30 May 2024
This month we will be heading to Mote 102 for the first time to see an exhibition of new work by artist, maker and designer Gail Turpin. We will be joined by the artist and gallery-founder Alice Bain.
A not-for-profit, changing space in Leith, Mote 102 hosts local artists, makers and gardeners with an eye to the wider world. Exhibitions, events, residencies, shop pop-ups take place throughout the year.
Gail’s new exhibition Clearing, features new textile works made from unravelling and using some of the precious pieces of fabric, paper and objects, accumulated by her family and in her own life. She says of her work:
‘Something happens to us when we clear out parents’ house after they’ve gone. The responsibility of dismantling a life or lives, to the person who says what stays and what goes, what is precious, what should be retained, loved and appreciated.’
Gail studied graphic design at Edinburgh College of Art and her career in design has taken her to London, Amsterdam and back to Edinburgh. In all areas of her practice, she’s come to work intuitively – whether making a monoprint collage, designing a textile, making a functional object, working with type or creating an image.
22 February 2007 at 6pm
Dark Light is ‘a painting that can literally be stepped into’. Scottish painter Alison Watt, who is currently artist-in-residence at the National Gallery in London, has created a room within a room in the form of a metal cube. Step inside and eloquent paintings of black cloth are revealed.
In previous solo exhibitions, namely Fold at the Fruitmarket Gallery in 1997, Watt presented diptychs of fabric and figure. Three years later in Shift at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, only the fabric and the suggestion of a human form remained. In 2004, she created Still, a composite of four 6ft paintings suspended in the Memorial Chapel of Old St Pauls Church. This personal homage to this extraordinary space was one of the highlights of the Edinburgh Festival of 2004, and is now on permanent display.
As Watt’s paintings have become increasingly engulfing and abstract, Dark Light is the fruits of her ambition to create an installation piece, made as a result of her Creative Scotland Award.
We will be looking at this exciting new work and will also consider the shift from figurative painting to abstraction which is ever prominent in contemporary art, as well as focusing on the relationship between the dealer and the artist.
