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Visual Arts Scotland, The Mound, Edinburgh (2026)

17/06/2026

We visited Gray’s School of Art Degree Show a couple of weeks ago in the search of the final pieces to put together our Graduate Showcase which is fast approaching. We loved so many works that before we announce the final picks for our prestigious VAS Graduate Awards- we would like to shout out the following visual artists:

Barbara Ann Boyne

Heather Thompson
bitchwaste
Jess Archibald

Visual Arts Scotland strives to support new art school graduates, providing opportunities to exhibit and continual support through mentoring and access to our vibrant, active and participatory membership of over 1,400 practising artists. Graduation is just the beginning!
This week we’ll be visiting both Gray’s School of Art and the University of The Highlands and Islands with the intention of bringing together artists who will, when brought together for our 2026 graduates showcase, create interesting dialogues and dynamic spectacles.

Gray’s School of Art Aberdeen

14/06/2026

INSTAGRAM TAKEOVER: DAY 4

I have always been drawn to materials that carry evidence of time — things shaped slowly through erosion, weathering, decay and transformation. They remind us that landscapes are never fixed but constantly evolving.

Throughout the residency I filled my pockets with small fragments found during walks: weathered bones, smooth stones, feathers, driftwood and other traces left behind by the landscape. For me, access to remote landscapes scattered with objects such as these is integral to both my photographic and sculptural work. Whereas in Glasgow I often travel significant distances to find them, in Orkney they formed part of my everyday surroundings.
I began gathering materials to work with too. Generous local potters, including the Harray Potter, helped me identify local clay and shared techniques for working with it. I also spent time searching for flint. Although flint does not occur as natural bedrock in Orkney, it was transported there at the end of the last Ice Age and can still be found on some of the beaches around Deerness.
A stone can contain an entire afternoon. A bone can return me to a particular stretch of coastline, a conversation, a quality of light, or a feeling that would otherwise be difficult to describe. A collection of objects becomes a map of experiences, a material archive of places I have visited. The objects grant me access to these memories after I have returned home.

- Oli Oli Turner)

13/06/2026

INSTAGRAM TAKEOVER: DAY 3

Walking has become one of the central methods within my practice.

Often, I would leave early in the morning and not return until evening. Some days I walked for eight or nine hours following cliffs, sheep tracks, beaches, and old paths. For me, walking is a way of slowing down enough for the landscape to truly enter the body and imagination.
At first glance Orkney can appear sparse, but the longer you spend moving through it, the more it begins to reveal itself. Small shifts in geology, changing bird behaviour, and fragments of archaeology emerge from the landscape. Everywhere felt layered with traces of the past.

Walking also creates a space for thought. I often stopped to sketch, make photographs, and spent time sitting alone inside cairns, listening to the silence. Many of the questions that shape my work emerged during these long solitary journeys.

Although I was based in Birsay, much of the residency unfolded through journeys to Rousay, Hoy, Papa Westray, and North Ronaldsay. On these islands, particularly North Ronaldsay where I camped for several days, the weather was raw and unforgiving. The coastline is scattered with the remains of whales, dolphins, seals and sheep, slowly returning to the landscape. Walking amongst these traces of life and decay felt like moving through both recent and ancient histories at once. It was here that I had a strange encounter with a fulmar, whose red oily stomach contents splattered onto a rock beside me before it laid an egg, stared at me for a moment, then flew off as if nothing unusual had happened.

Some of my most memorable experiences came through conversations. Tea shared with islanders. Stories exchanged with fishermen, artists, weavers and former lighthouse keepers. Again and again I was struck by the generosity of people willing to share their knowledge, memories and the occasional lift back to my campsite after a long day’s walk.

- Oli (Oli Turner)

12/06/2026

INSTAGRAM TAKEOVER: DAY 2

Alongside walking and exploring, much of my time in Orkney was spent researching.

I often think of research as another form of wandering. Rather than moving through a landscape, you move through layers of stories, objects and histories. I spent time visiting archives and museums across the mainland and the outer islands, as well as speaking with archaeologists, artists and islanders.

During my residency I became increasingly interested in how materials such as stone, bone and flint have been used by communities over time. The traces of these materials remain highly visible in the Orcadian landscape and form an integral part of my work.

