Introducing Neringa Černiauskaitė

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Introducing Neringa Černiauskaitė

Art North is pleased to announce Neringa Černiauskaitė as an addition to our team of writers covering the contemporary visual arts of Northern Europe and Far Northern latitudes. Neringa, who may already be known to many of our readers for her contributions to Artforum, Flash Art, Parkett, ARTMargins.com, MAP, and Mousse magazine, will serve as Contributing Editor (Lithuania). She is also the forward-looking Editor in Chief of artnews.lt, and is an M.A. graduate, 2014, of Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies, NY.

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Peter Davis – Stillness in Motion

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Peter Davis – Stillness in Motion

Peter Davis is an artist who has spent a great many years mastering the use of his materials and chosen medium of watercolour. With what appears to be consummate ease and an intuitive dexterity with the physicality of water and pigment on paper, the landscape paintings that Davis produces reveal Shetland with stunning economy, for nothing is ever overworked or laboured in his paintings. All the more reason, therefore, to be taken aback by the sheer impact that he makes with what is, after all, frequently considered a ‘modest’ medium.

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When Memory is Like a Dolphin

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When Memory is Like a Dolphin

Recently, in the West Coast village of Ullapool in Scotland’s Western Highlands, an exhibition was staged at An Talla Solais gallery showing work by participants in the village’s Dolphin Arts Project – an initiative set up to support every person in Ullapool with a diagnosis of dementia, as well as their families and carers. There is much that is commendable about the project, for it is not just about the making of art…

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CuratorSpace – Opportunities Made Easy

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CuratorSpace – Opportunities Made Easy

CuratorSpace was built as a platform to help art organisations manage their open calls – everything from exhibitions and residencies through to commissions and competitions. Since then it has also become the first port of call for thousands of artists looking for opportunities at all stages of their career. Founded four years ago by artist-curator Louise Atkinson and web developer Philip Bennison, the platform has hosted an astounding number of arts opportunities in over forty-five countries, and has over 27,000 registered members.

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Karólína Lárusdóttir: 1944 – 2019

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Karólína Lárusdóttir: 1944 – 2019

Rare would it be that I would consider pre-publishing any content from the upcoming first issue of Art North magazine, but this qualifies as an exception. In our 'In Brief' section on the opening pages of the magazine, we have run a short column on the upcoming exhibition of work by the Icelandic artist Karólína Lárusdóttir. I have just learned, however, that Karólína Lárusdóttir sadly died, yesterday. The upcoming exhibition had been organised, in part, to celebrate her 75th birthday.

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Inverness Darkroom

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Inverness Darkroom

Inverness Darkroom is a new community b/w darkroom space setup in WASPS Inverness Creative Academy. “WASPS have done us proud with a fabulous space,” say Matt Sillars and Rachel Fermi who are behind the project. The thinking behind the initiative is to provide year-round darkroom access for members; regular analogue photography workshops; and, hopefully, become a self-sustaining visual arts space, too.

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Art North Magazine on BBC Radio Orkney

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Art North Magazine on BBC Radio Orkney

BBC Radio Orkney’s arts programme 'Tullimentan', hosted by Huw Williams, featured an interview with Art North’s editor Ian McKay yesterday (31 January), with Ian explaining why there was a clear need for a visual arts print magazine in the Far North, and the rationale behind it being an international publication that celebrated the links between Northern Scotland and our Nordic and Scandinavian neighbours. At the time of writing, the full programme is online for the next 28 days.

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Ten Points

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Ten Points

Our planet’s systems are being pushed beyond their limits: the health of its water, air and soils under siege. From deforestation and soil erosion, to pollution of rivers, oceans and the air we breathe, our planetary health is waning badly. Climate change is the biggest threat-multiplier of them all. Consequently, sea rise is now a very real threat to millions. Today, there is increased awareness and concern about sea rise. There is also considerable myth and misinformation, however. In this extract from the catalogue accompanying David Cass’s exhibition Rising Horizon, the Oceanographer and Author John Englander offers a few points and perspectives.

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Like a Whisper in Your Ear…

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Like a Whisper in Your Ear…

So many artists express their ‘environmentalist’ concerns by forcing their argument in bold gestures that could easily be mistaken for confusing bigness with greatness. Cass, instead seems to unassumingly (though no less importantly) offer us the antidote to that – by which I mean, an urgent request to come in close, quietly, personally, in our own time… Here is an art that is truly intimate. It asks big questions, yes, but it asks them of the individual, drawn in close by the work’s diminutive size.

