EDINBURGH.- Visual art organisations and artists across Scotland showcase a wealth of cultural experiences on a range of platforms - journey across the nation through a wide range of projects you can experience now.

From an exhibition of works that will never be seen together and a performance of the Atlakim ‘Dance of the Forest Spirits’ ceremony, to a nation wide photography project and an exhibition of beautiful weavings behind closed doors in the rural South West - Scotland’s art scene is brimming with digital activity and visual art interactions in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. There’s online films to watch, things to read, discussions and events to take part in and for those looking for artistic inspiration everything from a downloadable colouring book, weaving workshops to an online cyborg parade. You can even visit a sculpture park on Minecraft while COVID-19 restricts visits in real life and make your own new work of art. Importantly, now is also the time artists need direct support and many in Scotland have taken the opportunity to sell and share their work directly with the public through individual websites on social media using #artistsupportpledge.

Here’s just a few ways of engaging with visual art in Scotland in the current times.

Digital exhibitions

Ingleby Gallery
The Unseen Masterpiece… is an exhibition of artworks that no one will see, of works that will never be together. Under a title borrowed (and slightly mistranslated) from Balzac’s Le Chef-d’oevre Inconnu Ingleby presents a series of interconnected images, posted daily in an exhibition that isn’t an exhibition. Beginning this week and continuing until the gallery is able to resume its normal programme, they will publish a new work daily in a rolling sequence, with every selection being the work of an artist who has taken part in some aspect of the gallery’s more conventional exhibition programme over the past 22 years. It will in effect be a tribute to all of the gallery’s favourite things. The works will appear each week day via their website and Instagram and every Friday an email will summarise the previous five days sequence, and release a newly commissioned film from the studio of one of the artists featured that week. The sequence will begin where we left off… with Marine Hugonnier, the artist whose exhibition closed prematurely at the gallery in Edinburgh a few weeks ago.

Jupiter Artland
Jupiter Artland have opened a virtual sculpture park in Minecraft, with young people invited to build proposals for their own sculptures to be added to the online collection. Andy Goldsworthy, Sara Barker and Shane Waltener among artists sending Notes from Jupiter, a series of creative activities for young people to explore at home. Peter Liversidge invites teenagers to share their lockdown stories, incorporating responses into a monumental new Sign Painting to be unveiled at Jupiter Artland later this summer as part of Jupiter Artland’s series dedicated to the legendary artist Allan Kaprow. Artists have also been announced for first Rising Residency, powered by Glasgow-platform OH141 and Jupiter Artland to support artists who identify as womxn, person of colour, LBBTQ+ or under-represented communities in the arts.

CAMPLE LINE
Acts for placing woollen and linen, an exhibition by American artist Helen Mirra at CAMPLE LINE and is temporarily shut but the weavings are being showcased online with a beautiful virtual walk through. Standard Incomparable, is a project of international scope first brought together in 2015 by Mirra and first shown at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California in 2016. Comprising weavings made by weavers from 16 countries and all born between 1949 and 2009, it will be on display at CAMPLE LINE for nine weeks before it becomes the material for a new work by Helen Mirra – Acts for placing woollen and linen (2020). As soon as it is safe to do so, the weavings will be taken from the gallery by invited participants (both local and from further afield), and placed outside in the surrounding landscape where they will be left. Each weaving will leave the gallery with a person or group by foot, and be placed somewhere that seems right for it. In this way, as Mirra says ‘the collection will be let go of.’ For now, CAMPLE LINE is asking people to enjoy the work with a virtual walk through until it is safe to walk the works out into the countryside.

Whilst the building remains closed, the team has been working on a new online spring programme. This spring, they invite you to participate in a writing project and workshop with Victoria Miguel, a writer and specialist in the work of artist and composer John Cage, which explores Cage’s method of ‘writing through,’ drawing on letters exchanged between the celebrated Scottish author and essayist Thomas Carlyle and the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. #StayHomeWatchTogether brings you a number of films available for live streaming from their website throughout May and June and an online weaving workshop is also available online.

