Dalkeith Photo 2025
Please find attached the information from Dalkeith Palace re the exhibition we have been invited to participate in. The theme for our prints is
“ Midlothian Nature and Family Life Today”
This makes more sense if you read the attached to see how we will fit in with the main exhibition theme.
Studies in Photography (lead curator, Julie Lawson, former Senior Curator, National Galleries of Scotland) propose an exhibition for 2025, featuring work by leading contemporary photographers.
The themes, inspired by the parkland setting of the Palace and the importance of the Buccleuch collection of family albums that, together with landscapes by Walter Dalkeith, would feature in the exhibition, comprises Nature and Family.
The exhibition, following the precedent of 2024, would occupy the ground floor of the Palace, with additional use of a room for the showing of moving-image work.
The Photographers
Robin Gillanders would recreate his 2004 exhibition, ‘The Philosopher’s Garden’. This consists of photographs taken in the garden in France where the philosopher, J-J Rousseau wrote his Meditations of a Solitary Walker (1776-78), together with photographs taken in the Scottish garden significantly inspired by Rousseau, –Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta. Dining Room
Iain Stewart: landscapes associated with own family history and the Scottish Covenanters.Great Drawing Room
Alicia Bruce, Margaret Mitchell and Jane Brettle(Film): works that explore how inherited landscape has defined the way of life of local families in Aberdeenshire, Jura and former mining areas of Scotland, and how landscape and lives have been affected by change.Queen’s Room
Norman McBeath: Penderdosi, a collaboration with Edmond de Waal.
The title is a musical term that means sound gradually dying away.
A series of images of leaves on the cusp of decay, and a meditation on the beauty and consolation to be found in their contemplation.Picture Closet
Alex Hamilton: cyanotypes made directly from The Peace Rose , a plant whose genealogy can be traced back for over two hundred years. The Great Closet
Andy Wiener: Family Tree, work that combines the themes of Nature and Family, in which portraits of his forebears are projected onto trees then photographed. It is envisaged that large scale versions would hang in the entrance to the Palace as an introduction to the exhibition.Entrance Hall
Videos by Aerial Photographer, Patricia Macdonald (Film), and ( potentially) the acclaimed American photographer ,Nan Goldin.
David Williams and David Eustace would show work on the theme of Family.
An additional element outwith these main themes –appropriate for a room in which, in the past, Old-Master paintings were displayed– would be, by Ron O’Donnell. Paintings by Brueghel, in which details and figures, are ‘re-presented and re-enacted’, via computer-intervention, with O’Donnell himself acting all the parts in the dramas. The works are an amusing and satirical transposition of 16th century meditations on morality and proverbs about human folly to contemporary Scotland.(Blue dressing Room)
Calum Colvin is another artist who would base a work on an Old-Master painting –on this occasion, a work from the Buccleuch collection. His elaborate method is to build and paint a complex and visually tantalising and intriguing ‘stage set’ which is then photographed – the final image produced, as if magically, by the camera itself. He would make the set over the duration of the exhibition in Restoration Yard, where the public would have the opportunity to see the work in progress and engage in conversation with the artist.
Black Burn – Douglas Gordon
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