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David Cass: Materiality and Focus

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David Cass: Materiality and Focus

In the fourth of our seven-post series on the work of David Cass (ahead of his exhibition at The Scottish Gallery next week), I thought it would be a good point to widen the scope a little and consider the manner in which Cass works and the materials he works with. As with previous posts in this short series on a single artist, the underlying thinking has been to take just one work as a point of focus – that is, as a jumping off point from which to consider the wider body of work brought together and…

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Forest Fire Aftermath by David Cass

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Forest Fire Aftermath by David Cass

Back in 2014, artist David Cass was heading out for what he describes as “a research stay in an arid zone.” He’d gone straight from the moist climate and wet ground of the Scottish Borders to an alpine-desert and, as he relates it, “The heat and dry atmosphere hit me hard, but seeing this patch of bright red forest was almost surreal. Eventually, with a friend, I managed to climb the mountainside and enter the aftermath zone, where we took photographs and shot film…”

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Horizonte, horizontes, horizonten

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Horizonte, horizontes, horizonten

Perhaps now more than ever, we need artists such as David Cass who can at once present us with moments of pleasure when looking upon their work, and yet at the same time offer us reference points for understanding the environmental catastrophe that our own actions represent for the very environment that supports and currently sustains us. That the two can co-exist at one and the same time in any single work (or the body of work as a whole), is commendable, I believe.

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David Cass: Rising Horizon

/ The Scottish Gallery/
David Cass: Rising Horizon

David Cass’s Horizon 42% (2017-2019), from his upcoming exhibition Rising Horizon, is here accompanied by a short text by Prof. David Reay: “On the land, vast swathes of natural forest have been felled and their soils ploughed up. The carbon released has joined that from fossil burning in a smothering heat blanket encircling the globe. This hotter atmosphere super-charges the water cycle, bringing devastating flash floods in one place just as it saps away moisture and bakes earth into dust in another. Across the oceans, sea levels are rising…

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Some Notes For a Future Essay on Scale

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Some Notes For a Future Essay on Scale

My thoughts that follow relate primarily to a photograph by Alex Boyd and, in particular his image of State Lee, which is located in the North Atlantic and forms part of the St Kilda archipelago of the Outer Hebrides. They also relate to a much wider selection of images too, from cinema, modern painting, northern romantic painting of the nineteenth century, and a lot more besides. This is, to all intents and purposes, a short text that I am using as a means to park some ideas that I’d like to develop, elsewhere, elsewhen – maybe even in the pages of Art North magazine. I haven’t yet decided.

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Ruminations for a Day (or more)

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Ruminations for a Day (or more)

I don’t want to write a memoir of my experiences in the Far North. For one reason, I do not think I am done with it – this is what my northern friends say to me whenever they send me off. I am not done with Svalbard. I am not done with the North. For another reason, I have been thrown by the Arctic. Thrown in such a way that each day I ruminate on all these many thoughts, and feelings and ideas, and my experiences dance in my head and my heart and I don’t really want to write of clichés and tourism…

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Reading Art by David Trigg

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Reading Art by David Trigg

Described as an ‘enchanting compendium of artworks that celebrate books and reading throughout 2,000 years of art history,’ David Trigg’s Reading Art (pictured above) features reproductions of almost 300 artworks, collected together as a homage to reading and the written word in the visual arts. As a picture-led survey of art from around the world, among the artists to appear in this volume are the usual suspects – Caravaggio, Cézanne, Dali, Dürer, Magritte, Picasso, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh, as well as contemporary artists…

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Art Jewellery at Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo

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Art Jewellery at Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo

As the organisers of the exhibition, curated by Lars Sure, state, “Contemporary craft is often described as a genre of art with a close relation to everyday life. The materials at the heart of the craft field – ceramics, textiles, wood and so forth – are part of the functional and decorative objects we surround ourselves with. Jewellery is often part of this ordinary system of value – as costly and beautiful objects with exclusive connotations. In Everyone Says Hello, artists who challenge this system present jewellery that tell stories about…

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Art North & Artists' Books

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Art North & Artists' Books

Our first issue of Art North magazine, due to appear this spring, will launch with what will be a regular section of the magazine dedicated to artists’ books. The brief history of the format below offers an opportunity to introduce Déirdre Kelly, our 'Contributing Editor (Artist’s Books)'. In Issue no.1, she will be sifting through her archives from The Hardware Gallery where, during the late-1980s and 1990s, she was the gallery's Director. Hardware Gallery is still fondly remembered for the support it offered to an incredible number of artists, many of whom…

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On Watching

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On Watching

From my desk, I can see from my window all kinds of comings and goings in the village here, but I also have a prime view looking out across the road to the studio of artist Mark Edwards. There’s something of the voyeur in us all to a greater or lesser degree, I am guessing, but while I work I can also get distracted, and my mind wanders, taking in the view. For example, I know when Mark Edwards is in his studio because the blinds are up, and I know that in the lead up to his recent exhibition in London, the blinds were up a lot…

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Illustration: The Kelpies Illustration Prize 2019

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Illustration: The Kelpies Illustration Prize 2019

Are you an artist or illustrator based in Scotland? Do you have a passion for kids books? Then the Kelpies Illustration Prize may be for you. The Kelpies publishing imprint is part of the independent publishing company Floris Books, based in Edinburgh, and Floris is the largest publisher of children’s books in Scotland. Among their acquisitions is the original Kelpies list, which included books from classic Scottish authors such as Kathleen Fidler, George Mackay Brown and Mollie Hunter.

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