Frontiers: Painting in Scotland Now explored the ways in which artists are pushing the boundaries of the medium of painting and reveal it to be a vital connection between the traditions of the past and ambitions for the future of the visual arts in Scotland. Co-curated by Robbie Bushe RSA and Flora La Thangue, the exhibition includes paintings by 31 artists currently practicing in Scotland.
RSA Lower Galleries, Royal Scottish Academy, 3 August - 8 September 2024
RSA Lower Galleries, Royal Scottish Academy, 3 August - 8 September 2024
In the 2023/24 academic year Audrey Grant was the University of Stirling Artist in Residence. Throughout her residency she has interrogated the landscape, uncovering undiscovered aspects of a parkland whose primary function is now as a university institution, but whose topography contains the echoes of the lives of those who have lived and worked within its boundaries.
Developed over the course of this year-long residency, Memoria, through a variety of media, considers and responds to the visible and invisible traces left on the historic Airthrey Estate.
Pathfoot courtyard, Galleries 3 & 4, Pathfoot Building, University of Stirling, 27 May - 9 August 2024
Photography credit: Julie Howden
Developed over the course of this year-long residency, Memoria, through a variety of media, considers and responds to the visible and invisible traces left on the historic Airthrey Estate.
Pathfoot courtyard, Galleries 3 & 4, Pathfoot Building, University of Stirling, 27 May - 9 August 2024
Photography credit: Julie Howden
Inspired by German-Jewish literary critic and thinker, Walter Benjamin’s essay No. IX from ‘Thesis on the concept of history’ (1940) and the Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems about autumn, these experimental paintings, collages, photographs and installation use old newsprint, surgical suture, string, ash, items of clothing, autumn leaves, furniture and traditional oil paint to explore both metaphorical possibilities such as memory, loss and transition, and the place where I grew up.
Mote 102, Edinburgh, November 2023
Mote 102, Edinburgh, November 2023
Grant’s six-week RSA Residency in Cromarty took place during the first pandemic lockdown in March and April 2020. Her premise for the residency was to explore real and imagined landscapes through an engagement with the mythic. Also to experiment with new mediums beyond painting, such as photography and site-specific installation.
Treatise on the Wound builds on Grant’s work from both Cromarty and Bothkennar, expanding her practice into gallery installations that use sculptural and found objects to further explore the nature of the ‘wound’. The installation was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2022 as part of the ‘Scotland Small?’ exhibition of recent work by RSA Residencies for Scotland Awardees.
Treatise on the Wound builds on Grant’s work from both Cromarty and Bothkennar, expanding her practice into gallery installations that use sculptural and found objects to further explore the nature of the ‘wound’. The installation was exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2022 as part of the ‘Scotland Small?’ exhibition of recent work by RSA Residencies for Scotland Awardees.
Inscriptions in Arcadia is a series of site-specific artworks situated in the beautiful and protected landscape around the Bothkennar Pools, near Skinflats. Visitors were invited to walk on easily accessible paths through this real landscape with its pine trees and lagoons, its reedbeds and fields, and imagine another - the semi-mythical land of Arcadia. They encountered artworks created from found and made objects placed within elements of the land’s rich industrial and cultural past. Each artwork highlights the unique historical environment of the area, transformed through inscriptions from classical mythology evoking the Gods, the Underworld and the pastoral.
Audrey Grant and Norman McBeath
National Galleries of Scotland at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
25 May - 30 October 2019
The Long Look explored portraiture through an extraordinary and intimate artist and sitter relationship and was a unique creative exchange between the painter Audrey Grant and photographer and printmaker Norman McBeath, and with the author Val McDermid.
National Galleries of Scotland at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery
25 May - 30 October 2019
The Long Look explored portraiture through an extraordinary and intimate artist and sitter relationship and was a unique creative exchange between the painter Audrey Grant and photographer and printmaker Norman McBeath, and with the author Val McDermid.
