31 July 2025
Join us and meet the artist Louise Gibson who will be unveiling her new works as commissioned by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, part of this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival.
Louise Gibson works with a combination of materials including resins, recycled fabrics and found objects. Her work is intuitive but measured in skills, utilising industrial processes with learned techniques, such as casting and car body lacquering. By combining polyester resins with found or scavenged materials, such as scaffolding netting or metal work, she creates impressive organic forms with complex finishes.
The exhibition will be held in the vast sculpture yard, an inspiring outdoor arena surrounded by
workshops and specialist machinery which provides a unique and a dynamic experience for us to explore Gibson’s work.
26 November 2015
For our final meeting of 2015, Spin will visit Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. ESW’s Curator, Dan Brown will join us to discuss Concrete Antenna, a sound work in the tower created by Tommy Perman, Professor Simon Kirby and Rob St John. Concrete Antenna explores, through audio archives and specially made field recordings, the past, present and future of the ESW’s site.
Also on show will be Workshopshop – part-shop, part-exhibition, which includes a range of affordable contemporary artworks and commissions from Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop’s studio holders, programme artists and members including the following artists:
Catherine Aitken and David Murphy | Elaine Allison | Miranda Blennerhassett | Amy Boulton | Simon Burns-cox | Hans Clausen | Concrete Antenna | Covered In Toner | Sarah Dale | Jean Philippe Dordolo | Keith Farquhar | Alec Finlay | Clare Flatley | Andrew Gannon | Jessica Harrison | Christine Heughan | Kate Ive | Alejandro Lopez | Ian McPhail | John Mooney | Chris Muirhead | Despina Nissiriou | Jonathan Owen | Toby Paterson | Tommy Perman | Emma Pratt | Maja Quille | Jessica Ramm | Brodie Sim | Kjersti Sletteland and Tone Boska | Hanna Tuulikki.
The shop aims to support artists who work at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Artists will benefit directly from all sales made
19 July 2012 at 6pm
A chance to go behind the scenes of the newly opened Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. Designed by award-winning architects, Sutherland Hussey, the new building has been created as a centre for production and research and will be a unique working environment for artists at all stages in their career.
The Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (ESW) was set up in 1986, and can be considered a key part of Scotland’s visual arts. The new building, officially opened last month, will be the first of its kind in the UK – purpose-built for the needs of artists and a publicly accessible facility for anyone interested in making or learning about contemporary sculpture. The new sculpture centre has been developed to support ambitious, high level artist-led projects and to enable ESW to bring visitors closer to the art being produced here.
As well as being fortunate enough to have raised over £3.5m from private donations, they also secured £2.3m of National Lottery funding from Creative Scotland as well as £3m from the Arts Funding Prize for Edinburgh, allowing the organisation to develop a second building – the Creative Laboratories – and expand its vision for a world class research and production facility.
Joining us in discussion will be Irene Kernan, Director of ESW, who will lead us on a tour of the new building, its facilities and studio spaces and to hear about ESW’s vision for the coming years.
We will also be saying goodbye to Rachel O’Neill, our fantastic Spin host, who for the past five years, has shown commitment, enthusiasm, knowledge and a great ability to make everyone feel welcome and comfortable about taking about contemporary art!
25 June 2009 at 6pm
This month we will be visiting the recently opened gallery space Sierra Metro, located in a disused testing facility for the Northern Lighthouse Board in Granton, to see ‘The Reckoning’ Part One.
Curated by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, in collaboration with Kings Artist Run Initiative from Melbourne, The Reckoning features sculpture, film and installation by eight artists from Scotland and Melbourne which will then tour to Australia in Autumn 2009.
We will be joined by some of the exhibiting artists including Derek Sutherland who uses low-tech, ostensibly mundane materials to create unexpected configurations and arrangements; Jonathan Owen creates sculptures from found objects and intricate cut-outs in 2D to address the themes of British suburbia; Danica Chappell makes work using photography, video and installation to explore concepts of oppressiveness; and Darren Farquhar is a performance artist based in Edinburgh who draws his influences from cult cinema and drum-based, sub-pop music.
Other exhibiting artists featured in the exhibition include Kel Glaister, Tamsin Green and Jackie McNamee from Melbourne, Australia and Edinburgh-based Jessica Harrison – who some of you will remember from the Spin event at Edinburgh Printmakers’ last year.
28 June 2007 at 6pm
We move out of the gallery comfort zone this month, with a visit to Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (ESW) to view three-dimensional work.
Founded in 1987 by a collective of practitioners, ESW’s principal aim is to support artists, however advanced, through the process of making work as well as having a public interface with exhibitions and performance. Based in an old railway shed between Newhaven and Leith, this historic property provides 13 studio spaces as well as workshop facilities. However, ESW is about to undergo a dramatic change with the UK’s first purpose-built, fully accessible, sculpture facility.
For this event, we will be meeting staff and resident artists, taking a tour of the workshops as well as looking at artworks. We will also have the opportunity to see plans for, and discuss, the multi-million pound project. A great chance to see an exciting and innovative institution prior to a spectacular transformation. We will also meet key individuals who are going to make it happen.
