Spectra: Scotland’s Festival of Light, Aberdeen City Centre ****

Bernie Reid: Ornamental Breakdown, Edinburgh Printmakers ***

View: Selected EP Editions, Edinburgh Printmakers ****

Let’s begin with a disclaimer. Aberdeen is my home town, which means I’m predisposed to welcome the city’s cultural initiatives. In times past, these have been scarce enough, and there is no doubt that the city, in its latest, post-oil-boom, post-pandemic incarnation, benefits from them.

Spectra Festival, now branded “Scotland’s Festival of Light”, switched on this year in the newly reopened Union Terrace Gardens, a sunken green space at the heart of the city which has been closed for five years for refurbishment. The gardens has a troubled history, branded a dangerous no-go zone and made the focus of various failed regeneration plans, from an inspired project by local art organisation Peacock (now Peacock and the Worm) to a hare-brained scheme to cover the whole thing in concrete.

Thankfully, it has been restored as a garden, and a good one, so far as one can tell, in winter, in the dark. The focus, of course, was not on the plants but on the light installations springing up here and elsewhere for a long weekend at a cost of some £250,000 from the local authority plus £65,000 from the UK Government’s Levelling Up Fund.

Spectra, unashamedly, goes for crowd-pleasing, family-friendly spectacle to draw people back into the city centre after dark at a time when increased footfall is badly needed. Organisers Curated Place bring in big light and sound installations created by design studios which tend to do the rounds of festivals in the UK and abroad. Despite the theme of ‘Home’, little, if anything, here is local. But it aims to attract attention and it does: Spectra 2023 once again drew record crowds, and still more will now be aware that the lights are well and truly on in the Granite City.

Union Terrace Gardens was home to the largest group of installations. Some, such as the giant light-filled figure lying on the grass (one of the Fantastic Planet series by Tasmania-based Parer Studio) could be seen from far away. Others, such as Illuminaphonium, by Michael and Gemma Davis, a giant frame of some 200 chime bars which the public can “play”, needed to be visited up close.

The north end of the gardens was occupied by Nature Nocturnal by Liverpool-based Lantern Company, pretty despite the fact that the animals are subtle and naturalistic and the flowers big, psychedelic and stylised. Further down, next to the lying figure, were Luminosi Trees, by Dan Fox’s company Sound Intervention, which chimed out a soundscape of Indonesian gamelan gongs based on the Fibonacci sequence. Tucked in at the south end was Circa, by Bristol-based Limbic Cinema, one of the most thoughtful of the installations, a sequence of twelve rings each of which represented the average light in a month of the year in Aberdeen.

In the arches under Union Terrace, three projections by Yorkshire-based artist Vincent James combined drawing, collage and stop-motion animation. Each represented a domestic space - kitchen, home office, living room - in which freak weather was manifest. I particularly liked the table lamp which “rains”, filling both the TV and the photoframe with water.

The Waxwing Wanes, a projection by Illuminos (video artists Matt and Rob Vale) on the frontage of His Majesty’s Theatre, was a reflection on migration and the shifting grounds of climate change, while Parer Studio’s figures - there are others in Aberdeen Art and Marischal Square - aimed to pose questions about our relationship with the planet. The irony of this is not lost in a festival which depends upon large amounts of electrical power to stay lit up.

Big Yellow Lips by Bernie Reid PIC: Alan Dimmick

A further work by Illuminos, Nøkken, about a shape-shifting water spirit from Scandinavian folklore, lit the front of Marischal College, while in nearby Broad Street, Pulse, by Somerset-based This Is Loop, invited visitors to walk down a 45-metre tunnel of 12 giant mirrored hoops pulsing with light and sound.

One might have questions about Spectra - the absence of local artists, the environmental impact of all that electricity - but it would be churlish not to enjoy it, or to appreciate the way the city is beginning to embrace culture as a pillar of its regeneration.

Meanwhile, Leith-based artist Bernie Reid is enjoying his first institutional show at Edinburgh Printmakers. Reid, who has a background in graffiti art and illustration, and connections to fashion and design, has developed his fine art practice since graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2010.

His paintings - on paper, canvas, newsprint and recovered linoleum - use stencils and spray paint as well as conventional oils. His stylised figures have a boldness of shape and form with a big nod to futurism and surrealism; he cites Italian futurist Fortunato Depero as a particular inspiration.

He is interested in combining elements of design and fine art: stencilling patterns on linoleum to make “rugs” (even painting on the tasselled edges), has been a recent preoccupation, though there is only one here, featuring a bold abstract patternr. The other works are figurative - even if the bodies are collages of geometric shapes. There is colour, movement and, frequently, playfulness evident in works such as ‘The Red Puffer’ and ‘Big Yellow Lips’.

The upstairs gallery shows a small but impressive collection of editions made at Edinburgh Printmakers since 1987 by a wide range of artists, encapsulating the ways the studio has been used in the past 35 years (and is still being used: don’t miss Victoria Crowe’s beautiful ‘Resilient Tree, Rising Moon’ from 2021 on the way up).

There are works by well known names here: in John Bellany’s sugarlift etching self portrait, ‘Through a Glass Darkly’, the eyes of the artist pin us both across time and through the glass of the title. A screenprint by Carol Rhodes has the characteristics of her drawings and paintings - anonymous urban landscape, aerial perspectives - but uses bright, vibrant shades of purple and pink. Calum Colvin’s blend of assemblage, photography and sculpture is as finely nuanced as ever in print form.

There are collage images of diving birds by photographer and filmmaker Wendy McMurdo, a study of the surface of water by artist and environmentalist Ravi Agarwal, who had a show at Edinburgh Printmakers after a residency in the Highlands supported by the John Muir Trust, uplifting political slogans by Ruth Ewan.

And don’t miss Sandy Moffat’s etching of a very young Peter Howson, Paul Coldwell’s multi-layered A Mapping in Blue, and the delightful Double You (2004), by the late Katy Dove, demonstrating her lightness of touch and consummate facility with shape and colour. Whether or not you know your polymer etchings from your collographs, there is a variety of work here to surprise and enlighten.

Spectra, Scotland’s Festival of Light, run ended; Bernie Reid: Ornamental Breakdown and View: Selected EP Editions run until 16 March

Art reviews: Spectra | Bernie Reid | View - Selected EP Editions