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The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
10 exhibitions to see next - including work from top Scottish sculptor
Scottish sculptor Kenny Hunter brings his contemporary works to Edinburgh this summer. Known for some of his high-profile sculptures including I Goat (2010) in London's Spitalfields, The Southwark Memorial to War and Reconciliation (2018), he's previously exhibited in Edinburgh with a Covid memorial at the Royal College of Surgeons entitled Your Next Breath, which he received the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture. The Scottish Festival of Railway Modelling 14-15 June. Entry from £12. Braehead Arena, Kings Inch Road, G51 4BP. Celebrate the intricate and fascinating world of modelling with the Scottish Festival of Railway Modelling. There's an array of fantastic model railways, meticulously crafted by talented hobbyists and professional modellers from across the UK as well as a wide range of projects available from the exhibitors. Edge States 18-29 June. Entry free. Patriothall Gallery, 1D Patriothall, Stockbridge, Edinburgh EH3 5AY. The starting point for this exhibition was the Cyprus College of Art in Lempa, Paphos where the five artists on display met for the first time. Located in the hills near the ruins of an ancient Neolithic settlement and overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, the college, its surroundings and the connections forged had a lasting impact on the artists. For this exhibition, they've all created works in response to their relationship to place and landscape. Fire on the Mountain, Light on the Hill 20 June-7 September. Entry free. Collective, City Observatory, 38 Calton Hill, EH7 5AA. Leading visual and performance artist Merces Azpilicueta, originally from Buenos Aires and now based in Amsterdam, is committed to an exploration of care and resistance. Azpilicueta often considers and reveals less well-known stories from history and gives a platform to the role of women who have made a difference in the past, and continue to inspire in the present. For this show, the artist brings these subjects together in a mixed media installation. Beneath the Waves 14 June-13 September. Entry from £14. Scottish Maritime Museum, The Linthouse Building, Harbour Road, Irvine, KA12 8BT. Discover award-winning underwater photography, exquisite maritime sketches and rare Glasgow pottery recovered from a shipwreck, all celebrating the extraordinary world beneath the ocean's surface. The exhibition has been curated in collaboration with renowned underwater photographer, marine conservationist and writer Lawson Wood, diver and maritime explorer Graeme Bruce and Ayrshire underwater artist and writer Christina Riley. The Dark Room 14 June-31 December 2030. Entry free. Perth Art Gallery, 78 George Street, Perth, PH1 5LB. The Dark Room (Image: unknown) For 150 years, before digital cameras, photographs relied on light reacting with chemicals and for Perth Art Gallery's latest permanent display, The Dark Room showcases these early methods and celebrates the gallery's diverse photographic collection. The exhibition also explores how everyday photos have changed with snapshots from 1928-1960 showing previous family moments. GLASS 14 June-2 February 2026. Entry from £5. Perth Art Gallery, 78 George Street, Perth, PH1 5LB. We hold it, look through it, clean it, clink it and creak it - but how much do you really know about glass? Perth Art Gallery invites you to explore GLASS, an exhibition celebrating the material and makers that made Perthshire famous. Go on a journey across time and space, through thousands of years of glassmaking all of which helped put Perth on the map as the UK's first UNESCO City of Craft and Folk Art. Shipshape 14 June-26 July. Entry from £5. Strathnaver Museum, Clachan, Bettyhill, Thurso, KW14 7SS. Research based visual artist Joanne B. Kaar explores the heritage of traditional boat building in her exciting new exhibition. Inspired by Strathnaver Museum's community boat building project, Kaar worked with local boat builders seeking to preserve the intangible cultural heritage around traditional boat building techniques and tools at risk of being lost. Capturing the Moment: Glasgow Then and Now 14 June-6 July. Entry free. The Burrell Collection, 2060 Pollokshaws Road, Glasgow, G43 1AT. To celebrate Glasgow's 850th anniversary, students from Shawlands Academy have teamed up with Glasgow Life Museums to celebrate by curating this touring exhibition. Visiting venues across the city over the coming months, starting with the Burrell Collection, the display features historic images of the city taken by amateur photographer Eric Watt, alongside photographs taken by the pupils showing the city today. Awesome Bricks 14-15 June. Entry from £13.50. National Museum of Flight Scotland, East Fortune Airfield, EH39 5LF. A weekend packed full of LEGO brick fun, there's lots to see and do for all ages at the National Museum of Flight. Get an up-close view of incredible LEGO constructions, including an interactive train set, and have the chance to make your own unique creations in the brick build zone.
