A new exhibition – Uprooted Visions – has just opened at Edinburgh Printmakers and will run until 2 July.
The new artworks are the culmination of a series of residencies held at printmaking studios all over Europe to support artists whose practices have been disrupted by displacement and migration, and one of the residencies was at Edinburgh Printmakers.
Themes explored in the exhibition include the concept of home, the enduring experience of war, the mundane, experiential nature of moving across borders and re-configuring notions of self-identity.
The two year project led by Edinburgh Printmakers was funded by Creative Europe. The work of 30 artists is now on display including some from Ukraine.
Each artist was awarded a non-prescriptive month-long residency to provide space to experiment, explore and work with studio technicians to discover new techniques or develop current projects. Uprooted Visions will include a range of work created in print, textiles, video, sculpture and photography. The artworks reflect a range of responses including those that delve into the concept of home, the enduring experience of war, the mundane, experiential nature of journeying across borders and re-configuring notions of self-identity while other artists have chosen to use their residency time to create artworks linked with different themes.
Edinburgh Printmakers CEO Janet Archer said: “Brought together for the first time, this exhibition invites us to encounter an assembly of makers, each motivated by distinct creative intentions and bringing their own unique individual perspective, while creating room for conversations around meaningful threads that resonate across different works.
The purpose of the residencies has been to offer a space to artists to explore their art in a way that works for them whether it is to deepen their artistic practice, develop new techniques or simply enjoy the freedom of a flexible open residency without any expectations on their work. From the sharing of knowledge to a greater understanding of the artists’ experiences we’re privileged to have hosted such a diverse range of talent. The connections established not just with the artists in the studio but across the entire European network of print studios has enriched Edinburgh Printmakers and I’m excited to see the resulting artworks take over the entire building at Castle Mills in Fountainbridge.”
2 July 2023
Gallery 1, Edinburgh Printmakers,
Castle Mills 1 Dundee Street, EH3 9FP
Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 6pm
http://www.edinburghprintmakers.co.uk/
Uprooted Visions and the In From the Margins project have been made possible with the support of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. Additional support provided by The City of Edinburgh Council, The National Lottery through Creative Scotland, the Arts Council of Ireland, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the Embassy of Slovenia in London. Uprooted Visions is kindly sponsored by StayCity.
Participating artists include:
Irynka “Ira” Gvozdyk was born in 1983 in Kyiv, Ukraine. She graduated from the National Medicine University and then did a degree at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Printmaking. Her works have been shown in Kyiv in several solo exhibitions, including at the US Embassy International Gallery and Gallery 83. She exhibited in 2018 at the 9th International Biennale for Prints in Douro, Portugal, and in 2022 in the exhibition Ukrainische Grafik at FARB Museum, in Borken, Germany.
During her residency at Funen Printmaking Studio, Irynka worked with photogravure, a technique she felt comfortable with since she had documented her journey from Ukraine to Germany in a photographical way. Irynka’s work My Way Home is a representation of artistic allusions and reminiscences created under the influence of changes in the living environment. The artist depicts longing; a state of devastation from a journey into the unknown. A journey that does not bring joy is a forced state that does not have a deadline. Through the lens of the smartphone camera, she leads the viewer through her own path, which actually unites the paths of many Ukrainians. Having left Ukraine in an unknown direction and without a plan, Ira has only one clear goal – to go back home.
Lina Rica (1980, Makarska, Croatia) is an intermedia artist working in the field of installation with video, printmaking, photography and animation. Her work deals with the social processes of past and present worlds, and their influence on the contemporary individual. She obtained her master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2008.
The Croatian artist drew on her own lived experience when working on the topic of home during her residency at MGLC Ljubljana. Home can be understood not only as a physical place that an individual owns and belongs to but it also represents a localised set of meanings. Lina has created a three-dimensional spatial model that does not follow the logic of practical, applied architecture, but rather represents the idea of a modular and changeable home. This follows a conceptualisation that goes beyond a one-sided definition; here the home represents the origin, current residence, descent or perception of the world and space, fused with memories, emotions, plans and expectations.
The Hull-based, Sudanese collective Arafa and the Dirars brings together Arafa Hassan Gouda and four of her children: Mayas, Ethar, Waieel and Akram Dirar. Working predominantly across painting, drawing and installation, their practices weave together in a variety of ways, enabling ideas and work to be shaped organically by input from different members as well as each having distinct artistic voices.
Arafa and the Dirars have developed a large, printed textile artwork, collectively denouncing the plight of those whose lives continue to be torn apart by war. The piece entitled Our Scar shows a screen-printed background of a village in Libya seconds after an explosion has occurred, the sky covered in yellow and orange flames. Over this surface, the artists have applied small print blocks by hand, each depicting a different figure witnessing the blast, their bodies distorted by horror and grief. One of them is a child, whose face resembles simultaneously a wave caused by a bomb and a rose, evoking both life’s fragility under war and the artists’ demand for a peaceful future.
