Tag Archives: landscape

Artists’ Studio Visit: Patriothall

27 June 2024

This month we will be heading to Wasps studios at Patriothall in Stockbridge to visit artists Jo Barker, Sara Brennan and Eric Cruickshank. 

Some may remember Jo Baker from our Zoom session in January 2022, so it will be great for us to meet Jo in person. Her tapestry designs originate from simple gestural brush strokes in paint or ink with smudges of pastels. She is interested in our hands. In the spontaneous mark made by a simple gesture; traces of an event, a fleeting moment. The marks are then captured in the slow considered construction of tapestry weaving. 

Sara Brennan‘s work is an unspoken response to landscape, with routes in a sense of place. Sara uses a refined and reduced approach to colour and form. Her work takes two routes, weaving either from her drawings or reacting and responding in smaller works to yarns as they are placed directly next to each other. The yarns are very specific and often unrepeatable.  

Taking landscape as an initial starting point, Eric Cruikshank’s paintings are not about literal representation, instead the focus is on the emotive qualities of place. Using an objective palette tied to the Scottish landscape, colour acts as a vehicle to reveal the picture planes underlying points of reference; with the works being grounded in the everyday, the viewer is encouraged to readdress notions of their surroundings, where the familiar is opened up and made full of possibility. 

Document Scotland: The Ties that Bind

29 October 2015

This month we will be exploring the work of the photography collective, Document Scotland comprising Colin McPherson, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert, Sophie Gerrard and Stephen McLaren. The Ties that Bind is a compelling exhibition of documentary photography by these four Scots-born photographers. The exhibition takes place one year after the Scottish Referendum and features 75 photographs of and about Scotland and its people. While the work touches on the political landscape around the Referendum, the images do not affirm any one position, but seek to present a multiplicity of views that portray the complex changes and subtle nuances surrounding the larger debate.

Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert’s Unsullied and Untarnished focuses on the Scottish Borders area and its traditional summer festivals, known as the Common Ridings. Drawn to the Land is an on-going exploration of contemporary Scottish landscape in which Sophie Gerrard explores the lives of six women farmers working in Argyll, Perthshire, Scottish Borders and the Isle of Mull.

A Sweet Forgetting by Stephen McLaren revolves around the involvement of Scots in the sugar economy of Jamaica in the 18th and 19th centuries which was built on the back of slave labour from Africa. Colin McPherson’s When Saturday Comes explores non-league and grassroots football, looking at the rituals, sense of belonging and the commitment shown by supporters, players and those charged with running clubs from Berwick Rangers to Fraserburgh.

We are delighted to be joined by two of the artists, Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert and Sophie Gerrard, who will give us a valuable insight into their work and the photography collective.

 

Studio Visit: David Forster and Michael Craik

28 July 2011 at 6pm

A visit to the studio spaces of David Forster and Michael Craik to discuss their current practice in contemporary painting.

David Forster’s landscapes refer to the traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Though the scenes depicted are topographically correct, Forster subtly alters the light and colour to create a fictionalised reality that conveys the authority of photorealist document. Whilst exploring the romantic narrative of landscape, Forster’s work presents the industrialised wilderness of farmland, the well-trodden solitude of the British uplands, and the tame sublime of the country park.

Michael Craik is fascinated by modernist architecture and creates abstract oil paintings which have been described as a ‘contemporary minimalism for an urban audience’. His most recent works focus on the geometry of squares or hexagons and are painted on aluminium panels to create works which evoke perspective and create a play of light which recalls the buildings from which the patterns have been drawn.

Patriothall Studios is parts of WASPS which has grown to become one of Scotlands largest arts organisations, providing studio space to over 750 artists each year at 17 locations throughout Scotland.

Carol Rhodes

31 January 2008 at 6pm

For our first Spin event of 2008, we will explore the work of Glasgow-based artist, Carol Rhodes. This exhibition of paintings features almost fifteen years of work, exploring her very distinctive approach to landscape.

Carol Rhodes’ paintings resemble oblique aerial photographs. They depict fictional landscapes, depopulated, yet shaped, by human activities of industry, habitation, forestry, landscaping, transport and quarrying. Nearly all of these ‘landscapes’ are seen from a bird’s-eye view and almost all possess a hazy atmosphere.

Joining us in our exploration of these fascinating landscapes will be Edinburgh-based artist Alan Kilpatrick, who currently has a solo show at Art First in London. We will discuss the content and psychological effect of these peculiar, yet familiar images. Rhodes grew up in Bengal in India and at the age of fourteen came to the UK. We will think about Rhodes use of colour and, in particular, how the dry, earthy, muted colours of Indian colours have informed her palette.

Richard Long: Walking and Marking

26 July 2007 at 6pm

This time last year, a gathering of artists, curators, friends and family assembled in Greyfriars Kirk to honour one of Scotland’s most important conceptual artists, Ian Hamilton Findlay. His son, Alec Finlay, related his father’s principals to Heraclitus’ philosophy that you can never step into the same river twice. It could be suggested that this is the impetus of all great Land Artists, including Richard Long, who also refers to this belief throughout his work.

As a graduate from the influential St Martins College of Art in London during the late sixties, Richard Long stood alongside Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George and Roger Ackling, as an artist who would completely alter our perception of art practice.

Whether Long is on a six-day walk through Torridon, kayaking down the Colombia River or working in Warli Tribal Land in Maharahtra, India, he works with the most immediate materials that are available to him to make his art. Using mud, water, sticks and stones, he forms them into elemental shapes such as lines, circles and spirals, to express, in a visually arresting way, his presence within the landscape.

Since Long makes art directly in the landscape, much of his work takes the form of photographs, maps and text pieces, however for the exhibition at the SNGMA, he has created Cornish Slate Cross 2007 in the grounds of the Gallery of Modern Art and mud drawings made from mud from the Firth of Forth.

This is a great opportunity to view 40 years of work in Long’s first retrospective in Britain since 1991.

Studio Visit: Donald Urquhart

30 April 2006 at 6pm

WASPS Studios at Patriothall in Stockbridge open their doors again to Spin: Edinburgh, following on from an enlightening visit in September 2005.

Donald Urquhart is one of Edinburgh’s treasures within Scottish contemporary art. Whilst he is principally a painter, exhibiting internationally, his practice also involves working with architectural space and permanent outdoor installations. Recent projects include the collaboration, An Turas on Tiree, which was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for Architecture and The Sanctuary at Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary, which won the Best Building for Public Use Prize at the Scottish Design Awards last year. Donald has completed numerous residencies including one at Grizedale Sculpture Forest and another at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

This Spin night will be a journey, from polished granite on the east bank of the Tay in Perth, to volcanic landscapes as far away as Iceland, as we will explore Donald’s perceptions of environments and how they enthuse our way of seeing.