The Scottish Photography Group decided to meet for lunch, chat, discussion and viewing several exhibitions at the City Art Centre and Stills Photography Centre. We had students come from Glasgow, from the north of Scotland, Edinburgh and it’s surrounds and from the north of England. This was first time the group had met in person since before lockdown when we used to have study days and gallery visits. Picture below shows some of the squad who came along.
The City Art Centre work was based around a contemporary exhibition called “Deep Rooted” which explored, “the relationship between people and the natural environment using a variety of media and approaches. Some of the works reflect on current ecological issues, others explore our fragile coexistence with nature and capture its beauty”. Exhibition details at following links:
https://www.edinburghmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/deep-rooted
https://edinburgh.org/event/deep-rooted/
I took some photographs on the day which give a flavour of the work on show.
The series above is by Dalziel and Scullion and shows large frames images of tree trunks in a landscape format. While the subject had limited appeal for my own work I was struck by the scale, teh framing and the orientation of these wors and also that these spread in line across large expanse of wall creating a greater impact than with just a single piece.
One work I didn’t get a picture of was by Hanna Tuulikki who is a British-Finnish artist, composer and performer based in Scotland. Her work titled Under Forest Cover/Metsänpeiton Alla from 2021. It consisted of silver birch tree trunk, audio recorded on the artist’s derelct family farm in Finland and a song of sorrows. Of interest to me was that work displayed in a dark space. The space so dark when I entered the space I was unsure who else was there or if I was alone. I found this space very powerful although I found it difficult to understand why. The space so oppresive and threatening. Was it empty? What was about to happen? I have contacted Tuulikki to offer some words of encouragement on how her work impacted me and also to ask some questions about the dark space she created.
In the Scottish Landscape Awards exhibition I show some works below and give reasons why I was drawn to these pieces.
The works above caught my eye because of the bindings used. One set of images used dragonfold and the other a venetian blind binding. I know very little about such presentation so would be interesting to research this.
I enjoyed this work very much and was taken with description of the work set alongside the soundscape and this photograph I have taken showing tiny segment of work. The melding of memory, ancestors, the lament for a lost past and a fading language through a work based around sound but which also uses the image.
The City Art Gallery is a big building so there were many other works on display including “Scottish Landscape Awards” and “250 Years of Scotting Landscape” exhibition.
At Stills Gallery there was an exhibition of Cafe Royal Photography books. This exhibition was mind-blowing in the scale of works on show with hundred of books each filled with photo stories. Links to exhibition and some images shown at following links:
https://marcvallee.co.uk/Cafe-Royal-Books-Stills
https://stills.org/exhibitions/
The most interesting of these exhibitions were the “Deep Rooted” works and the Scottish Landscape Awards. In part because of content and how ideas were presented and also because of choices in how work formed part of the wider exhibitions. I enoyed seeing works in very different media and which crossed over and weren’t stickly bound top photography, scultpure or the written word. I took some photographs but it is difficult for me to show the entirety of this show so I have picked out some highlights to show in this post.