Tag Archives: nature

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years

25 September 2025

After our month off we are back to explore one of the standout exhibitions of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years. Featuring over 200 works, the show includes stunning installations made in response to the iconic Royal Scottish Academy building, as well as drawings, photographs, films, sketchbooks and archival items dating back to the mid-1970s. To provide insight into the work we will be joined by Chief Curator Patrick Elliott. 

Goldsworthy is internationally recognised for his work with natural materials such as clay, stones, reeds, branches, leaves, snow and ice. For over 50 years, he has created a unique and highly influential body of work that speaks of our relationship with the land.  

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years has been conceived by the artist as a single immersive artwork in response to the space, materials and character of the RSA building. The interrelationship of humans and the working land is a recurrent theme in Goldsworthy’s art and in the exhibition. He often presents the land as a hard, hostile and brutal place. Fences and barriers feature prominently, in the form of rusted barbed wire stretched across a room, and a massive, cracked clay wall. As in nature, beauty and danger co-exist. 

Shipping Roots

27 April 2023

Shipping Roots, a new immersive exhibition by Australian artist Keg de Souza at Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Keg de Souza draws on the Garden’s collection using key plants to tell stories about the impacts of European colonialism. From the prickly pear and eucalyptus to ‘alien’ seeds, Shipping Roots reveals fascinating stories past and present about the transportation of plants and their impact on ecosystems and communities as well as the artist’s own cultural identity. De Souza is of Goan heritage and her ancestral lands were colonised.

De Souza works across a range of mediums from performance art and drawing to temporary architecture.

Not Man The Less, But Nature More | Modern Edinburgh Film School | David Faithfull | Henry Coombes

25 June 2015

For our next Spin event on Thursday 25 June we will be visiting Summerhall’s early summer programme of exhibitions. Curator Holly Knox Yeoman will join us in our  discussion, highlighting some exhibitions they currently have on show.

Modern Edinburgh Film School’s MOTHS exhibition features work by Zoë Fothergill, Anne McGuire, Lucy Skaer, Katrina Vallé, Amy Pickles, Mairi Lafferty, Anna Lucas, Allison Gibbs, Jenny Brady and Bobby Niven. It explores human interaction with animals, natural and synthetic substances.

Henry Coombes new film Two Discs and a Zed has two main sets: the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh and a mountainous landscape somewhere in the Highlands.

David Faithfull’s Leviathan exhibition features recent work made on the remote isle of Inch Kenneth off the western shores of Mull, surrounded by the relentless onslaught of the Atlantic Sea, lies.

Not Man The Less, But Nature More is a group exhibition of work by Cendrine Rovini, El Gato Chimney, Erika Nordqvist, Esther Pearl Watson, Fred Stonehouse, Rithika Merchant, Solange Knopf and Zeki Agacan. Uninfluenced by academic training, the artists in this exhibition reproduce the surroundings they inhabit and have an intimate relationship with nature.

Natasha Russell: Night Smell

26 February 2015

Our February event will be Spin’s first visit to a new visual art space in the city, The Number Shop Gallery and Studios.

Gallery Director, Alistair Grant will take us on a tour of the studios and preview emerging artist Natasha Russell’s exhibition of new work which will open the following night. Russell is an Edinburgh-based painter and illustrator. She is a recent graduate of Edinburgh College of Art and will join us on the night for the discussion.

Natasha is interested in the strange and imbalanced relationships between humans and the rest of nature. Night Smell is a body of recent work in printmaking and drawing exploring night time. Here she has woven together folklore and science, exploring the tug of war between our desire to become more removed from the natural world while peering ever closer. 

The Number Shop studios provide artists with a defined personal space, as well as shared floor space in which to work, echoing the art school studio model. Since its opening, the TNS has hosted a program of exhibitions in the Project Space as well as throughout the shared studio spaces.

Jean-Marc Bustamante – Dead Calm

31 March 2011 at 6pm

This month we will be looking at the work of Jean-Marc Bustamante, one of France’s senior artists and a major figure in the international art world.

Bustamante received critical acclaim with his contribution to the French pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2003. A key theme in his work is a linking of what Uta Grosenick has called the abstract space of the mind with the real space of nature and architecture. Though sitting outside recognisable trends in recent art, Bustamante’s work has a formal and conceptual contemporaneity, a freshness, that makes it relevant to the way art is made and looked at today. His clear, direct vision manifests itself in an almost bewildering array of materials and media – first photography, then sculpture, painting, architectural projects and installation. His work is unified and characterised by its calm intelligence and a kind of extraordinary ordinariness that helps us see its subject, the world around us, in a new way.

This exhibition includes classic work from the 1980s and 1990s – the large-scale photographs and sculptures with which Bustamante made his name and more recent works from 2000 onwards, in particular a series of paintings on Plexiglas made especially for The Fruitmarket Gallery and completed in 2010.

Joining us to explore how Bustamante continuously reinvents his ideas and artistic language will be Stacy Boldrick – Research and Interpretation Manager at The Fruitmarket Gallery.