Notes from the North 10

The main art exhibition at this year’s Festival has been Grayson Perry’s ‘Smash Hits’ (on until 12 November). I haven’t been to that. The pink-plastered pillars at the RSA entrance hint at the colour inside but they don’t entice me in. Nor does the prospect of the naked Grayson or more Alan Measles, the teddy bear we know too much of. There are lots more challenging artists on show. The most obvious one is at the City Art Centre behind Waverley Station, a Retrospective of Peter Howson. 


The exhibitions at the CAC are usually free. The Howson is not but you get a wristband that allows you to leave and come back later in the day. Perhaps that’s no bad thing as there are about 100 works spread over 3 floors and none of them makes for easy viewing.
Peter Howson wasn't born in Scotland, but Prestwick in Ayrshire, was his home from the age of 4. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art but the programme doesn’t seem to have suited him. He failed the first time and dropped out the second. Perhaps it was too remote from the ‘real world’, the muscular working men and the homeless who were so often the material of his early paintings. 


The exhibition rightly makes much of his time as a war artist in Bosnia and then in Kosovo. Both of those experiences had a profound and lasting effect on him. 


He is said to be an intensely private man of few words but he has made two videos for this exhibition in which he speaks eloquently about what motivates him to paint and particularly about his faith. Christ features often in his more recent paintings but almost always in agony. 


His Christianity clearly gives him succour but the message of redemption is muted by the visual clamour of a world in conflict, male aggression, fire and rape. 

This is great, but demanding, art. Fortunately for the viewer it has been well curated and is spread across a calm, uncluttered space. 

Much further out from the city centre are Modern Art One and Two. Modern One is currently showing work by Alberta Whittle. Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, Whittle came to Scotland to study, first at Edinburgh School of Art, then in Glasgow. Some of the work on show here has transferred from her Scotland + Venice exhibition at last year's Biennale. 
Alberta Whittle at the Scotland+ Venice exhibition, Biennale 2022

The current Modern One exhibition, ‘Create Dangerously’ (the title is from the essay by Albert Camus) is on until 7 January 2024 so there is still plenty of time to visit if you haven’t already. Of all the artwork I’ve seen over the past months this is, to me, the most engaging. Using a huge range of materials and techniques – paint, tapestry, collage, film, performance - Whittle works both solo and collaboratively with other black women (she calls them her 'accomplices'). Her aim is to counter anti-blackness, explore the legacies of chattel slavery and colonialism and the enduring challenges of migration. There are handwoven blankets on some of the seats in the rooms, as there were in the Biennale where visitors were also offered herbal teas. She is explicit about the need for care and nurture to be woven into her practice. No wonder her work exudes such warmth, colour and vigour. 


The structure in the photo above is made of painted metal and wood. It honours the Barbadian Musician Neville Denis Blackman, better known as the Great Carew. He died on 3 August 1995 when his house was swept out to sea in a storm. The work both acknowledges the impact of the climate crisis on people of colour, disproportionally affected by rising seas and extreme weather and evokes the history of the island where enslaved men, women and children, lived in chattel houses like the one pictured here, built from salvaged materials. 

Mixed media with conch shell, bronze tongue, cow jaw bones and hoodie
 



It’s easy to miss the small gate with its sign, ‘private allotments’ on the left near the Modern Two gallery on the other side of Belford Road. The gate isn’t usually locked and in these late summer days what lies behind it is a carefully tended profusion of vegetables, fruit and flowers. 


Don’t pick anything - just walk round the beds and enjoy what the gardeners have grown.

If the shorter days and the feeling of endings make you want to do some of your own harvesting all you need is a plastic bag and some spare time. At present Holyrood Park has enough brambles to feed a village. The weather is dry and warm. No better time to get the preserving pan out. 






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Notes from the North 6 2025

Image
It’s the last Saturday in June. There is a warm wind blowing strongly through Edinburgh. Tourists and locals are sprawled out on the dry grass in Princes Street Gardens and I am with them. I am waiting to go to the opening of the exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Talbot Rice Gallery.  one of the Shawky glass marionettes Across the grass I can hear the voice of a woman speaking to a crowd which has gathered in the square outside the National Gallery. She and they are protesting the occupation, starvation and killings in Palestine. I have been out on other Saturdays lately and seen similar actions: outside St Giles Cathedral (a collection and a choir singing), outside Barclays bank (‘blood bank’ and other slogans chalked in big capitals on the pavement). I wonder how these signs of dissent and anger will be handled if the government persists in its decision to designate Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. For the moment their documentary To Kill a War Mac...
Read more

Notes from the North 7 2025

Image
  Less than two weeks ago I looked out from my sitting room window and saw plumes of thick smoke rising over Arthur’s Seat. After weeks of no rain the flames were rampaging across bone-dry gorse and grass. This was not the first time the hill has gone on fire but it jerked Edinburgh out of its usual complacency and reminded us all that Scotland, reputedly the land of rain, mist and lochs, does burn too.       Flames and floods are what we are learning to expect everywhere, as the planet responds to centuries of human destruction and warfare.     The Festival is in its last days. The crowds show no sign of thinning but the temperatures are lower and there is more than a hint of autumn in the bright red of the rowan berries and hips. Here at home I have emptied my potato bags, picked the last of my small crop of beans and peas and am now out along the back lanes getting blackberries to make bramble jelly.    The theme of the Festival has been...
Read more

Notes from the North 4 2025

Image
April marks the start of the bowling season. From my kitchen window l can watch the man with the mower pushing backwards and forwards across the turf almost every day, leaving perfectly straight green lines behind him. His efforts result in a lawn so smooth and firm that you could as easily play marbles on it. It’s the bowling green equivalent of a number 2 haircut at the barber’s.   In the Meadows, all along Princes Street, in the Botanics, in other public parks and countless private gardens there is an explosion of cherry blossom, showers of pink petals floating to the ground at the slightest breath of wind. I stop on my way back from town, first to listen to and then record the song of a thrush, a rarity these days, out of sight in one of the trees near the Parliament. Then one morning I find lots of tiny feathers scattered across the grass in my little back garden. It looks like the local sparrow-hawk has made off with an unlucky bluetit. And when a day later I’m on a bus throu...
Read more