CUT/PASTE at the Embassy Gallery supported by ContemporatArtETC…

CUT/PASTE

ContemporaryArtETC are delighted to be supporting CUT/PASTE a show of recent graduates at the Embassy Gallery in Edinburgh.

The exhibition which is centered around the theme of collage and assemblage was conceived and selected by ContemporatArtETC course leader Alan Holligan after his voyage around the degree shows for Art World magazine.

In the most important times in our existence we try to make sense of our place and time by cutting up the past and re-ordering the future.

At the turn of the 20th century collage and assemblage came to the fore as a legitimate means of visual and cultural expression. The lineage of this act of creative destruction can be traced to the invention of paper in China in 200BC but it was the rise of Modernism that necessitated a technique, which took the pre-existing: the already, and tore, cut and slashed it before it was re-proposed giving rise to new understanding and meaning.

The artists who feature in CUT/PASTE have graduated during the most turbulent and uncertain of times. Nearly a full century since Picasso and Braque re-defined collage by taking the subject of the café and colliding it with the surface of the painting they are acutely aware of the contextual past & present and do not shy away or hide from it.

Alan Holligan 2009

CUT / PASTE

Embassy graduates show 2009

19th September – 11th October

Thurs – Sun 12-6pm

Katherine Gallacher, Johnathan Long, Travis Souza, Diane Edwards, Thomas Nolan, Omar Z. Bhatia, Mikhak Mirmahmoudi

Selected by Alan Holligan

Private View of XX – Collective at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop Tonight

ContemporaryArtETC.com in association with Edinburgh’s Telford College are delighted to announce the opening of XX – Collective at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop this evening.

XX – Collective is the first ever HND Contemporary Art Practice Grad Show anywhere in the world and is the culmination of the collective efforts of the qualification development team, teaching staff and most importantly students over the past 4 years.

The exhibition features , painting, video, sculpture, drawing and performance by 9 artists each of whom present their unique view of the world.

Opening at 6pm this evening the exhibition will run daily from 10 – 6 until Wednesday the 3rd June

ContemporaryArtETC Graduates in showcase of contemporary Scottish art.

Graduates from Edinburgh’s Telford College’s Fine Art Programmes feature strongly in Exhibition showcasing the very best of contemporary Scottish art.

The inaugural RSA New Contemporaries exhibition presents some of the finest up-and-coming artists and architects in Scotland, selected from the 2008 undergraduate degree shows. The exhibition is an exciting and innovative move by the Royal Scottish Academy as it replaces the pre-graduation, open submission, mish-mash that was the annual student show with a post-graduation selection of the best of the four Scottish art schools and six architecture schools.

Ruth Barry who graduated from Edinburgh’s Telford Colleges (ETC) innovative Fine Art HND programme has presented a combination of table, table-top sculpture and watercolour painting in new work commissioned especially for the exhibition. An impressive work for which Ruth was presented with ESW Research Award for excellence in Contemporary Sculpture practice at the opening Gala by RSA President Prof Bill Scott. Ruth recently arrived back in the UK after working the education dept of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and she will move to London next month to continue her career in Fine Art.

Other FineArtETC graduates featured in the exhibition are Alex McAndrew whose dark glittering mountain dominates the landscape of the sculpture court and Kevin Harman who presents a rather understated wall piece featuring multiple tools which have been stripped of their original surfaces.

Both Kevin and Alex studied on the BTEC Foundation in Art & Design at Edinburgh’s Telford College.

Colin Greenslade, RSA Programme Director, comments: “We envisaged that the development of this exhibition will be one of the most important initiatives for emerging artists in Scotland each year, enabling a ‘first exhibition’ opportunity for some 60+ emergent artists annually. The exhibition will be an unique opportunity to see the best of Scotland’s emerging talent under one roof.”

RSA NEW CONTEMPORARIES

14 to 25 February 2009. Open Monday to Saturday 10am – 5pm, Sunday 12noon – 5pm. RSA Upper & Lower Galleries, The Royal Scottish Academy, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL. Admission £2 / £1 conc

THE SKINNY

ContemporaryArtETC… student exhibits in City Art Centre

An artwork by HND Contemporary Art Practice Year 2 participant Sarah Wilson has been selected for the annual exhibition of Visual Arts Scotland which opened at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh last night. The exhibition offers a rare chance to see some of the best painting, sculpture, printmaking, jewellery, ceramics, glass, textiles, furniture and photography in Scotland all under one roof.

This is a great honour for Sarah who’s work was selected from among 750 submissions many of which were made by professional artists and degree graduates. It is testimony to the quality of the work produced by participants on the ground breaking course at Edinburgh’s Telford College that Sarah is exhibiting in such illustrious company.

The work, which was produced in response to a course brief, is brass plaque mounted on wood with an engraving of the definition of the Lex Sumptuaria an ancient Roman law outlawing the public display of wealth during times of economic hardship.

