I’m absolutely delighted to be one of the recipients of the BAG in its final year. I’ll be using the grant to attend a workshop on composition, taught by Olivia Irvine, at Moray Art Centre in August.
More on the grant and other winners here.
The BAG was set up in memory of ShirleyAnne Cumberlege, to support the work and ambitions of early-career artists in the Highlands.
The show is now at Galway Art Centre – online only, due to Covid!
You can see the exhibition virtually in this short film:
I’m delighted to have work in this show – such a great mix of strong and interesting work from around 60 international artists. My work is shown from around the 5 minute mark.
I have five small works in this show, open now in Fermanagh, Ireland, and due to tour world wide thereafter.
I’m delighted to have a painting in this new show from the Society of Scottish Artists.
Due to lockdown, the exhibition is being held online.
‘Marine Debris’
In this dreamlike, semi-abstract image, I was thinking of how humans are inextricably tangled in our environment. Images of ghost nets reference the nets that are now lost at sea
I’m delighted to have a poem commended in this competition.
The Bathymetry of the Inner Sound is about Captain Otter, who surveyed extensively the waters of the west coast of Scotland.
Read all the winning & commended entries here:
https://torch.ox.ac.uk/article/winning-entries-for-scipo-poetry-competition-the-science-of-the-seas
I’m looking forward to showing a piece (virtually) in this SSA exhibition, coming up in October.
More later.
I’m pleased to have a painting in this upcoming show. There’s a virtual private view on Saturday 25th July, and the show runs to 6th of September.
View my ‘Nervous Mermaid’ and many other works here, from Saturday.
I’m delighted to have been appointed a Satellite Associate for the Society of Scottish Artists.
These new roles have been created to help strengthen the SSA’s outreach across Scotland. I aim to forge links between Argyll & Bute and the rest of Scotland, increasing engagement and sharings news from the area.
If you have arts/crafts exhibitions, events, workshops, opportunities, etc within Argyll & Bute and you’d like to spread the word, please get in touch via the contact form, and I’ll pass the information on.
If you’re interested in joining the SSA, you can read more about this artist-run society here.
I really look forward to seeing what we can do to help strengthen the arts community within Argyll & Bute and across Scotland.
Image: Jamie McAteer, altered from series A Farewell Shaped Land
I’m thoroughly delighted to be starting 2020 with the prospect of working with the Scottish Book Trust as a recipient of their Ignite Fellowship.
I’ll be working on a collection of poems provisionally titled ‘The Water Cure’, investigating the waters of the west coast of Scotland, their histories, geographies, myths and peoples.
More soon!
What the sky demands
the wind insists on.
How much light can one body bear?See what we become when our gnarled,
knotted needs are swept aside.
A landscape stripped to the horizon
to rockform, flint flaked with hesitant gleam.
Gorse-root fingered, peat block feet
tread paths perpendicular to the weather.
Whin-haired, heather sweetened,
a huddle of willow bickersbehind you, a flock of starlings
weave their old prayers into the cloud.
This is the final week of our group show at Dunoon Burgh Hall, with work made by four cowal-based artists at Cove Park residencies this year. (Sandi Kiehlmann, Jackie Stevenson, Soozie Tarkenter and myself.) The gallery is open 12-4 daily.
Maps of the Other Side, Cove Park, 2018 – by Anoushka Havinden
In July this year, I spent a week at Cove Park, exploring ways of making new work. I took a pile of books, and various ideas I’d been working with including mermaid/selkie stories.
At Peaton Layo, the shingle beach at the bottom of the hill from Cove Park (a good spot for swimming) I found driftwood that suggested a head, and eventually collected the remains of a mermaid figure.
I used this figure to embody a character, to narrate a story that then informed the work I made.
The mermaid was a creature that longed for human life but never settled wholly on land, a self-created, impossible creature pulled in different directions. The poem, written in her own odd, broken Scots, is her last will and testament.
Words and images sprang from the mermaid’s central, invisible and unwritten story. This was informed by the history and geography of that sliver of coastline, the loch beyond, and the Clyde Estuary that flows down past Dunoon.
Peaton Layo: ‘A flat rocky point on Loch Long – it is supposed to be a corruption of the word Leac, a flat stone’ – Ordnance Survey Name Book
| Leac
a slate (for writing on) a ledge (of rock) a slab (of stone) a flagstone, paving stone
a cheek a gravestone a hillside
With many thanks to all at Dunoon Burgh Hall and Cove Park.
|
Long
a ship a boat a vessel a craft
|