Scotsman
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Rare chance to see work of one of Scotland's leading sculptors
The Fine Art Society When Kenny Hunter describes his forthcoming exhibition at the Fine Art Society in Edinburgh as 'monumentous', he's not just talking about its importance in his career, writes Susan Mansfield. Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... For 40 years, he has made it his business to engage with the monumental: To study monuments, ask questions of them and also, sometimes, to make them. Solo shows of his work don't happen often, as much of his time is spent on public commissions. The provocatively titled Let's Forget is his first survey show in Edinburgh for more than a decade, a chance to look back on his practice as well as present new, unseen works. It includes sculptures of all sizes, drawings and prints. It's almost, one might say, a retrospective? 'You're probably on the money there,' he says, thoughtfully. 'I've tried to create a sampler, you know? What's my practice about? Who am I? Because doing public art will make you focus on very particular outcomes, but in an exhibition, the artist is the focus. I've tried to represent my practice in its broadest sense.' The Fine Art Society Carving out a niche Hunter is one of Scotland's pre-eminent sculptors. He has carved out a niche (no pun intended) as a maker of public sculpture in a contemporary style, all smooth forms and clean lines, making work all over the UK and internationally. His subjects are often young people or animals, more often anonymous and symbolic than paying tribute to specific individuals. His best-known works include Citizen Firefighter near Central Station in Glasgow, Elephant for Glasgow in Bellahouston Park, Blackbird (the persistence of vision) in London's Leicester Square, and Your Next Breath, an arrangement of four figures for the courtyard of Edinburgh's Surgeons Hall to commemorate the work of the NHS during the pandemic, which won the 2023 Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture. His work is conceptually rigorous and rooted in a deep knowledge; in the course of our conversation, he references widely from classical Greece via Rodin to Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty. From the choice of materials right down to the base or plinth (if there is one), everything about a sculpture is subjected to careful thought. He sets out to challenge the ideas inherent in much traditional sculpture: Permanence, commemoration, a fixed, linear progressive view of history. 'I guess it's been my project to try to replace those with compelling questions. The artist's role is not to provide answers but to set problems in their requisite depth so the question resonates, has an impact on the mind of the viewer. I've had a love-hate relationship with the art form all my life. I think this exhibition contains that kind of discourse, I'm really happy with it in that respect. It represents my life in art. Kenny Hunter That life began at high school in Edinburgh when someone handed him a lump of clay – a work in the show, 'Clay - The Life' recalls the moment. 'That's my little origin work. That was the material that got me going as an artist. I just loved the feeling of clay in my hands. It was how I lost myself. I thought, if I could do this all day…' he grins. 'Which is a very naive idea of what an artist does.' The Fine Art Society Head of sculpture takes up the challenge At 21, he went to Glasgow School of Art to study sculpture, then on to the British School in Athens. Later becoming head of sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art, he has recently quit teaching at the age of 62 to return to the life of a full-time artist. Throughout his career, he has been committed to challenging the tropes and attitudes of traditional sculpture, for example re-imagining the 'self-aggrandising' form of the equestrian monument as a young woman in contemporary clothes astride a Przewalski's horse, the now-rare wild horse which is regarded as the genetic prototype for modern horses. She rides without saddle or reins so that 'there's almost an agreement between the horse and rider, as opposed to one's in control of the other'. However, to make contemporary work for public commissions often involves a lot of negotiation. Another of the works in the show is a version of a sculpture he made for the Aberdeenshire town of Fraserburgh, to commemorate Thomas Blake Glover, a Victorian merchant-adventurer born in the town who is celebrated as a key figure in modern Japan. Instead of the 'man with the handlebar moustache standing astride the globe', he made a statue of a small boy playing with a boat, reflecting the age Glover was when he lived there. 'You have to start off the process by listening, but I also think that I've spent the best part of 40 years thinking about sculpture, so I think I should be confident enough to say, 'This may not be what you thought you wanted, but I think you will like this, and this is why.' He chuckles softly. 'There is that idea that the artist is somehow removed from society, isolated, up in their garret. My experience of being an artist has been such a gift. I've met so many people from different walks of life, worked with them, learned from them. I see the gallery as an experimental zone where ideas can be tested. It allows you to build up an identity, but ultimately, I want to take those lessons out into the public art realm.' Just occasionally, he gets to make a public work which is his and his alone like The Unknown, the 2.5 metre skeleton he placed in Borgie Forest in Sutherland (a version of which is also in the Fine Art Society show). 'I absolutely love that work. That was my idea, supported by Creative Scotland, and I went around trying to find a constituency for it. It's deliberately awkward to get to. You have to leave your car, you have to become aware of nature before you see the work. You go down a B-Road, and there's a sign by a dirt track which just says The Unknown, with an arrow. I think that's amazing,' he laughs. 'The unknown what?' Public sculpture, he says, has the capacity to unite and divide. It can be ignored for decades, then suddenly become 'the lightning rod for public discourse' as it did during the Black Lives Matter protests. Hunter was drawn in to the argument about whether or not to remove Henry Dundas, who stands atop a column in St Andrew Square in Edinburgh, because he delayed the passing of anti-slavery legislation in Parliament. (In the end, Dundas stayed in place, although the accompanying interpretation was rewritten). To make work for the public realm is to engage with questions about what we remember and what we forget, hence this exhibition's title. Because the whole point of public sculpture is the remembering, that's what it's charged with. I'm not saying remembering's bad, I'm saying remembering's appropriate sometimes, but also it could be appropriate to forget as well. And that history, or collective memory, can be misused, can sustain bitterness and stop reconciliation. Ultimately we do forget, as well. There are huge swathes of history we've all forgotten. Kenny Hunter It also means accepting that the meaning of your work can change. It might become a focus for public gratitude, as Citizen Firefighter did after 9/11 and in the wake of the fires at Glasgow School of Art — or a focus for drunken revellers who want to put a traffic cone on its head. 'It exposes you a little bit as an artist. It's almost like you've given birth to something and you're leaving it out in the world on its own, it's not safely wrapped up in a gallery every night. It has to deal with seagull shit and chip wrappers, sticky fingers. It's not easy, that part of it. But it's also where I want to work.' Visit the exhibition Kenny Hunter: Let's Forget is at the Fine Art Society, 6 Dundas Street, Edinburgh, from June 14 - August 30.
