Turner prize-winning artist exhibits at Lothians attraction

Artist Alberta Whittle will represent Scotland at an international art exhibition in Venice next year, but Lothians audiences can view a segment of the Turner Prize-winning artists extensive work at a new exhibition on their doorstep.

RESET opens at award-winning Jupiter Artland at Wilkieston, West Lothian, on July 31 as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival and runs until October 31. It showcases a new generation of Scottish artists creating socially-active work in the wake of the world-wide pandemic.

The work was filmed across Scotland with locations including Whittle’s native Glasgow and also at Jupiter Artland, in South Africa and Barbados where she now lives.

And the collaboration is said to “respond” to the Black Lives Matter movement, the global pandemic and the climate emergency.

The piece was developed by Whittle (pictured with guests to the preview at the ballroom at Jupiter Artland) using the writing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and it aims to realign “ourselves towards a better politics defined by care and healing”.

RESET ends with the image of the ‘garden’ as a utopian space of relearning, reconnection and resetting and was filmed in the popular Lothians attraction.

And the project is part of a year-long, artist-in-residency connecting artists from Scotland and the Caribbean. It features work by Beccy Nipps from Edinburgh.

Nicky and Robert Wilson have grown the exhibit into “one of the UK’s most significant places” to view outdoor sculpture.

They hope the work will boost visits to the 125-acre meadow, woodland and indoor gallery space, which also boasts 36 permanent sculptures.

Attendances have, said Nicky, surged since the start of the pandemic as guests seek somewhere else to enjoy the fresh air away from their normal walks.