GROUP EXHIBITION

Life for everyone has been very different over the past few months but there are silver linings amidst the muddle, including the opportunity to make this exhibition of new work from Scotland, that would otherwise have been seen elsewhere.

Andrew Cranston (b.Hawick, 1969) describes himself as a storyteller of sorts, without a clear story to tell. His narrative paintings, often made on the covers of hardback books, draw on a combination of personal histories, literature, images from cinema and observations of life. He says: ’ Painting is a form of time travel, of conjuring up the past. Places, spaces people and imagining new possibilities. It is magic.’

Moyna Flannigan (b. Kircaldy, 1963) makes paintings and collages where elements from art history, mythology and popular culture combine to explore the representation of women. Moyna’s most recent works have often begun with an element of chance—the artist cutting up her own drawings and reusing abstract body parts to create a new order from the original components.

In the making of his glassworks Kevin Harman (b. Edinburgh, 1982) reclaims and recycles materials from the world of construction, salvaging discarded double-glazing units and mis-tinted household paints. The panes are split apart and layer upon layer of paint is poured onto the inside surfaces. The luminous and delicate forms that result belie both the ordinariness of the materials and the physically demanding process of their making. Harman says, ‘there’s a sense of subverting the material so the window loses all transparency and becomes this other thing to be looked at rather than through’.

Katie Paterson (b. Glasgow, 1981) is quickly becoming established as one of the most important artists of her generation to consider our relationship to our environment and planet. Many of her projects seem unfeasible, yet working with scientists and researchers she finds ways to realise complex projects with an elegant simplicity.

The origins of her practice are gathered together in a series that she calls ‘IDEAS’—short haiku-like sentences in solid silver—‘Ideas’ says the artist created ‘to exist in the imagination of whoever reads them’.