The National
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
Sculptor deconstructs what monuments mean with exhibition
'You could analyse all the public artworks of the capital and they all come with a code, a political code,' he said. 'They're Unionist, most of them – there's power, dominance, control and imperial might and all that sort of thing. I'm kind of seduced by the whole drama of public sculpture but I'm also very wary of all its codes and messages so my long-standing project with public art is to try and replace that certainty and singular message with uncertainty and questions.' Although some believe the traditional monument has an outdated status, Hunter thinks it continues to act as an important reference point in contemporary art and a focal point for public discourse, either as an emblem for contested values or as a rallying point for societal change. In a new exhibition of his work that opens this Saturday, he inverts traditional monumental values with unexpected uses of scale, material and subject matter to open up questions for the viewer rather than providing answers. 'This exhibition for The Fine Art Society can be seen as a continuation of my ongoing efforts to deconstruct the monument as a permanent symbol of political and historic progress and instead re-present it through my work as a form in flux, open to varied interpretation,' he said. READ MORE: 'Joy, celebration and warmth' of Palestinian art to be showcased at Edinburgh Fringe Among his high-profile sculptures are Citizen Firefighter outside Glasgow's Central Station, Youth with Split Apple at King's College, Aberdeen, and the Covid memorial, Your Next Breath, at the Royal College of Surgeons, for which he received the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture in 2023. His new exhibition reflects radical shifts in public sculpture over the past few decades, echoing changes in Scotland. 'Post-industrial Scotland is trying to find its voice, trying to find a new expression and a lot of public art is tied to regeneration,' Hunter pointed out. 'It tries to signify the past but also point towards a possible future for communities.' Rather than public art being dropped on a community, as it often was in the past, artists are now expected to engage with the people who live there. And while it is often seen as less glamorous than the worlds of galleries and museums, Hunter believes it is now one of the most exciting areas of art. READ MORE: This bird species is found only in Scotland – and may 'have a Scottish accent' 'There's a belief that public art is in some way a compromise or a sell-out but I think that is a naive way to look at it because, as a practitioner of public art, I've found it's been an incredible privilege to work with other people, learn and collaborate,' he said. 'I think that's generally a good way to work in any field as you're getting exposed to a wide variety of people from all different backgrounds, different histories, different stories. 'It's great work to be involved in and there seems to be an appetite for it. It's a geographical point in the community and it can be a focal point for an impromptu celebration, or if there's any kind of grief.' Hunter's Citizen Firefighter was such a focal point after 9/11 when it became an impromptu gathering point for the fire services of Scotland. 'Public art can have a social role,' said Hunter. 'It's not just visual aesthetics – it's actually got a social function and it can have economic benefits for communities as well.' Despite austerity and budget cuts, public art is still being made as appreciation has grown for its role as a community focus. 'It has a capacity to create a community around it and a sense of common identity, shared stories and shared histories,' said Hunter. 'I think the artist has got to bridge that distance between the history of that community and its possible future. It's an interesting thing to do.' His new exhibition includes models of unrealised public art projects that he would love to create if he did not have to work to a brief. 'We very rarely get the opportunity to build something that comes directly out of the artist's imagination,' he said. It's always conditional on satisfying the brief and I'm not complaining about that. I think it's great that we work out these ideas collectively. But I like the idea that the artist can make a memorable work as well that doesn't need directed by outside forces.' Let's Forget is at Edinburgh's The Fine Art Society from June 14 until August 30
