and experimental musician. Baldvin has had several solo shows and taken part in group shows and projects in as diverse places as Finland and New York.