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Hello and welcome to my Summer 2022 newsletter! It has been quite a while and there have been lots of exciting things happening over the past few months. But, before I catch you up on everything, I should say first of all that I am taking part in this year's Hidden Door Festival which is on now and runs until the 18th of June... So there is still a bit of time left for you to come out and see it if you are in Edinburgh!
Installing work at Hidden Door: that means lots of pasting prints on to the wall one-by-one and running up and down tall ladders! A huge thank you to my husband, who not only took this photo but also helped enormously with the installation.
If you aren't familiar with Hidden Door, it is an annual festival of visual art, dance, music, poetry, and theatre which runs each year in abandoned buildings throughout the city of Edinburgh. This year's festival is taking place in the neglected neoclassical splendor of the Old Royal Highschool on Calton Hill, which will soon be redeveloped into a music school.
For Hidden Door I printed again from some of the stones I made last year for 'Our Unfathomable Depths', (and you can now see photos of that exhibition on my website, if you follow the link) and then used the prints to form a completely new installation. In total there were nearly one thousand lithographic prints made for this exhibition, though in the end not quite all of them were needed!
This re-mix of a previous project was a great opportunity to re-think how the work could hold space, and how it could be re-interpreted for a setting that was not a gallery. It was also a chance to have a bit of fun in a space that was divided over different levels!
The stairwell where the prints were installed had beautiful natural light pouring in from a huge, central sky-light. At the top of the stairs the prints are arranged in rows, reminiscent of shelves of specimens, but as the corals continue their way downward into the shadowy areas below the landings, they follow the downward-sloping walls until they land in a heap.
If you would like to see more photos of the whole exhibition, please follow the link to the 'Cabinets of Coral' section of my website.
Another place that you can see some of my work if you are in Edinburgh in the next while, is in the café at Summerhall. Over the past few months they've been exhibiting some lithographs I made on residency in Eichstätt, Germany a few years ago. The prints were part of an exhibition called 'ZitrusFrüchteSterben | The Great Citrus Extinction' which you can read more about by following the link. Best to go and see them in person though, with a coffee and a friend!
Over the past while I've also been working on this etching plate, which is very nearly finished. It's been a long process to make it -- I started at the beginning of the first lockdown! The plate is rather large, but the most time-consuming aspect has been that each tiny coral was drawn in line by line, and then the tones were added entirely through hand-stippling.
Even so, I think I would have finished a while ago, but I keep having to put it aside for other work. One day soon though, I hope to have prints of the plate to share with you!
In the meantime, I've also taken part in a couple of large salon-style exhibitions, and both of them have online components that you can enjoy:
The first of these exhibitions is the Royal Scottish Academy's Annual Exhibition, which included my sculptures 'Moveable Hunger Stone' and 'Shifting Baselines Tool', both of which were made last year. The physical exhibition has just wrapped up, but the online exhibition is still available and it's worth checking out as it is an incredible selection of work by talented artists from all across Scotland.
The other exhibition is a more local one: the Aberdeen Artists Society Annual Exhibition. This was the first in-person show the AAS has had since the pandemic, and even more exciting because it is the first time the the annual exhibition has taken place in the newly-refurbished Aberdeen Art Gallery. I have three pieces in the exhibition: 'Acid, Calcium Carbonate, and the Disappearance of the Unseen', as well as the paintings 'Cavallo Marino' and 'Hippopotamuses of Escobar' The physical exhibition continues until July 3rd for those of you who are nearby, or online for those who are not.
In the coming months I'll be working on some projects that I have underway and can't wait to share with you, and I'll hopefully also be enjoying a nice break too!
Happy midsummer, when it comes!