Intranquility

1 April – 3 June 2017
Tweeddale Museum
Chambers Institution, High Street, Peebles EH45 8AG

Following successful exhibitions at An Talla Solais Gallery in Ullapool and Fire Station Creative in Dunfermline, Intranquility moves to Tweeddale Museum, for the third exhibition of works by six of Scotland’s leading artists. 

Open:
Monday – Friday 10.30am – 12.30pm; 1pm-4pm
Saturday 9.30am – 12.30pm
Free admission
No Disabled Access

 

 

 

The Society of Scottish Artists is delighted to present the curated exhibition Intranquility, initially conceived by Rosie Lesso.

The exhibition title is a subversive play on the word tranquillity, which is so often used to describe beautiful and remote locations.

Using this theme as a starting point, the group of six artists who work in a range of media has been brought together to explore less traditional approaches to landscape, creating tension and unrest and asking questions about the role of land, place and the environment in contemporary art.

 

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Exhibiting artists:

Katharine Aarrestad
Katharine Aarrestad studied for her postgraduate in European Fine Art in Barcelona and had an MA degree in Fine Art from the University of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh College of Art. Her work garnered critical acclaim at her solo show in Edinburgh’s prestigious Bourne Fine Art Gallery, the Royal Scottish Academy, and the Glasgow Art Fair. Katharine’s medium is reverse painting on glass, producing art that is haunting and unique. Travels to India and South East Asia informed some of her earlier work, she finds equal inspiration from foraging through libraries, museums, and galleries with a particular predilection for the Victorian, the curious and the absurd.
www.s-s-a.org/member/katherineaarrestad

 

Alastair Clark
Alastair Clark is an artist, printmaker and educator based in Edinburgh. Having trained in drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art, where he worked with mixed-media, Clark became increasingly involved in printmaking. Since 1992 he has worked at Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop as Lithography master-printer, and is now the Studio Director. In this position, he works with artists on collaborative print projects and teaches printmaking. Clark has exhibited widely in Britain and abroad and is a Professional Member of The Society of Scottish Artists.

“For this exhibition, I have created new hybrid islands, collaged by fusing parts of the Scottish Western Isles with diverse locations ranging from Jersey, Tokyo to Spaghetti Junction. Inspired by maps and created using digital collage and printmaking techniques, these works merge the real and the unreal with photographic reality and painted illusion.

With these imagined islands I have invented past incarnations and future visions of our landscape shaped over time by fictional civilizations and histories. Isolated from their surroundings, as independent stand-alone landmasses, the island takes on a different dimension within our current political context. 

Each island may be nowhere, or everywhere. It frees me to play out scenarios and evolutions of a land shown in different times and circumstances.The coastline points to the balance between land and sea and is a reminder that tranquillity and harmony are, perhaps, short lived but is always at natures discretion.”

 http://www.s-s-a.org/member/?u=alastairclark

 

Liz Douglas
Liz Douglas’ practice involves researching material from the landscape at both macro and micro level to make paintings, drawings and prints. Contemporary practices in both drawing and painting, in relation to traditional methods, are a constant challenge to find innovative ways of making work that challenges perception of landscape. Douglas has researched specific sites in the Scottish Borders, Dumfries and Galloway, and Angus, and have collaborated with Scottish Natural Heritage, to The Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, The Borders Forest Trust, and The Carrifran Wildwood to develop her working practice.

Liz Douglas is a Professional Member of the Society of Scottish Artists, and graduate of Edinburgh College of Art. She lives and works in the Scottish Borders.

“Using the theme of ‘Intranquility’ as a starting point I would like to make two new paper works which respond directly to the location of Ullapool and to explore less traditional approaches to landscape, place and the environment in contemporary art. The aim for this project is to dialogue the hand-made with the machine-made to explore visible and invisible aspects of subject matter to challenge my own perceptions of landscape.

The idea of ‘land at the edge of the sea’ is a visual metaphor that interests me. The subject matter that I will research is three plants first recorded in the Ullapool area in the 1700s. This will be used to find a way of linking the past with the present and an imagined future.

These plants are found in limestone soil on the edge of the ‘Moine Thrust’. They are plants that were growing there before major changes in land use – fishing, forestry, sporting estates and sheep farming and still exist today. I am also interested in the programmes of a vision to connect habitats in the area just north of Ullapool as part of regeneration projects, joined up management, reinstating long lost skills and part of a larger living landscape project.

The plants are: Gall-uninnseann ma creole – Rock whitebeam – sorbus rupicola Raineach-chuilinn – Holly fern – polystichum lonchitis Lady’s mantle – alchemilla glaucescens”

www.s-s-a.org/member/LizDouglas

 

David Faithfull
David Faithfull is an artist, printmaker and curator based in Edinburgh. He studied at DJCAD, before living in Copenhagen for 8 years. He currently lecturers at the University of Dundee. His practice involves a broad range of processes, from installation and site interventions; to Artists Books, multiples and murals. Current themes include investigating landscape, alchemy and environmental issues.

Faithfull studied at DJCAD, before living in Copenhagen for 8 years. He currently llectures at the University of Dundee. His practice involves a broad range of processes, from installation and site interventions; to Artists Books, multiples and murals. Current themes include investigating landscape, alchemy and environmental issues.

Recent exhibitions include ‘Leviathan’ at Summerhall in Edinburgh and ‘OAK’ at Modern One in the Pig Bothy as part of Print Festival Scotland. In 2015 he curated the ‘Dark Matters’ project, curating artists with astronomers, coinciding with last year’s total solar eclipse.

“Xenolith: a piece of rock within an igneous mass, not derived from original magma, originating from elsewhere.

The landscape, with its diverse natural elements, forms and inhabitants is a palimpsest of runes and geological rifts. Stones, rocks and alluvial plains shift slowly across the landscape in an ever changing metamorphic metamorphosis. And against these eternal geological displacements and rearrangements, humanities own nomadic toils are played out against the landscape, forged and moulded within their own social, political and national constraints.

For Intranquility, Faithfull responds to this idea of restlessness, by investigating once misplaced, now connate elements, within the Scottish landscape.”

www.s-s-a.org/member/DavidFaithfull

David Forster
David Forster’s intensely wrought landscape paintings refer to the traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Though the scenes depicted are topographically correct, light and colour are altered to create a fictionalised reality, that nonetheless conveys the authority of photo realist document.

By referring to older artistic traditions, the inheritance of narrative and emotional associations with landscape is evoked. However, at the core of the work is the idea of paradox, the contradictory, pairing of ideas. This notion is emphasised through the adjustments made by the artist to the scene.

Thus the work presents the industrialised wilderness of farmland, the well-trodden solitude of the British uplands , or the tame sublime of the country park. In this way the importance of a romantic narrative of landscape is explored, one that tenaciously survives the knowledge of a more prosaic reality.

www.s-s-a.org/member/DavidForster

 

Su Grierson
Su Grierson is a visual artist who utilises video, image and sound to present land and landscape from differing non-traditional perspectives.

Working on a project basis, Grierson exhibits in galleries, outdoor locations and other venues in Scotland and internationally. She aims to visually and aurally stimulate an understanding and awareness of the land. Graduating Master of Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art in 1995, she is also actively involved in developing contemporary art and supporting artists living outside of the urban centres. Working collaboratively and across media and other art platforms is a current interest.

“Landscape is a human construction. We use it, enjoy it and control it for our own ends. The work ‘Allotted Space’ acts as a visual reminder of the ways and the extent to which we designate and control environmental space for our own needs. The work includes a wall based image and a sculptural free standing form including video and additional objects.”

www.s-s-a.org/member/SuGrierson