THE last two years have proved challenging for singers. So it was for the 130-strong Bearsden Choir, a fine and much-expanded amateur choir who have spent the Covid years coming together virtually in solitude, or masked-up and so socially distanced that only half the choir could fit in the rehearsal hall at one time.
Requiem is, says Katie Paterson, “probably the most epic work I’ve ever made.” Given that the Glasgow-born artist’s past works have ranged from broadcasting live the sounds of a melting glacier to mapping all the dead stars in the universe, and planting a forest (Future Library, 2014) that will, in a century, provide the paper to print the unread works of 100 authors – Margaret Atwood was the first – placed yearly in a “silent archive”, this is no small contention.
Why choose fish fingers when you can have ‘goujons', strips of white fish, coated in flour, egg and
There’s a certain knack to putting together music and art – just look at Wagner, who dedicated his life to the “gesampkunstwerk” or total work of art – that is the multi-discipline of opera.
With obsolescence now designed in to everything from cars to phones to clothes , and the all-encompassing tyranny of plastic where other more sustainable materials were once the norm, the necessity of addressing why we live in the way we do is paramount.
When John James Audubon (1785 - 1851), putative American woodsman, son of a French plantation owner and his housemaid, turned up in Edinburgh in 1826 with hair greased with bear oil and a series of vivid, dramatic bird paintings of American species alien to British shores, very few predicted that the result would become one of the most feted illustrated books of natural history.
Vibrant, diaphanous, painted yet sculpted, constructed, scrunched and assembled, the paintings draped around the walls of the Modern Institute this week are the work of the American painter, Suzanne Jackson, here showing in her first solo exhibition at the gallery.
I can strongly attest to the warming qualities of a Welsh blanket. Not the lovely soft lambswool sort you can buy now, but the solid, sturdy, tightly-woven kind made from sheep that appear so stoically waterproof their wool threatens to knit to the consistency of a waxed tarpaulin.
High up in the former Observatory buildings on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, in the imposing City Dome that once held a substantial telescope for the use of the city’s amateur star gazers, the sound of alien music is ringing out.
In 1912, the Marquess of Bute founded the Edinburgh Tapestry Company – now known as Dovecot – in order to provide tapestry wall-hangings for his Scottish seat, Mount Stuart. With no history of tapestry weaving in Scotland, this was a hugely important move for the craft in Scotland.