The exhibition is open daily until 19th March

City Art Centre
2 Market Street. Tel: 0131 529 3993

Caravan of Horrors to premier new work.

ContemporaryArtETC are pleased to announce that a new video work by staff member Alan Holligan will be premiered in the Caravan of Horrors at the Collective Gallery Edinburgh.

ONEZERO projects returns after an extended break to bring you ‘Caravan of Horrors’ the first outcome of a research project looking at the influence of Horror on Contemporary Art.

Caravan of Horrors will take place on Thursday the 30th of October in the Mobile Picture Salon which will be parked outside the Collective Gallery on Cockburn Street.

Onezero will be screening 5 works by:

Beagles and Ramsay
Alex Hetherington
Alan Holligan
Juri Ojaver
Catherine Street

Caravan of Horrors is running in conjunction with the launch of issue two of Fools in Print ‘AKA Tomfoolery’ as part of New Work Scotland 2008

ContemporaryArtETC.com meets Tracy Emin

Contemporary Art ETCs’ Sarah Wilson met Tracy Emin at the recent press launch of the artists first retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

If you have never heard of Tracey Emin where on earth have you been hiding.
Tracey Emin is one of the best known artists working in Britain today. Born in London in 1963, she is a central figure in the generation of Young British Artists (or YBAs) that emerged in the early 1990’s and has produced some of the most memorable, compelling and iconic works of the last 15 years. Her autobiographical, confessional art has tapped into the mainstream of public consciousness, and has contributed to an unprecedented surge of interest in contemporary art in Britain.

Emin studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, and has had major exhibitions around the world. She became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2007, and in the same year was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, the largest and most prestigious event in the art world calendar.

Unfortunately her notoriety means that practically everybody has heard of, or has formed an opinion about Tracey Emin and her work. A huge percentage of her work is biographical, we all know about her abortion, her rape and most of us have seen her slovenly made bed surrounded by used condoms, fag ends and dirty laundry – when it was entered as a contender for the Turner prize and exhibited at the Tate in 1999 tabloids ran competitions to recreate it using teenagers bedrooms stating the unoriginal “I could do that”.
Tracey spoke of her education, apart from passing her driving test every exam she ever sat was to further her knowledge of art. Although she destroyed most of her work after getting her degree it was not an act of defiance, it was merely because the college had nowhere to store it and she did not want them to destroy it for her.

Emin happily posed for photographs at the Press View and after a quick race through the exhibition there was a questions and answers in the room with her tapestries hanging in huge frames.
The exhibition is fascinating, it is a collection of 20 years work, there is a room with a wooden rollercoaster made in 2005 entitled “It’s not the way I want to die” and rooms containing huge tapestries of blankets. There is a huge collection of her mono-prints and some of her video work and neons. It takes up the entire ground floor of the gallery and is the first major UK retrospective exhibition of work by Tracey Emin. This exhibition brings together loans from private and public collections around the world.

We were introduced to Simon Groom the director of the gallery and Patrick Elliot, the curator. She talked about the logistics of hanging such a huge collection – it is an exhibition that has been 4 years in the planning (they were putting the finishing touched to it as we arrived), work had to be acquired from private collectors across the globe and shipped to Edinburgh. The gallery had supplied her with a model of the gallery space so she could work out the best overview of the layout – she kept the model and now stores buttons in it!

The tapestries had to be removed from the frames as they were too big to get through the main gallery doors but finally seeing them all together in one small room was brilliant. She talked about how (obviously) “all the work is about me” but explained that she was hoping to achieve a transferrance of ideas from her work – like with the tent – “when you crawl inside and look at everyone I ever slept with, you will come out thinking of everyone you ever slept with”.

She said that the course she did in philosophy was the best training she could have done for her art – as they are all about her ideas – I asked her about her plans for the meercats she made for the London plinth – she laughed and said that it was a bit of a joke really, she likes meercats and didnt expect her idea to be one of the final ones chosen she was glad it didnt win as she did not want to be remembered as the meercat woman and anyway, large sculptures scare her! And there was me believing the spiel that had accompanied the idea, that meercats are lookouts and would protect the city etc – she just likes meercats!

What people seem to forget is that Tracey Emin is a Contemporary Artist, her installations are the result of lengthy trial and error and are representational of the “idea” – the bed was a response to a certain time in her life, just because it wasn’t painted by Van Gough does not mean it is not art.

Press responses have been pretty obvious, “celebrity is more important than real achievement, self revelation more gripping than anything created by talent and a considerable imagination” perhaps if journalists were not so lazy and looked at the art from a contemporary point of view then Tracey Emin would actually be given the credit she deserves.

Tracy Emin 20 Years continues at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh until November 20th.

