The annual group show at Sorcha Dallas this year is themed around the idea of repeated words, images and motifs. Dubbed r e p ’ e . t ’ t i o n - the unconventional spacing and punctuation is a nod to the eccentric orthography of EE Cummings - the exhibit blends new work by young, Glasgow-based artists with more established international figures and big names from the Op and Pop art canons, arranged together in two tightly-grouped installations.

The first, in the smaller of the two gallery spaces, is overbearing and claustrophobic thanks to Claudia Wieser’s wallpaper installation.

Pasting black-and-white photocopies directly on to the gallery walls, Wieser builds up fan-like motifs, parallel lines and dense geometric blocks. These serve as a backdrop for Sue Tompkins’s typed works on paper. These texts might be poems or song lyrics - Tompkins was frontwoman of the pop group Life Without Buildings, and her practice still includes musical performance - or snatches of overheard conversation. Whatever the source, each one takes a phrase and repeats it, sometimes with slight variations, until even the most innocuous term takes on a sinister air. There’s something dark about Fiona Jardine’s untitled collage, too, which sees images of hands and limbs arranged in a repeating, circular pattern.

In the second gallery, its windows covered in gauzy white fabric, the atmosphere is lighter and cooler, bordering on the antiseptic. The works here are arranged around a seating area, which features two chairs by Franz West, their seats and backs woven into Aztec patterns of brightly- coloured industrial strapping, and, on a little plinth bearing a vase of cut flowers and volumes of EE Cummings’s poetry. The domestic feel is furthered by Eva Berende’s hinged screen, each of its four panels bearing meticulously dyed strands of wool that trace out a pattern of interlocking oblongs and diamonds.

Up on the walls surrounding this odd little salon are works by Bridget Riley and John Wesley. Undressing, a diptych by Wesley, shows a woman taking off her stockings and knickers, but any trace of the salacious is removed by the Californian Pop surrealist’s flat, spare technique, as if the female body is nothing more than a pattern to be transcribed. Wesley’s Untitled (Mickey & Minnie) further flattens the already two-dimensional, repeating the familiar three circles of Mickey Mouse and his wife in flesh pink against a minimal landscape reduced to stripes of green and blue. The pair of Riley prints here lack the dizzying, disorienting power of her best-known monochrome Op Art works.

Instead, Riley offers studies in false tessellation, aligning leaf-like abstractions in orange, blue and deep green for Sylvan, revisiting the pattern for Berlin Wall Drawing (Print), this time opting for pale pastel tones.

For a show examining repetition, there’s a good deal of variety here, but thanks to some careful curation, connections are drawn between the disparate bunch of artists gathered here, sometimes simply - Wesley and Riley share a similar palette, Berendes and West both make furniture but present it as art - sometimes subtly, with Wieser’s wallpaper providing a busy visual soundtrack for Tompkins’s silent songs.

Around the corner on King Street, 15 artists from the Sorcha Dallas roster have taken over the Glasgow Print Studio. The group show, To Bring Forth and Give, is the result of a collaboration between the gallery and the studio designed to introduce artists to the possibilities of printmaking.

While most of the 15 have opted for the traditional approach, producing editions, some have taken a more radical, experimental tack.

Clare Stephenson’s piece Ornament and Boredom is more sculpture than print. The towering effigy - it’s a good 8ft tall - is equal parts haughty drag queen, classical statue and winged angel, its component parts apparently cobbled together from fashion magazine clippings and antique illustrations.

Michael Stumpf has made a screenprint of a photograph of a screenprint. His sweatshirt, emblazoned with a jumbled, purple, red and orange logo that reads “silenzio”, each letter rendered in different type, ranging from a simple sans serif to a hand-drawn gothic face, is suspended from the gallery ceiling on a hanger.

The partner print shows the same sweatshirt, roughly scrunched and crumpled on a jet black floor. On either side of the curtained doorway that leads to the print studio, Fiona Jardine has plastered the walls with screenprinted rolls of wallpaper, dotted with eyes, lashes and brows. One panel of the pristine paper has been defaced with smudges of slurry-brown paint, and Jardine has pasted a few more eyes, this time collaged from magazines, over the top.

Craig Mulholland’s contribution is a continuation of his sprawling solo show, Grandes et Petits Machines, which filled the two spaces at Sorcha Dallas and the Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh Gallery earlier this year, before transferring in expanded form to Spike Island. Mulholland is at home in any medium - that solo show included everything from delicate sculptures to paintings made of metal to an animated film with an operatic score - and his four prints here are assured, crisp new renderings of his past work using pegboard, obscure patterns that suggest programs written in obsolete computer code, or dangerously decayed electrical circuits.

The artists who have opted to make more conventional prints are not overshadowed by the sculptural and installation work. In fact, the more delicate, quiet pieces stand out. Alex Pollard’s Jack Sheppard is a photo etching that distorts a portrait of the eighteenth- century thief like a fairground mirror, as if Pollard has dragged his source image this way and that during the printing process. Couple, by Raphael Danke, is a surreal juxtaposition of an outsize lipstick and a radiator, rendered in grainy monochrome. A pair of digital prints, Drawing Study, offers a diary of Kate Davis’s recent practice, with a self-reflexive text reading: “It has taken me a month and a half to complete one drawing recently. That fact is part of the image now.”

Alasdair Gray must have made his first print before some of his peers here were born, and it’s easy to see that this isn’t an artist feeling his way in a new medium, but a master at work. His Corruption - “the Roman Whore”, according to the print’s hand-written caption, “for whom hangmen and politicians play the pimp” - is a woman with a death’s head rictus grin, impossibly pregnant with an embracing Adam and Eve, who are in turn surrounded by a strange bestiary of eagles, squid and bloated fish.

