EDINBURGH .- It’s not often that an artist appears with a genuinely new way of making abstract art, but Brandon Logan (b.1996) did precisely this with his degree show from Edinburgh College of Art in 2019, and just four years later he has cemented his growing reputation with his first museum show - at the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, in the Orkney Islands where he grew up, and where he has since returned to live and work.

Logan’s ‘paintings’, as he describes them, have a sculptural presence, hanging away from the wall on raised batons. They acknowledge the place that he’s from, finding their colours in the streets of Stromness and the Orkney landscape, and nodding to the islands’ rich traditions of weaving and tapestry, but as he says:

‘I always think of them as paintings because I have a specific interest in what paint can do. I’m obsessed with the simple transformation of fluid, liquid colour, to solid, that can take place in my hands. It is like magic to me every time’.

It is a distinctive process which involves the flooding, sealing and fusing of warps of string using the gradual application of layers of paint. The string support allows for colour to be suspended within, resulting in works with an open, fretted structure and an innate delicacy.

His first exhibition at Ingleby builds on the body of work exhibited at the Pier and presents what the writer Cal Flyn has described as ‘a strangely affecting practice’, that somehow connects the history of minimal abstraction with a sensibility born of, and belonging to, the Scottish islands.

"The cycles of seasons mirror the human cycles of birth, life, death, as a history constantly happening, constantly beginning in a sense. Time becomes something very physically apparent when in the islands themselves, where the remnants of past lives are so visible, in ruins and wrecks. If I work by a repetitive, potentially time-based process, it might be in part due to these considerations. I think for me there is a small comfort in accepting the passage of time while repeating the same process over and over again." - Brandon Logan

Ingleby Gallery
Brandon Logan: Dog Rose
27 January - 9 March 2024