Sarah Wilson is currently in the 2nd Year of the HND Contemporary Art Course at ETC

Magazine 08 @ Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop

MAGAZINE 08: Positive Critical Imagination is an exhibition of work by an array of international artists curated by David Arlandis and Javier Marroqui at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop. The show is the third part in an ongoing curatorial investigation looking at artists who offer concrete solutions to social problems. Alongside the exhibition is a series of workshops and seminars discussing the concerns of the exhibition details of which can be found at www.edinburghsculpture.org

The project features work by:

Superflex and Copenhagen Brains, Elske Rosenfeld of Big Hope, Oliver Ressler, Andreja Kuluncic, Recetas Urbanos, Wochenklausur, Société Réaliste and Marta de Gonzalo & Publio Pérez Prieto.

The exhibition is open until the 24th of August, Thursday to Sunday, 11am to 5pm

Edinburgh Art Festival is no damp squib.

Rain couldn’t stop play last night as the Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) officially launched with a decidedly damp street party in the heart of the capital. Among the beer, burgers, ice cream vans and a rather wonderful reincarnation of Karen Carpenter; the great, the good and the nicht so gut, of the Edinburgh art scene took turn in shaking off their umbrellas in the doorways of the Collective, Stills and Fruitmarket Galleries before re-deploying them for the journey through Advocates Close.

Now in its 5th year the festival offers another ambitious programme of more than 130 contemporary visual art exhibitions and events throughout the cities museums, galleries and temporary spaces. This years festival features established artists including Tracy Emin and Richard Hamilton as well as emerging talents from around the world.

Throughout the coming month contemporaryartetc… will bring you news and views from the festival. We would also welcome your contributions written or visual. If you would like to submit images or text please send them to:

contemporaryartetc@googlemail.com

you can also leave comments on any of our posts.

Regards

ED.

www.edinburghartfestival.org

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop launches fundraising campaign

Yesterday saw the launch of a public appeal by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (ESW) fundraising campaign. ESW has already secured 90% of the funding needed to realise their vision for a world class contemporary visual art facility with 30 artists studios, specialist research, development and workshop spaces as well as project and education spaces which will further enhance their already successful community and outreach programmes

If you would like to know more about the new building and ESW’s or if you would like to support directly support the project by making an online donation then please click on the following link.

http://www.edinburghsculpture.org/new_build.html

Contemporary Art ETC 1st Year Exhibition

Contemporary Art ETC in association with North Edinburgh Arts Centre are delighted to announce the opening of Page 1 of 2 the first year exhibition.

The Exhibition runs until 13th of June and is open dailly between 10 am and 5pm.

” To exhibit in such a well respected and professional community based art centre is a fantastic opportunity for the students to engage their practice with the local community “

Alan Holligan (Course Leader)

Underlined: HN Diploma Show @ ESW

After a highly successful opening event the show ran until the 28th of May. The exhibition was well received and was well attended by family friends and members of the Edinburgh art fraternity. The Staff and students would like to thank the following people for their contribution and continued support:

• Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop
• Ben McLeish
• Breave
• Mandy Purdie
• Benjamin Fallon
• Chris Walker

PLEASE CLICK ON A PHOTO TO VIEW A LARGER VERSION

Install 2008

The installation of this years HN Diploma Show at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop began in ernest today with a flurry of activity and anticipation. It was a beautiful day to working outside and everyone was in fine fettle. We are all looking forward to getting things finished up tomorrow in time for the opening.

Please come and join us from 6pm-8pm at ESW and afterwards at the Village Bar

Last of the Public Artists

We are delighted to announce that the Private View of the last ever HN Public Art Diploma Exhibition will Take place on Friday the 23rd May 2008 at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop Please see below for details.

During the installation we will bring you upt date news and images of progress and events.

Transloco: Artists Talk

Artist Talk by TRANSLOCO

2pm Saturday 24th November

WASPS Patriothall Gallery, Hamilton Place, Stockbridge

Join artists Lesley Martin, Jenny Outhwaite, Francesca Nobilucci and Nicola Rodger for a discussion about their current exhibition.

Transloco is a show of new works presented in association with Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, 25 Hawthornvale, Edinburgh, EH6 4JT
Tel: +44 (0) 131 551 4490 Fax: +44 (0) 131 551 4491

www.edinburghsculpture.org <http://www.edinburghsculpture.org/>
myspace.com/edinburghsculpture
edinburghsculpture.wordpress.com

Supported by the Scottish Arts Council and the City of Edinburgh Council

HEY STUDENT! @ the Collective: Thursday 25 October

Exhibition Talk & Live Music:
Go to the Collective for a free exhibition talk and stay for some live music afterwards £3. A must for students but open to everyone.

7-8pm Programme Manager Kirsten Body will discuss Holly’s exhibition and the New Work Scotland Programme application process. FREE.

8-10pm Live music organised by Little Pebble. Ziggy Campbell and Amy Duncan play live at the Collective £3.

Collective Gallery