Rezan Arab, Solitude. 2022
Rezan Arab is originally from Syria, but left at the start of the civil war and has been living in Denmark since. Rezan holds a B.A in painting, from Damascus University and a MA in Fine Art, specialising in Painting and Art History, from University of Fine Art, Bucharest in Romania. Rezan was awarded First Prize from the University of Fine Arts, Syria. Since moving to Denmark, Rezan has regularly exhibited his work in Denmark and Sweden. Rezan’s prints draw our focus towards the isolation that marks the immigrant’s life and the difficulties arising from it. Describing these works, he notes:
“This series of engraved drawings represent individuals, drawn in an expressive style which is far from reality. There is clearly a lot of exaggeration in these figures. I have tried to express the isolation that I experienced when I first came to Denmark 8 years ago. It was very difficult for me at the beginning because of how different cultures and traditions were. I lived in a state of isolation until I gradually adapted to the situation. Through these works, I am trying to create an image of my isolation by employing oriental compositions and elements that express my culture, a culture that I am trying to communicate to others.”
Leanne McDonagh is an award-winning Irish artist, as well as a teacher and a member of the Travelling community who grew up on a halting site, with first-hand experience of the prejudices and misconceptions that society has about Travellers. As an artist she feels she has a unique opportunity to represent and record her community from within. Her work features in both private and public collections and since her debut in 2015 she has exhibited both nationally and internationally.
Whilst on residency at Cork Printmakers Leanne created a quadryptich of screenprints inspired by the passing on of traditions within the Traveller community. Leanne creates vibrant images that have a lot of layers and movement to them. This is a parallel to the notion of a community that also has many layers and movement to it. “My grandfather was a Tinsmith, but he died when he was just 40 years old, leaving behind 16 children, 6 of which were girls and 10 boys. My father being one of them missed out on the opportunity of learning his father’s trade. Years later he sought out these skills and learned the basics from an old friend. I wanted to capture my father during the process of creating one of his pieces as I believe his very act of creating such a piece is homage not only to his own father but to the past and to a way of life that was once more appreciated in a not so complicated world.”
Leanne McDonagh, Tinkering with Tradition. 2022
Mousa AlNana was born and raised in Homs, Syria, and is now based in Glasgow, Scotland. He started his career at a young age. After graduating from Sobhi Shoieb Art Centre, he studied Fine Arts at Damascus University and graduated in 2010. He holds a master’s degree from Glasgow School of Art.
During his residency at Edinburgh Printmakers, Mousa experimented with etching on copper with different sizes and techniques, translating his own collage practice into printmaking, resulting in two larger etchings, where chine collé, monoprint, drypoint, and aquatint can be seen as layers mixed and bonded onto the paper. These prints have been developed as part of Unorthodox Heretics, an open-ended series of figurative works in different media highlighting queer experiences and the complex human emotions within the context of the Middle East.
Diaa received his first art degree from Aleppo University. He then travelled abroad to study for his Master’s in art research before he ended up in Ireland, where he is developing his career as a multidisciplinary artist and educator. He has been in art residencies all over Ireland and exhibited in different group shows, recently in the LAB Gallery in January and the Horse Gallery in June. He is a VAI member, currently based in Dublin and is a studio resident in The Dean Studios. Through sculptural installations and intimate paintings, Diaa explores the complexities and contradictions that he has experienced as a Middle Eastern immigrant to the Western world. He practices a variety of elements related to his background, including calligraphy, geometric patterns, and eastern craft styles.
“The prints made during my residency at Cork Printmakers, included working on creating this imaginary landscape of oriental architecture, a deconstructive form which is connected by a pattern of repetition of one word in Arabic “كيف”-Kayefa, in English means “How”.”
Barbara Miše (b. 1994) is a multimedia artist from Croatia, currently based in Amsterdam. She works in the areas of applied arts such as illustration and animation, while remaining radically committed to experimenting and examining the limits of the media in use and their traditional narrative forms.
In her independent artistic practice, she focuses on the transmediality of fixed narratives in sound, film and image, as well as the operating systems of memory and recollection, the subjective relationship of the individual towards their past and history as a collectively constructed fiction.
She completed her undergraduate studies in Animated Film and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. You could have seen and/or heard some of her work on sound art and film festivals (Sound Art Inkubator, 2016, Zagreb, Croatia; Sine Linea 2017, Zagreb; Floating Castle festival 2020 & 2021, Grad Snežik, Slovenia; ANIMATEKA, Ljubljana, 2020), and other group exhibitions and film screenings in Croatia and Slovenia.
“At the start of my residency, I just moved to Amsterdam, after a long period of moving through different countries. I was thinking a lot about how much of ‘home’ we carry with us, the way that we connect and transpose our memories to unfamiliar environments in order to make sense of the place. It was interesting to observe how the process of adaptation takes place in my mind and in my body.”
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