Edinburgh: Inverleith House, Fruitmarket Gallery + Rhinoceros
So last Thursday my bestie and I headed through to Edinburgh to face the dreaded festival crowds and see some exhibitions before an evening theatre show which a friend was performing in.
We kicked off the afternoon with a visit to a favourite of mine - Inverleith House which is situated in the middle of Edinburgh's Botanic Gardens. After the Trustees decided to close the contemporary art gallery last October this is the first show to be hosted here as part of the new 'more inclusive' programme of events to come - and it did not disappoint.
The exhibition titled Plant Scenery of the World runs from July 29th - October 29th and is well worth a visit. Walking in to the first room in the house, we were greeted by Charlie Billingham's hand printed wallpaper and plants in painted pots sitting alongside original paintings of plans for the greenhouses elsewhere in the botanic gardens.
Moving in to the next room by Isik Güner, Jacqui Pestell and Sharon Tingey, were large scale framed watercolour paintings of flowers. Seeing this amount of detail in watercolour paintings never fails to impress me as I never did quite get the hang of watercolour as a medium while I was at art school.
The last room on this floor of the house was by Laura Aldridge and required shoe covers to enter the room. The printed fabric floor was made using a natural eco-dye method using substances like vinegar, rust metal and soy which react with plants she'd collected from areas of the botanic gardens, leaving a trace impression of the plants on the fabric. This was combined with large colourful glass eye sculptures reminiscent of those found in East Mediterranean cultures such as Greece and Turkey, where they're used to ward off evil spirits. In this scenario they are used to playfully direct your eye around the room.
Heading upstairs we entered a room with odd hand shelves adorned with bronze cast configurations of various plant specimens by Bobby Niven, and a tree-turned-sculpture which we couldn't help but think looked like the heptapods from the film Arrival which we'd watched the night before.
The next room was by Oliver Osborne and featured fabric walls with cleverly embroidered 'drips' with smoothly finished paintings of plants and still lifes hung above them. As you can see from the look on her face, clearly a favourite with Karlie.
The next room featured a vitrine of historical books opened at pages of lithograph plates of various jungles and plants, and the walls were adorned with watercolours of the same prints by John Hutton Balfour and Robert Kaye Greville. This would be the least contemporary of all the rooms in the house, and led straight into the last room of the house which featured a film work by Ben Rivers - a personal favourite of mine.
The film 'Urth' is a 19 minute long narrative of an unnamed woman's reflections upon her own mortality and a record of her last days as the lone survivor of the human race in a deteriorating manmade habitat. Rivers' is one of those filmmakers whose work never fails to impress even just purely from his aesthetic choices of what frames to use and how he edits his work.
Having finished seeing the exhibition Karlie and I headed in to the city centre in search of food, settling for a place called MUMS Comfort Food if only for the funny name and branding imagery.
We both got pies and chips: Karlie a venison and redcurrant one, and me a classic steak and ale. For the portion size alone we really couldn't complain at the price of £9.95 and needless to say it was a quiet meal as we both sat in silence stuffing our faces with meaty deliciousness.
Heading in the direction of the Fruitmarket Gallery we fought through the madness that is the Royal Mile during festival season, swerving through countless leafleters and street performers and eventually making it out of the other side and to the gallery. Karlie had already seen the Jac Leirner show 'Add It Up' so I went round alone as she browsed the bookshop that the gallery has.
Visually the work is stunning. Each sculptural piece is made of simple, disposable, everyday materials which Leirner collects in masses and repurposes, putting a new perspective on the mundane. The floor sculpture in the first photo Blue Phase (1991) is made up of 50,000 obsolete banknotes strung together, one laid over the other. The copper on the wall, only a small section of Little Light (2005/2017), two miles of insulated copper wire threaded from the visible plug and nailed up-and-down in perfect formation along the entire length of the back wall to a single lit lightbulb.
Heading upstairs there were collections of cigarette papers collected from the past twenty plus years and reconfigured into pieces such as Some to go and Five to go (2016), and my personal favourite -pictured above - Skin (Randy King Size Wired) (2013) which consisted of over 2000 white rolling papers pasted to the wall using their own adhesive strips, aligned with perfect precision.
Our last stop and the main reason we'd come to Edinburgh was to see Rhinoceros at the Lyceum Theatre. Having been pre-warned by our friend that it was completely bonkers I really didn't know what to expect, only vaguely aware that it was a play about people turning into Rhinoceroses and that being a metaphor for people's political thinking and actions changing drastically and unexpectedly - quite fitting for the current political climate in today's society.
With a hilarious script including the classic pull-the-chair-out-from-under-them trick and multiple bird shit moments, as well as an actual person in a suit with a cat head playing one character's pet cat and a body dropping unexpectedly from the ceiling - I can safely say our friend wasn't lying when they said bonkers...
The stage grew in height with each scene thanks to the set design of different pull out tiers and screens that added different layers, creating a smaller space each time for the actors to perform in. The finale was the epic conclusion to both the play and the set design as our friend, Robbie, cried out a defiant monologue - the stage deconstructing itself around him. It was one of those moments that I really wish I could have filmed - just epic.
We ended the night by catching him after the show to congratulate him on his brilliant performance before driving back to Glasgow, rocking out to Childish Gambino on an empty motorway, what a great way to spend the day...
If you're interested in seeing Rhinoceros it is coming back to the Lyceum Theatre in Spring 2018 so keep your eyes peeled for tickets! Here's a video of some clips of the play: