July Exhibitions

The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

www.scottish-gallery.co.uk

IT IS an odd and sometimes quite dry month, culturally if not meteorologically, these few weeks before the various Edinburgh Festivals open up doors about the city and stuff them with cultural goings-on. But if some galleries are shut in anticipation, many are still open for business, not least the commercial galleries, who provide a fresh, if modest, line-up in July as the monthly programme rolls over.

The Scottish Gallery is always a good bet for prints and applied arts, aside from its weighty fine art roster, and July is as good a month as any to concentrate on them. This month, a four-square look at the print in “Studio Practice”, a showing of Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham, Elizabeth Blackadder, Victoria Crowe and Frances Walker. The emphasis is on the collaborative process of print-making which these four artists variously indulged in. Included in this eclectic mix – both artistically and in terms of medium – are screenprints, etchings, oils and more, from Blackadder’s still lives to Frances Walker’s sketches of Tiree.

Elsewhere in the gallery there is a small exhibition of works on paper by the Colourists, including Peploe, Cadell, Hunter and ten newly-acquired works by Fergusson.

Downstairs Grace Girvan shows the latest of her beautiful pebble and enamel jewellery in an extensive solo show, and Amanda Simmons, a glass artist here showing for the first time, shows her gravity formed glassware inspired by landscape patterns. It’s a far cry from her original training in Biomedical Sciences. There is also a small showing of three tapestry artists, Jo Barker, Sara Brennan and Susan Mowatt, who graduated some time since from Edinburgh College of Art and whose work is both conceptual and abstract.