Our Shared World art review: A broad range of impressions
Our Shared World is a diverse and experimental delight as over 100 artists respond to a universal message in differing ways. Claire Sawers admires this often majestic celebration of printmaking
Standing in front of a joyous, turquoise, abstract screenprint called ‘January’ in the dreich month of that same name (a time renowned for the starting of new hobbies and art projects), who wouldn’t be moved to grab a leaflet about Edinburgh Printmakers and all the courses they run? These include letterpress evenings for beginners, collagraph masterclasses and kids printing workshops with Lego blocks, seeing as you ask.
‘January’ is a wonderful, aqueous pattern of blues and greens, scattered with pops of pastel pink rhombuses and slim orange shards. This is by Edinburgh-based printer and painter Matilda Bryce, one of 124 artists who responded to Edinburgh Printmakers’ theme, Our Shared World. Like everything else on show, it’s for sale, so ‘January’ could hang on your wall year-round. The Own Art 0% finance scheme applies here too, for anyone left skint by the calendar’s opening five-week squeeze.
A total of 280 studio members make work in the former North British Rubber Company factory in Fountainbridge, now one of Europe’s largest printmaking workshops. Our Shared World is Scotland’s biggest celebration of printmaking, where stone lithographs, etchings, woodcuts, Toyobo prints, collages and screenprints explore the realities of co-existing with each other and the places we occupy. It’s a loose brief and for some that means studies of nature. Eiko Yamashita’s ‘Cliff Off The Arbroath 1’ is a majestic, chiseled pink rockface; John Grey’s ‘Loch Lomond From Conic Hill’ is a monochrome view of calm waters; and Helen Kennedy’s ‘Watchfulness, Firth Of Forth, Shag’ is a solemn, pleasingly minimal, black and white etching of a long-necked waterbird. Tiny, detailed examinations of moths, lichen and jellyfish (by Douglas Reed, Alison Grant and Nicky Sanderson respectively) make for serene peeks into rural life, while ‘Bingo (Portal)’ by Josh Murfitt brings us back into Edinburgh and a dilapidated bingo hall with graffitied shutters pulled down.
Besides local environments, others turn their gaze more globally. Alastair Kinroy’s woodcut ‘Identity Concerns Us’ shows coastguards rescuing a crowded dinghy, with a row of feet dangling perilously into the waves, while Kevin Maringer’s ‘Kevin, New York, Migrant’, on bamboo washi paper, is the Anglo-German artist’s take on his five years living as a migrant in America. Hazy clouds float around a Namibian woman with upwards-sculpted dreadlocks and thick necklaces in Isobel Work’s photo ‘Himba Lady Smoking Herself With Cleansed Herb’, and precisely overlapping rectangles explore depths of colour in Rhona Taylor’s ‘Blue Fragments’. Alchemy and experimentation share the same world within this diverse, enjoyable group show.
Our Shared World, Edinburgh Printmakers, until Sunday 15 March; gallery picture: Alan Dimmick.