Art

Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow could all make a bid to become Scotland’s leading city of culture, writes Brian Ferguson.

THE distance between arts and sciences tends to be described as a gulf that needs bridging, and there are an increasing number of projects encouraging (and funding) artists to cross over. The results can be illuminating, if occasionally baffling for the non-scientist; the best provide new ways of seeing the world.

I first bit Macrobert’s hand off approximately nine years ago. At school I was given a taste of how liberating drama could be. In a way it was the proverbial lifeboat in a raging sea of awkwardness. I was still me, yet, amazingly, I found that I could articulate. I could be ­anything and anyone. Give me a script or a scenario and I could be someone confident and bubbly who could act and dance and si... – well actually no, still couldn’t sing. One step at a time, right?

The Isle of Lewis is pickin’ up good migrations thanks to its thriving surf scene. In a new exhibition at An Lanntair in Stornoway, local artist Laura Maynard tells the stories of some of these hardy wave-seekers in a series of stunning portraits

300 years after the publication of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, artist Roger Palmer discusses his ambitious photography project at Kirkcaldy Galleries, which took him from Lower Largo to Chile’s Isla Robinson Crusoe

The Cordis Prize tapestries show that skill is not the enemy of creativity, but a vehicle to extend its ambition still further

Traditional skills are to the fore at the Hunterian and in the work of Sarah Longley, whose show explores her relationship with her famous father

Beating more than 300,000 entries from across the globe, an Edinburgh photographer is the only Scottish professional to be shortlisted for a prestigious award in Sony’s internationally acclaimed competition.

Based in Tayport and a graduate of Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, Marian Leven could perhaps be described as an east coast artist, but the paintings on show at the Open Eye were inspired by an area of coast in the north-west of Scotland. She has made a beautiful exhibition out of the analogy between watercolour – the way it moves and its transparency – and actual water, of light on water, of the waves and the tide over the shore, but also of the atmosphere where water is suspended as vapour in the air.

Every year I look forward to the RSA New Contemporaries. It always fizzes with energy. Here are the young showing us how, while the so-called grown-ups drag us through the grisly farce of Brexit. Nor does this year disappoint. There are 63 new graduates including a small group of architects. The show is on both floors of the RSA and so there is room for them each to have their own bit of wall or floor. Thus their work is not scattered and they can spread themselves out a little. One or two individual works have been in the recent group shows, but here the artists, among their peers, have a better chance to make a statement.

We think of an archive and we think of a room somewhere, closed off from the light of day and stacked top to bottom with papers and files and computers. Politics, History, Economics… these are the kinds of subject areas that fill most archives in most places, representing a past that, on the whole, was dominated by men, in a world that went about its business as though women had little to do with it.

Revolutionary politics fired a new wave of art in Germany, as this wonderful show at the Hunterian illustrates

The V&A Dundee is among Scottish beneficiaries facing calls to return donations from a billionaire family accused of fuelling an epidemic of painkiller addiction.

As Brexit looms, a group show at Talbot Rice brings together work by 13 international artists exploring the subject of borders

The National Museum of Scotland began life in 1866. Opened by Prince Albert, it was called the Industrial Museum of Scotland and was a product of the same drive, led by the Prince, that gave us the V&A and the other South Kensington museums, all conceived as engines of economically useful, popular education. Enlarging on the same Victorian purpose, the Museum then changed its name to the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art. In 1904 it changed its name again, but not really its purpose or character, to become the Royal Scottish Museum. In 1985 however, a development began that has, since then, changed it profoundly. The Royal Scottish Museum, as it then still was, absorbed the National Museum of Antiquities, the collection of the Society of Scottish Antiquities that had been started two centuries earlier. This accession in turn eventually prompted the wholly new building of the Museum of Scotland, joined onto the western end of the old building and opened in 1998. Then finally in 2004, a project was launched to reorganise the original Victorian building and completely transform all the displays. The first step was to create a new entrance at street-level and indeed the new ground floor onto which it opens. Much else has happened since as this radical process of renewal was taken up through the building’s many layers and spaces.

A quartet of women are hidden in plain sight at Ingleby Gallery, while Victoria Morton shows her mastery of movement and colour

A striking piece of Edinburgh street art reputed to have been created by the world-renowned graffiti artist Banksy has been defaced in the ultimate act of criticism.

Visual Arts Scotland’s show at the RSA mixes work in diverse media to impressive effect

With a new exhibition celebrating her work opening in Edinburgh, the Irish designer talks about her love of print, the inspiration of the colours of her childhood and her hopes for the future as her website relaunches