Tag Archives: found objects

Louise Gibson: Beachheads

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.

Spin-Off Trip to the Venice Biennale 2013

17-21 October 2013 or 24-28 October 2013

We are proposing a weekend trip in October to the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale following on from our successful visits in 2005, 2007, 2009 and 2011.

The Venice Biennale is the oldest and most prestigious contemporary art festival in the world and was established in 1895. Held every two years, the Biennale is an excellent opportunity to see works by leading, international and up-and-coming artists. Over 70 countries are taking part including first-time participations from the Bahamas, Kingdom of Bahrain, Republic of Kosovo, Kuwait, Maldives, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Paraguay.

There are two main strands to the Venice Biennale: the Giardini which houses 30 permanent national pavilions and a curated exhibition by the Biennale’s appointed director. This time it’s the turn of critic and contemporary art curator, Massimiliano Gioni. He previously curated the 8th Art Biennale of Gwangju, South Korea, and since December 2006, he has been on the curatorial team of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

The title for Gioni’s curated exhibition is Il Palazzo Enciclopedico / The Encyclopedic Palace and will be presented in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini and the Arsenale – the buildings of the adjacent formal naval dockyard.

Il Palazzo Enciclopedico / The Encyclopedic Palace evokes the self-taught Italian-American artist Marino Auriti who on 16 November 1955 filed a design with the US Patent office depicting his ‘Palazzo Enciclopedico’. This imaginary museum was meant to house all worldly knowledge, bringing together the greatest discoveries in a 136-story building that would stand 700 meters tall and take up over 16 blocks in Washington, D.C.

 As Massimiliano Gioni explains:

‘Auriti’s plan was never carried out, of course, but the dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout history, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other artists, writers, scientists, and prophets who have tried – often in vain – to fashion an image of the world that will capture its infinite variety and richness.’

‘Today, as we grapple with a flood of information, such attempts to structure knowledge into all-inclusive systems seem even more necessary and even more desperate. The 55th International Exhibition of Art will explore these flights of the imagination in a show that – like Auriti’s Encyclopedic Palace – will combine works of contemporary art with historical artefacts and found objects.’

Artist Jeremy Deller has been chosen to represent Great Britain in the Giardini. Deller often works in collaboration with others (including artists, makers, musicians, members of the public), to create films, installation, performances and events which are often humorous. If you attended Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art (Gi) last year, you may remember Deller’s Sacrilege – his interactive public artwork situated on Glasgow Green which took the form of a life-size blow up model of Stonehenge which doubled up as a giant bouncy castle!

Other confirmed artists include Simryn Gill who will be representing Australia, Alfredo Jaar for Chile and France and Germany are swopping pavilions with France showing the work of Anri Sala and Germany’s selection including Ai WeiWei.

Collateral exhibitions take place in venues across the city of Venice. Scotland will be presenting the work of three artists – Corin Sworn, Hayley Tompkins and Duncan Campbell – in an exhibition curated by Glasgow’s Common Guild. It will be housed in the Palazzo Pisani. Duncan Campbell is known for his film works that blend archive, documentary material with fictional, imaginary elements. Corin Sworn creates atmospheric installations that weave fiction and history through film and objects. And finally, Hayley Tompkins makes delicate paintings and painted objects.

In a labyrinthine city like Venice and given the sheer number of artworks to see, it is impossible to visit everything. So that’s where we come in. We will be going on a research trip during the opening week in June to come up with an itinerary which will select and showcase the very best of this year’s Biennale.

 We very much hope you will be tempted to come along. 

For more details email spin@nationalgalleries.org

Gravity’s Rainbow

26 May 2011 at 6pm

This month Spin members are invited to Gravitiy’s Rainbow to see and discuss work by artists David Batchelor, Jonathan Callan, John Chamberlain, Ian Davenport, Yves Klein, Peter Liversidge, Kay Rosen and Ed Ruscha.

Gravity’s Rainbow is, as the title suggests, an exhibition about colour, with a nod to the American writer Thomas Pynchon’s use of ‘borrowed’ colour adjectives as imaginative prompts in his novel of the same name. This is a show in which colour is integral to the work, and may even be its subject, but which always originates elsewhere: ‘Found’ colour – borrowed or stolen from outside the studio. This exhibition includes a diverse range of inspirational work including: a site-specific piece by Tommy Grace and Kate Owens who have  transformed the gallery’s glass frontage by creating a temporary stained-glass window from coloured plastic bags; a wall drawing created by Ian Davenport by deconstructing an old master painting into its colour components and re-assembling it as a series of poured lines; and an sculptural installation by Peter Liversidge presenting found objects and fragments united only by their common hue.

This exhibition will be an opportunity for us to discuss how contemporary artists think about colour and to consider the shifting moment in twentieth-century art when artists began to perceive colour as ‘readymade’ rather than as a vehicle of spiritual or emotional content.

‘The Reckoning’ Part One

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.