& Gallery SALVAGE Solo Show 3 Dundas Street, Edinburgh. 5 – 30th July 2025
This is the first exhibition of my body of work called Salvage. I am showing fifteen pieces, from 30cm to 120cm tall, all created over the last eighteen months, developing my theme of Salvage.
I first exhibited my work at the & Gallery in their inaugural Open in 2024. As soon as I walked through the gallery doors I knew that this was the right place for my work! Avril, the gallery Director, has a true vision for wall sculptures and contemporary ceramics/sculpture and she’s not afraid to stick to it. With her gallery team of Olivia and Emily, they always make everyone feel really welcome. It is a beautiful, light, contemporary gallery space at the top of Dundas Street in Edinburgh, just minutes from the main street.
Salvage is a bold and playful series of collage paintings that move beyond the original inspiration. They are rooted in the rugged aesthetics of the urban boatyard, with their weather worn detritus and towering structures, this work draws from the visual language of forgotten industrial spaces. On site drawings and the collection of discarded materials – off cuts of wood, paint sticks, and garish plastics – serve as my foundation for small three dimensional studies which in turn inform the development of my college paintings.
Whenever I need inspiration, I return to my beachcombed characters, my flotsam and jetsam.
As I start to collage and assemble my compositions it is the surface beneath the begins to tell its own story. What matters is not the application of paint in a lush expressive brushstrokes. This is too far removed from my own hand, but how I use the papers functionally: to decorate, protect, conceal flaws, mend, revive, and patch, often over many months. The evidence of human interaction and the accidental marks left by practical fixings are essential to my work. I turned to house paint as my medium when acrylics felt overly synthetic and lacking in the depth that I seek.
As you can see below there are many stages of adding, removing and recomposing. Many layers of paper – up to twenty are added and distressed to reveal snippets of previous life. Usually, in the first stages, the compositions are over complicated so I keep working until I have a quieter, calmer composition, as you can see in the gallery image above.