Rhubaba
Rhubaba Gallery and Studios is pleased to have invited artist duo Bureau d'études to conduct research in Scotland in February - March 2020. The research took the form of a two week trip in Scotland; Bureau d'études visited and contacted organisations and communities with diverse practices and ways of making, including crofting, archeology, farming, art practicing and more. The research will inform the production of farewell, Art, an online exhibition of new work and the presentation of research by Bureau d’etudes. This research-driven project draws from the hypothesis that we will soon emphatically experience a collapse of social and cultural order due to the looming ecological degradation. The exhibition will ask: How can we help to shape the social, political, and cultural life of the future?

Talbot Rice
Earlier this year, in celebration of the opening of Pine's Eye at Talbot Rice Gallery, members of the Kwakwaka’wakw community performed the Atlakim ‘Dance of the Forest Spirits’ ceremony outside Canada for the first time. Including story-telling, music and dance, the performers assumed the role of forest spirits. In the Legend of Atlakim, these spirits visit Prince Kwak’wabalas in a sacred place and share with him a dance that will teach him respect for all living things.. Video documentation of the full ceremony will be released on the gallery’s website very soon. Keep an eye out on their website later this spring here www.trg.ed.ac.uk

Talbot Rice have also commissioned Jack Handscombe to produce a new publication as part of our Projects programme. Jack has taken the opportunity to dig back into his extensive archive of found and original photographs before weaving them together with poetic narrative threads. The result is an autobiographical visual trip full of puzzles, reflections and unexpected treasures.

Take action and get creative:

Stills, Edinburgh
Elementary Blueprint was originally planned as a creative experiment for participants across Edinburgh and Stills wanted to create an alternative photograph of our city using the elements and, in the middle of March, began to post cyanotype paper to community groups and individuals across the city. Elementary Blueprint has changed - they have now made this an online project and are opening it up to participants from across the UK – they want as many people as possible to take part in this creative project. Help create an alternative document of this challenging and extraordinary time and make your own unique cyanotype.

Atlas Arts
A limited edition colouring book is now online and is part of Patterns of Flora | Mapping Seven Raasay Habitats, a 2015 ATLAS Arts commission by artist Frances Priest in collaboration with botanist Stephen Bungard. A celebration of the diverse flora of Raasay, it features the original botanical drawings made by the artist of seven different plant habitats. For a limited period a specially adapted A4 version of the Patterns of Flora colouring booking is available as a free download for you to print at home.

An Atlas Arts community meal, screening and cyborg workshop due to take place at Minginish Community Hall on 18 April has been postponed. In its place the team are inviting you to join the Plural Futures Virtual Cyborg Parade. Cyborgs are fictional or hypothetical beings often found in Science Fiction. Taking any form, human like or not, their imagined powers and abilities can extend beyond human possibilities. Create your cyborgs out of recycled material and things you find around your home, and imagine what super powers your futuristic beings might have. We hope to bring cyborgs of all ages in Skye, Lochalsh and around the world together online, at a time when us humans are physically apart. We’ll be sharing simple tips and tricks for making your cyborg beings on Facebook and Instagram.

Edinburgh Printmakers
Based in one of the largest print studios in Europe, Edinburgh Printmakers have created a series of weekly simple at home printmaking You Tube videos for beginners. Led by Fiona Maher these share printmaking techniques you can do at home. All of the prints featured in these videos can be made with items you'll find around the house and in the first video Fiona teaches us how to create a ‘no phone’ selfie. Those looking for more advanced techniques can delve into the Edinburgh Printmakers video archives for everything from japanese woodblock printing demonstrations to lectures from leading artists.

Dovecot Studios
World renowned tapestry studio in the heart of Edinburgh, Dovecot Studios is encouraging weaving from home. With a series of “How To Guides”. For over 100 years Dovecot has collaborated with international artists to make exceptional handwoven tapestries. The team at Dovecot believe that anybody can enjoy the art of weaving and to inspire and innovate they are sharing some useful tips on how to weave from home.