One morning I spent time with archaeologist Mark Edmonds, who taught me flint knapping techniques. I also visited the archives of UHI Archaeology to examine Mesolithic microliths excavated from Linkshouse in Stronsay.

At Stromness Museum herbarium I looked at plant specimens from the 19th and 20th centuries and researched herbs that may once have been used within Neolithic houses and ritual spaces, including henbane, mugwort, and meadowsweet.

I was also researching the uses of whale bone. The archives at Kirkwall Library contained photographs of whale bone artefacts, while a whale and dolphin conservation meeting run by WDC helped inform my understanding of these species and their anatomy.

I visited Lynne, a storyteller, where conversations drifted between history, myth and local memory. The archives on the outer islands, including North Ronaldsay, Hoy, and the Kelp Store on Papa Westray also fed into my research. I often enjoyed exploring the archives first before heading out on foot to seek out the landscapes connected to what I had encountered.

What interested me most was how these different forms of knowledge overlapped. Archaeology, ecology, folklore and lived experience never felt entirely separate.

Over time I settled into a rhythm between researching, writing and drawing, walking and making photographs. Some of the most important moments of the residency came from allowing connections to emerge between these different ways of understanding a place.

- Oli (Oli Turner)

11/06/2026

INSTAGRAM TAKEOVER: DAY 1

Hello, I’m Oli Turner (Oli Turner), and over the next few days I’ll be sharing reflections from a month spent in Orkney through the Visual Arts Scotland residency at the Pier Arts Centre.

People often say that Orkney is a magnet; once you’ve visited, it draws you back. I first came here a few years ago on a brief camping trip. Although I only stayed for a few days, the experience had a lasting impact on me and my work. Since then, Orkney’s landscapes, archaeology and coastlines have continued to shape my thinking.
This residency gave me the opportunity to return and spend a month based in Birsay, where the North Sea meets the Atlantic. Much of my time was spent walking, observing, reading, gathering materials, visiting cairns, tombs and exploring some of the outer islands.

The presence of stone in Orkney is vast. Everywhere you look there are traces of deep geological time, human history and ritual activity layered into the landscape. Orkney feels like a place where past and present remain in constant conversation.

Over the next few days, I’ll be sharing some of the experiences, encounters and places that informed my time on the islands.

- Oli

(Oli Turner is a visual artist from Yorkshire, currently based in Glasgow. Her practice is multidisciplinary, rooted in the exploration of landscape, place and memory.

Her work is shaped by journeys into remote and rural environments, investigating themes of ecology, decay and the interrelationship between inner and outer worlds. Using a contemplative visual language, she reflects on the evolving bond between humans and the natural world, creating work that invites slow looking and reflection.

Recent projects have focused on the ritual landscapes of the British Isles, particularly Neolithic sites in Scotland, where layers of human history lie embedded in the earth. For Oli, these ancient places act as portals to explore continuity between past and present, revealing how memory and meaning can be held within the land itself. At the heart of her practice is a search for solace in nature - a counterpoint to the disconnection and noise of contemporary life.)

Pier Arts Centre

11/06/2026

📷:

A Seat At The Table | 4th - 20th June 2026

A chair seems like a simple thing: something you sit on.
Yet A Seat At The Table reveals that even this most familiar object is far from fixed. Bringing together artists, makers, designers and furniture makers, the exhibition explores the chair in its full range, from finely crafted, functional forms to works that question, extend, or unsettle what a chair can be. At its centre lies a deceptively simple question: when do we decide something is a chair, and what shapes that decision?
A chair is something we think we understand. A Seat At The Table invites us to look again.

A Seat At The Table is a group exhibition at Wasps Southblock that brings together a diverse range of practitioners working across furniture making, sculpture, design, and contemporary art. The exhibition is grounded in the chair as a recognisable, made object, something designed to be used, while also exploring how that understanding can be expanded, challenged, and redefined.

From carefully crafted, fully functional chairs to works that test the limits of use, representation, and definition, the exhibition reveals the chair as both a physical form and a site of inquiry. Some works invite sitting; others refuse it. Some prioritise structure, material, and skill; others operate through image, language, or absence. Together, they form a conversation around how meaning is constructed through object, function, and perception.

