Art

Katie Paterson grapples with some of the biggest ideas in cosmology and deep time and offers up work which helps make them more understandable, whether that’s on a beach or in a gallery. Interview by Susan Mansfield

Optical illusions? Surrealist collages? Donegal carpets? You’ll find all these things and more in Scotland’s galleries in the year ahead, write Susan Mansfield and Duncan Macmillan

As First World War centenary commemorations draw to a close, the Outer Hebrides marks a special anniversary, for the aftermath of the war brought a particularly savage tragedy to these islands. On Hogmanay 1918, a yacht packed with returning servicemen sank after hitting rocks less than a mile from the harbour at Stornoway with the loss of 201 lives. For many years, the sinking of the Iolaire seemed a disaster too terrible to comprehend: men who had survived the war, drowned just yards from shore, even as their families joyfully awaited their return. On top of already heavy wartime losses the event would leave no community untouched, yet it was shored up behind a wall of silence. It was 1960 before a memorial was erected near the site of the sinking at the Beasts of Holm.

Sister Wendy Beckett, the Roman Catholic nun who became an unlikely television star in later life, has died aged 88.

It is a city synonymous with the grey hues and imposing architecture forged from its most enduring export.

There were brilliant shows all around Scotland, celebrating the best artists of the past and those pushing boundaries today, write Susan Mansfield and Duncan Macmillan

The Queen’s Gallery shows how Charles II used art to re-establish the might of the monarchy, while Robert Bloomfield’s images of 1950s Edinburgh show a city in transition

As the years roll by and the internet becomes increasingly saturated with camera phone snaps from every corner of the globe, you might expect photography books to fall out of fashion. Curiously, however, these unwieldy, low-tech artefacts now feel more relevant than ever, first as a means of making us stop and think about the art of image-making, and second as a means of drawing our attention to different places and times in a way that’s far more immersive and meaningful than simply scrolling through hundreds of random images on Instagram.

The Scottish Government has recently been consulting on a new draft culture strategy for Scotland. Underpinning this new draft strategy is the idea that there is “no one story of culture in or from Scotland and each individual and community contributes to and shapes their own culture, and society more broadly.”

Intimate family portraits captured at the Argyll home of former Beatle Paul McCartney during the 1960s and 1970s are to go on display in the UK for the first time.

Not so long ago, books on Scottish art were a rare event. Things have changed and so it is a pleasure to be able now to welcome two new books at once. Elizabeth Cumming has written Robin Philipson, a biography of one of the most notable figures in Scottish art of the post-war decades, while Phyllida Shaw has written a biography of Gertrude Alice Meredith Williams, less well-known, but, as she demonstrates, important. The history of Scottish art is still a small world, however, and Cumming has written a foreword to Shaw’s book.

It is a time of change for many of Scotland’s art spaces. This year has seen the Ingleby Gallery open in its fine new space in Barony Street, and the high-profile opening of the V&A in Dundee. Next year brings the closure of the Fruitmarket Gallery for redevelopment and new premises for Edinburgh Printmakers at Fountainbridge. Meanwhile, Glasgow’s Common Guild has just announced that it is to leave Woodlands Terrace for pastures new (and as yet undisclosed).

One of Scotland’s leading artists has said he hopes a new statue of Charles Rennie Mackintosh will help Glasgow move on from the devastating fire which destroyed the celebrated architect’s best known building.

Eduardo Paolozzi and Andy Warhol were contemporaries. Born in 1928, Warhol was just four years the junior. Both were sons of first generation immigrants, but though that doesn’t seem to be refelcted in Warhol’s work, it was definitive in Paolozzi’s. One of his major works, Manuscript of Monte Cassino, is, for instance, a profound rumination on time, displacement and the dislocation of war. It is also monumental. There is nothing remotely comparable in Warhol’s art which seems instead determinedly to reflect the transience and immediacy of contemporary culture. That doesn’t make it any less significant, but it does suggest how much difference there is between the two. Nevertheless the exhibition Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi: I want to be a machine starts from the proposition that they had a lot in common. Elaborating this idea, it is certainly a rich show of the work of both.

“She devoted her life to preserving and cataloguing the cherished age-old traditions of the Hebrides in photographs and written documents.” So began The Scotsman’s obituary for Margaret Fay Shaw, published in December 2004 following her death at the age of 101. “Had she not persisted,” the obituary continues, “an entire slice of Scottish culture could have disappeared.”

The Talbot Rice Gallery is home to two shows offering a female response to gender inequality. By Susan Mansfield