Online communities:

Collective
Collective are currently organising a series of online screenings, each up for a week and with corresponding Zoom discussion. Coming up are The Heavy of Your Body Parts and the Cool Air of the Air Condition was a new film and installation by Ross Little, tracing different forms of globalised labour (from 16 April, discussion 22 April) and Kimberley O’Neill’s Re-routing (2019) merging the machine and self in a circuitous visual relationship as it follows a female protagonist’s road trip through the Californian desert and Silicon Valley, a place associated with the emergence of personalised technologies (from April 23, discussion April 29).

Lux Scotland
Lux Scotland are currently offering weekly One-to-One Advice Sessions for artists in the coming weeks, to help those who need to align their practice with the current situation. There’s also a monthly artists moving image ‘pub quiz’ to join in with.

Scottish Sculpture Workshop
Despite its highly rural location in Aberdeenshire, Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW) has a vast range of international connections and partnerships. Their current Creative Europe project, BE PART, sets out to explore collaborative art making and sharing through decentralised governance models involving local citizens, artists, partners and policy makers. With the current restrictions on international mobility and the wider need for change in how the arts currently operates, SSW will be working with local communities and artistic partners including Marwa Arsanios, Roland Gunst, Lotte van den Berg and Fanny Robles, to collaboratively develop an online Assembly later in the year exploring (amongst other things) How digital processes, design and interaction can inform relationship building and collective care.

MAP: SOUNDING OUT
MAP, present a series of articles on Staying Close.The question of this close view unfolds in our first issue, Staying Close, as a collection that gestures towards a proximity that is geographical, interpersonal and intertextual, in recognition of the challenges of commissioning, of research in a fractional position and the limits to knowledge. Why and how might we write about what is close to us while still hidden behind a screen?

In this first of this short series, MAP is delighted to screen a new film by Màiri Lafferty, alongside Polyphonic Repentance: a text by Holly Yeoman. Claire Biddles reflects on connections between art and music in Glasgow and Doing It (All) Yourself. Claire has generously put together a playlist for home listening. In Light Translations, Rebecca Wilcox listens-in and responds to Stolen Voices Album Launch by Johanna Linsley and Rebecca Louise Collins, presented at CCA Glasgow, 8 Feb 2020.

Then there will be a series around the moving-image: they will be hosting Lauren La Rose’s film Gay Bond which we will publish alongside a MAP interview with the artist. Marcus Jack writes thoughts on place-making, narrative and labour in relation to artists’ moving image and the conditions around its production in Scotland. Rhea Storr considers the gaze in Steve McQueen’s retrospective at Tate.

Support Artists:

Hanna Tuuliki
Hanna is releasing music from the last five years that has featured in HER various audiovisual installations and performances, which until now has only ever been experienced in those exhibition/live contexts. The first piece released is SOURCEMOUTH : LIQUIDBODY from 2016 (more info on the band camp). She plans to release music from Deer Dancer, and Away with the Birds, amongst other things.

Panel
Presented by Panel and Voices of Experience, Remnants is a free newspaper for Glasgow's Merchant City. Remnants is commissioned by Civic Room and is a part of their curated programme 'Of Lovely Tyrants and Invisible Women', featuring four solo exhibitions by artists, Lauren Printy Currie, Ashanti Harris, Thulani Rachia and Marija Nemčenko and a newspaper publication by Panel.

Mother Tongue
Mother Tongue have a forthcoming text published by Brookyln Rail due early-May, discussing Alberta Whittle's video work 'What Sound Does the Blk Atlantic Make?' as part of curator Daisy Desrosiers's guest critic invitation themed around Glissant and translation. The film was originally shown at Edinburgh Printmakers in 2019 and is a chance to relook at Alberta’s work.

Patricia Fleming Projects
Through the Instagram account @patriciaflemingglasgow you can follow a digital residency programme, currently hosting the moving image artist Anne Colvin. The gallery’s Youtube channel also will host shorts introducing artists, their work and their studios in the coming weeks and those created to date. Also recommended is the gallery Soundcloud for narration about exhibitions and poetry readings, demonstrated recently with beautiful works by Anne Colvin. Glasgow’s popular Art Car Boot Sale will have an online edition in November 2020, watch this space for more details.