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‘LEITH HALL’, ‘MAVIS BANK’ & ‘ARTHUR’S SEAT’
2017
Inkject print on coloured paper, A2.
This work was displayed in the exhibition ‘Terror & Beauty: Artists’ Response to John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea.’ in 2018 at the Talbot Rice Galler, Edinburgh, Scotland.
[IMAGE DESCRIPTION 1: Mono cyan and black poster with a portrait orientation. Taking up the majority of the paper space are two screenshots from a Youtube video, depicting a room full of people, stacked upon one another. In the left-hand margin of the poster are two carved stone statues ride in on Saltires / crossed rugs. In echoey, squiggly lettering at the top and bottom of the poster are the words ‘LEITH’ and ‘HALL’.]
IMAGE DESCRIPTION 2: Mono black and vivid yellow poster with a portrait orientation. In the top left coroner in a box the name ‘MAVIS BANK’ is drawn in lowly waved lettering. In the centre of the poster is a still of an open road with large sky and vegetation running along the roadside. Typed sentences sit above and below the still. They say: “It was part of a general European flowering of the world of the mind but what marks [it] out the Scottish Enlightenment was its range - there is everything from history to geology, philosophy to medicine, and architecture to poetry - this is also the age of Burns… The Scottish Enlightenment would have a great impact - particularly on the empire across the Atlantic, as Scottish thought was taken to America by Scottish immigrants.”]
IMAGE DESCRIPTION 3: Mono orange and black poster with a portrait orientation. In thick strokes on the top and bottom of the poster are the words “ARTHUR’S” and “SEAT”. In the centre of the poster is a wallpaper of images, as they would appear in a Google search. Most of the images contain water, stones and vegetation. Bellow the wall of images to the right is a photograph of a statue of Adam Smith, which has been illustrated to be holding a Scotland and a Jamaica flag. An image of tenement flats has been edited to sit behind the statue. Bellow the wall to the left is elongated typed text which says: “That meant that the Scottish thinkers, the scholars, the intellectuals, they didn’t have to take political sides - they were able to discuss freely and of course I emphasised the word freely because in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, where the Enlightenment was really centred, it was a very social Enlightenment and it was lubricated by alcohol… It was a wonderfully civilised and sociable atmosphere.”]