Wasps Southblock is one of Glasgow’s leading creative hubs, housing a vibrant community of artists, designers, and makers. The exhibition takes place within the ground floor gallery space during the Glasgow International Festival period for which Wasps The Briggait is the central hub.

Open: Monday - Friday 9am-5pm

WASPS South Block Gallery Space
60-64 Osborne Street,
Glasgow, G1 5QH

South Block

09/06/2026

Strata | An exhibition presented by Visual Arts Scotland in partnership with wasps_

26 June - 31st August 2026

Strata begins with landscape as material, surface and form.

Working across painting, print, textile, photography and mixed media, the exhibition focuses on how landscape is held through surface and shaped through form. Layers accumulate, marks settle, materials shift. Whether working through depiction or material process, the artists consider landscape as something formed rather than fixed. Each work holds a relationship between what is seen and what is made.

Presented at Inverness Creative Academy, the exhibition is grounded in a context where land is not distant, but lived and worked. The works reflect this through their attention to material, structure and change.

Strata is an exhibition exploring how ‘landscape’ takes shape; through material, across surface and in form.

The Assembly Hall
WASPS Inverness Creative Academy,
Stephens St, Inverness IV2 3JP

09/06/2026

MEMBERS NEWS

VAS member Jenny Smith has had her print Broch, selected for this year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London, which runs from 16 June - 23 August 2026.

This limited-edition print is part of Postcards from the Past (Cairtean-puist o shean in Gaelic), a new series of laser-engraved images inspired by the artist’s everyday life on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.

The image depicts Dun Carloway (Dùn Chàrlabhaigh or An Dùn Mòr in Gaelic), an Iron Age broch that the artist can see from her studio window. Standing on a rocky knoll above a small loch, with views across Loch Roag, it is one of Scotland’s most complete and iconic prehistoric monuments. Built between approximately 400 and 200 BC, Dun Carloway remains a powerful presence in the landscape, connecting the contemporary island community with its ancient past.

Visual artist Jenny Smith explores the possibilities of drawing in its broadest sense, often employing unconventional tools and processes to create her work. For this series, she uses a laser cutter as a drawing instrument, translating digital marks into finely engraved images. The resulting works possess a sepia- toned, almost Victorian quality that recalls the appearance of early photographic postcards and archival documents.
Through this combination of subject matter and process, Postcards from the Past creates a dialogue between different eras. Ancient monuments, landscapes and fragments of island life are rendered using contemporary digital technology, deliberately blurring distinctions between past and present. The works invite viewers to consider how history is recorded, remembered and experienced, while reflecting on the enduring presence of the past within the everyday landscape of the Outer Hebrides.

This work was recently shown in VAS’s Future Folklore Exhibition at the Maclaurin Galleries Ayr.

08/06/2026

MEMBERS NEWS

Shared Material :: Ceramic Showcase

&Gallery
3 Dundas St,
Edinburgh
EH3 6QG.

Saturday 6 June - 1 July 2026

This exhibition brings together sculptural ceramic works by eleven artists. Using clay as a shared point of departure, the exhibition highlights the diversity of approaches, forms and ideas that emerge through individual practices. While united by material, the works reveal distinct sensibilities, ranging from precise and architectural to expressive and intuitive, demonstrating the breadth of contemporary ceramic practice.

Through this focused presentation, the exhibition invites viewers to consider how a single material can generate a wide spectrum of artistic responses, shaped by each artist’s process, perspective and relationship to clay.

Exhibiting artists:
A-S Rope
Dan Kelly
Derek Wilson
Frances Priest
Jane Cairns
Lorraine Robson
Matthew Chambers
Nicholas Lees
Rebecca Appleby
Roger Coll
Steven Edwards

Photo credit Lorraine Robson

08/06/2026

WOW! We are proud to announce 51 applicants have signed up to take part in our new mentoring programme. Our team will now work to match mentors with mentees based on the needs and skills disclosed in your applications.

If you are not matched this time around, we will keep all members who express interest in mentoring in our mentor pool. We may call on you when we find a mentee that seems like a good fit!

Stay tuned over the next few months to find out what our mentors and mentees get up to 👀

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