Art reviews: Our Shared World | The Northern Isles

Our Shared World: Castle Mills Members’ Show 5, Edinburgh Printmakers ★★★★

The Northern Isles, Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh ★★★★

Every winter, Edinburgh Printmakers holds a selling exhibition to which all its members can submit a single work. The broad theme for this year’s show, Our Shared World, is open to the artists’ interpretation, but is broadly about how we take up space in the world. With 122 works in all, the more pressing question might be about how to claim your space on the walls.

However, thanks to Astrid Turner’s thoughtful curation, there is a sense of spaciousness rather than overcrowding. Apart from a single row of pictures which is on the high side, meaning the detail is hard to see, the work is well served and harmonises, despite encompassing a huge range of subjects, styles and sizes. Print processes too: the membership have not held back from experimenting with the more unusual ones.

Some tackle the theme quite directly: Alastair Kinroy’s Identity Concerns Us shows a crowded migrant dingy crossing paths with another which is flying the Union Jack. Are they there to help, or fleeing the UK for their own reasons? Or perhaps taking people back from whence they came? Kevin Maringer reflects on his own experience of being an outsider in Kevin, New York, migrant.

Many of the artists explore the natural world. There is a proliferation of birds, from Polly Morris’ majestic heron taking off, to Deborah Warren’s tiny linocut of a long-tailed tit, Helen Kennedy’s cormorant, Kittie Jones’ guillemots, and Clare Padgett’s dodo.

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Ursula Pretsch’s Safe Zone looks at the difficult question of making room for wildlife with a polar bear at the foot of a precipitous spiral staircase. Doreen Boogert looks at landscape and energy with her picture of Rockcliffe in Dumfriesshire, the turbines of an offshore windfarm visible beyond the picturesque bay.

Others work with abstraction: Paul Furneaux’s submission is a striking mokuhanga print, Sumi Bleed: Rain. Alastair Clark’s Hot Air is a cleverly distorted grid imposed on a skyscape as if melting in the heat of the sun. Rhona Taylor’s Blue Fragments is delicate and precise.

Ingrid Bell and Jenny Martin celebrate pattern and colour. Irina Narbutt’s Limestone Grounding series no.11 is all texture.

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It’s always interesting to see printmakers experimenting in three dimensions. Joanne Pemberton wins the Members’ Prize for her work Living with no brain, an intricately folded print inspired by the fossil of a sea urchin. Cat Outram experiments with nine panels offset at different angles, while Carol Smith has built a freestanding dome-like structure displaying a network of triangular prints. Mary Walters’ multi-panelled Sea Ice Requiem takes its space hanging free above the rest of the show.

In a big group exhibition, the unexpected catches the eye: Rory Hamilton’s You’re looking well (at the GPs) is part of a series of works using phrases heard by someone living with a diagnosis of chronic illness. Both Caitlin Whitaker and Chalmers Smith look down on their subjects from above. Hetal Chudasama’s His Ancient, Dreamless, Uninvaded Sleep seems to be looking up at the bow of a vast ship.

Frances Richardson’s Patrick Snoozing with Moyo is an evocative picture of a man and a rhino with a story we can only guess at. June August’s Unicorn Justice has the mystical beast doubling as a golf caddy. Susan Sloan invents a story around a Gameboy in Yoshi’s Dream, Deconstructed. Eleanor Buffam’s striking Kaleidoscope Eyes V successfully fuses image and pattern.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Gallery begins the year with an ambitious and impressive group show bringing together some 26 artists and makers with connections to The Northern Isles. The broad range of works includes painting, sculpture, jewellery, ceramics and furniture (antique Orcadian and Shetlandic chairs with modern versions by Roland Fraser and Kevin Gauld).

Among the painters, there is a common theme of wrestling with an elemental landscape which is half way to being abstract before you start to pin it down on canvas, and where the light and weather are ever-changing.

Victoria Crowe, who spent time on Orkney in 2022 on an RSA-funded residency, realised she needed to paint clouds for the first time after experiencing the islands’ big skies. A work such as Threshold Between Sea and Sky demonstrates her grasping this subject, making the clouds material, almost sculptural, above a thin dark flange of land.

Artists approach the challenge of the Northern Isles in contrasting ways. Gail Harvey’s pictures are expressive and semi-abstract. Paintings like Clearwater and Winter Surf are vibrant and physical encounters with the ocean. Peter Davis, whose preferred medium is watercolour, creates pictures which are delicate and dreamlike, evoking water and light in poised washes of colour.

Others - Ruth Brownlee, Janette Kerr, Sigurd Smith, printmaker Ingrid Budge - work on the spectrum between representation and abstraction, holding the tension between spontaneity and control.

Orkney-based Samantha Clark holds that tension, too, in a meditative and meticulously detailed practice in which she lays down dense patterns of white lines over rich swathes of colour. She negotiates the pull of energy versus control, motion versus stillness, in impressively large-scale works like The Wave, Dark Sea at Evening and This Salted Light.

Drawing is the focus of Ron Sandford’s practice, and he was known particularly for architectural drawing before relocating to the island of Yell in 2002. He now applies the same precision of hand and eye to the island’s rocks, fields and abandoned agricultural machinery.

There is a small group of works by Frances Walker, including a large and beautiful oil painting Sand, Stones & Sea, Orkney, which adeptly balances detail and space. It’s wonderful, too, to see two works by Bet Low, who made Orkney her home and painted it in smooth, sensual curves, and Sylvia Wishart, whose Orkney paintings make particular use of texture as well as delicate colour.

Add to all this wooden sculptures and box constructions by former Shetland resident Alex Malcolmson, powerful ceramics by Patricia Shone (based on Skye, but with definite overtones of wild northernness), prints by Japanese artist now living on Shetland Megumi Barrington Uenoyama, jewellery by Grace Girvan made from Orkney pebbles, and more.

If the show has a fault, it is perhaps that it tries to fit in too much, too many styles and perspectives. But to pursue that feels like being a killjoy. It is a superb celebration of the Northern Isles, an embarrassment of riches and a perfect show for the short, cold days of January.

Our Shared World is at Edinburgh Printmakers until 15 March; The Northern Isles is at the Scottish Gallery until 31 January (a smaller selection of works will remain until 28 February)

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