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Exhibition of some of the most interesting art works in Scotland is a feast for the senses
Large joint show presents some of the best work in Scotland
THIS is the second collaboration of two of Scotland’s big art societies, Visual Arts Scotland and the Scottish Society of Artists, held annually in the capacious surrounds of the Royal Scottish Academy building. If the two societies previously held their own large scale Open exhibitions, there’s nothing to obviously divide the two in this joint venture, although for anyone finding it preying on their mind, anything in what is sometimes called the applied arts – ceramics, furniture, design, tapestry – has usually come under the VAS remit, alongside their painterly contingent. The SSA collaborates, additionally this year, with CutLog, providing a room screening a series of selected moving image works.
Moving around the lofty spaces, each room has its unique character, carefully curating this large scale open exhibition, the result of an open call for work from members, home and abroad, with the final shortlist chosen from the multitude of work submitted. It is, as ever, a case of getting one’s eye in, and of not being overwhelmed by the vastness of the enterprise. If competition in each society, with only half the space available to each, must have been high, quality remains so.
It is the smaller rooms this year however – and bearing in mind small is all relative in these palatial Playfair surrounds – that work the best.
The central hall is always a big beast to fill and this year, the selection – a lot of geometrically-inspired work, a lot of smaller scale canvases and sculptures – just doesn’t have the collective wow to make this difficult but magnificent space work, despite some fine pieces. Indeed the smallest – three World War Two postcards of ruined churches in France, painted over – were the ones that caught my eye.
It linked back to a work I had seen earlier in one of the side rooms, a video by Alessandro di Massimo which charts wars annually since his birth to a soundtrack of hits from the same year. Di Massimo sings to a readymade backing track; the warmongering protagonists on his carefully chosen pieces of film seem to march, dance, sing or rant to the music. It is a moving, almost unbearably depressing indictment of global warfare. Popular music doesn’t come out of it too well, either.
Elsewhere there are tiny portraits of Torness power station on matchboxes (Jayne Stokes), darned sports socks (Celia Pym), jewellery made of prickly pears (Iro Kaskani), photographs of
Edinburgh community centre halls and lists of their users (Rebecca Millings) – this last, truly fascinating, both in terms of the absolute diversity of the spaces themselves, and the very fact of their continued existence, celebrated here, marked, and in the users.
Room VII, with its abstract and textured landscapes is finely done. Eleanor Whitworth, part of this year’s Graduate Showcase, displays her wonderful wearable objects, inspired by miniature curiosities, forms, and rhythms in the natural world. In these small wire-framed square-ish metal objects, ants nests, sand shapes, bee hives, matted grass, compact into a finely textured surface.
Alastair Clark’s “An island in time – Glacier Island”, looks like a painting from the other side of the room, but turns out to be a digital collage of broken floes amongst water, taken from above, filled with great depths of blue
and white. Also worth noting, invited artist Louise Barrington, who won the SSA Award, here expressively exploring, as ever, her home turf, Orkney, and “the concept of the misinterpretation of emptiness” in naturally dyed fabric.
A few rooms over, I liked William Braithwaite’s Concrete Multitude, a series of ranked Escher-blocks of sculpted concrete, a mini metropolis of tower block features, perhaps, of staircases and vents, balconies and ducts, impressed into the concrete form.
Elsewhere, Hanqing Mona’s striking 143 Second Street, a silver gelatin print of the building taken corner-on, graffitied, blocked windows, the tentlike guy ropes holding up the veranda roof, its form looming out of the picture with remarkable immediacy.
There is a room, too, devoted to the Cordis Tapestry Prize’s exhibition Over Under/Under Over, a collection bent on reworking your idea of tapestry. Here, then, are Celia Pym’s delightful worked and reworked darnings, Dail Behennah’s gilt and plaited paper landscapes, and Sadhvi Jawa’s lovely small scale weavings, with a sense of the ancient.
It’s an interesting way to spend a quiet hour or two in the city centre, a place where quiet, at this current time, and in this current place, has been very much missing.
VAS/SSA Open, Royal Scottish Academy, The Mound, Edinburgh,www.visualartsscotland. org22 Dec – 30 Jan 2020 (closed 25 and 26 Dec) Daily Mon – Sat 10am – 5pm; Sun (and 1stJan 2020) 12pm – 5pm, £3 entry fee