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.
29 June 2023
This month we will be heading to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One) for their new exhibition Alberta Whittle: create dangerously. We will be joined by curator Leila Riszko, whom some will remember as Leila joined Spin in 2022 for both our visit to Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life and Conversations with the Collection.
In her works, Alberta addresses the brutality and harm caused by colonialism, the Transatlantic trade in enslaved people, and the ongoing climate crisis. Through richly symbolic artworks, she pulls apart the belief that ’racism and police brutality is [just] an English problem or an American problem’. Instead she underlines Scotland’s complicity in the structures of white supremacy. Often deeply personal, weaving stories of family and belonging, Alberta ultimately offers a message of hope, asking us to imagine a world outside of these damaging systems and ways of thinking.
This is the largest showing of Alberta’s works to date, with sculptures, digital collages, watercolours and new paintings, made especially for the show, taking over the ground floor of Modern One. Alongside never-before-seen artworks, the exhibition offers you the opportunity to see Alberta’s extraordinary tapestry, Entanglement is more than blood, and film installation, Lagareh – The Last Born – which the artist presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, commissioned by Scotland+Venice.
25 March 2009 at 5.45pm
We have a special Spin evening this month with a visit to Dovecot Studios where we will be joined by artist Claire Barclay whose work we discussed at last month’s event at the Fruitmarket Gallery. Claire is one of many contemporary artists who have been invited to collaborate with the master weavers at Dovecot Studios. We will also be joined by David Weir, Director of Dovecot who will tell us more about the Studios and this exciting commission.
Dovecot Studios is home to Edinburgh’s innovative tapestry company. Established in 1912 by the 4th Marquess of Bute, Dovecot Studios founding weavers came from William Morris Merton Abby Workshops in Wimbledon, London. The studios were incorporated as The Edinburgh Tapestry Company in 1946, although they also continued to be known as Dovecot. Since its inception, the weavers have worked creatively with artists such as Frank Stella, Stanley Spencer, Frank Brangwyn, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, David Hockney, Eduardo Paolozzi, Alan Davie and more recently Barbara Rae and Elizabeth Blackadder, producing stunning tapestries for private commission and for public collections worldwide.
In August 2008, after an £8million refurbishment, Dovecot Studios moved to its new home in the former Victorian swimming baths on Infirmary Street. The main workshop reuses the main swimming pool area and the public viewing gallery retains the integrity of the original space. The weavers work regularly with artists, fashion designers and photographers to create new work in tapestry. The commission with Claire Barclay is particularly interesting due to Claire’s interest in process and making.