To Bring Forth and Give is more of a showcase than a group show proper, but it hangs together thanks to the palpable sense that most of these artists are eagerly experimenting with, and embracing, a new direction in their practices. It is, too, a sign that printmaking, all too often seen as a poor cousin to painting, is in rude health.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 12th December , 2008.

For his first solo outing in the UK, Doves, Alexander Heim has focussed firmly on the dull, dreary world he sees around him. It’s not clear whether Heim is offering an encomium to the poured concrete and pebbledash of the suburbs and city centre, or is happily resigned to the drab fate of the modern city-dweller. At times he seems keen to show the quirks that undermine the plodding efforts of the town planners, screening surveillance footage of a scrappy pigeon going about its business in a railway station concourse, and documenting ungainly collisions of paving stones and tarmac in photographs that call to mind Boyle Family’s meticulous recreations. The Doves of the show’s title are more celebratory. These three gunmetal grey winged sculptures in papier mâché, propped up with breeze blocks, are monolithic - a Concrete Henge, if you like, bound to puzzle future archeologists. Adding to the ambiguity, Heim also shows a set of beautifully crafted bowls, their interior surfaces puddled with enamel glazes in deep blue, green and purple. These careful, deliberate objects, hanging just so on the gallery wall, at first look like a counterpoint to the half-hearted Brutalism of the Doves, but by offering up something pretty for visitors to look at, Heim seems to be asking his audience to look again at the more unprepossessing work here, not to mention the world outside the gallery, and find beauty in it too.

At Edinburgh printmakers Chad McCail is looking to the world around him as well, but with an analytical eye, exploring social mores and global politics through a cartoon filter, crafting a world peopled by ‘wealthy parasites, robots and zombies’, McCail’s parodic labels for the upper, middle and working classes.

Compulsory Education is a concise history in cartoon strip form of the school system, which McCail presents as a tool of the military-industrial complex. A series of captions, tell the story, from the defeat of the Prussian army at the Battle of Jena, to that state’s adoption of compulsory schooling in a bid to create a generation of “obedient soldiers”, ending with a table of European countries which adopted the Prussian academic model. Whether or not you buy into McCail’s revisionist analysis of education as a method of social control, one thing is certain: this is a moving work, and, therefore, convincing. The zombie children, taught to “obey orders” in factory-like institutions, and their robot peers, charged to “learn more so they can transmit commands”, are as cute as a button, and McCail draws scenes with a pared down comic efficiency, rendering Prussian victories over France and Austria as wealthy parasites prostrating themselves before other, identical wealthy parasites as robots look on and zombies do the dirty work. There’s a pleasing irony to this audience manipulation - McCail’s critique uses the methods of the very system he denounces, borrowing the tactics of cartoons, which, from Nazi anti-Semitic caricatures to the recent Danish controversy, have long been at the vanguard of the propaganda war.

In relationships grow stronger and the Puberty series, McCail adopts a different style, this time based on the line drawings of children’s textbooks and educational pamphlets. The shift in style marks a shift in tone, with McCail documenting his Utopian vision for a society in which issues of sexuality, social responsibility and gender are discussed openly, with knowledge passed freely between the generations. relationships grow stronger sees a gang of teens being waved off by their mum, dad and grandma, on their way to plant a tree, which, bizarrely, is festooned with male and female genitalia. Partly a metaphor for budding sexuality, the scene also suggests a possible ritual for marking the transition from childhood to adulthood, a theme explored further in the Puberty prints, which show kids and grown ups rationally discussing the contents of a porn mag, adults calming an angry parent who has caught two teenagers kissing (he’s so angry, he’s transforming into a bear), and a man giving a boy a knife, recognising his ability to use it safely. This is strange stuff, and, like the cartoon pieces, curiously affecting. And that’s what makes McCail’s work so strong - in matching simple styles with complex politics, he manages to engage heart and mind alike.

There’s more complexity, more twisting of reality, and more deceptively simple tactics at play in 39, the debut show by Edinburgh-based artist Hugh Brady. Brady has converted his mews studio into a cool and considered essay on the role of the artist, representations of artists in popular culture, the self-reflexive nature of the art world, the clichés of contemporary art and the business of making art. The glue that binds this ambitious exhibit together is Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up. The entrance to the show bears the same sign that graces the photographic studio in which much of the film is set, and the beams from the fictional studio’s door are painted over the beams of Brady’s real studio door, while a dual-screen video piece lifts interior scenes for the film, filling the upper floor of the building with the sound of star David Hemmings’ footsteps on a floor which Brady has, inevitably, recreated here. A flood of allusions to perennially hip or currently vogue-ish art and artists follows. A section of wall has been removed in a nod to Gordon Matta-Clark, the exposed bricks splashed with silver, calling to mind Richard Serra’s molten lead splashes (and his role in Mathew Barney’s Cremaster 3). There is a glibly minimalist painting of a canvas stretcher, taken from a photograph of Warhol’s studio, and artlessly installed fluorescent strip lights as a homage to Dan Flavin, or in parody of the sort of artists who pay homage to Dan Flavin. A concrete sculpture looks like the sort of art that borrows from architecture, but turns out to be a genuine maquette rescued from a skip outside an architects office. On the walls, abstract minimalist patterns ape the work of Daniel Buren, but are in fact patterns borrowed from bathroom tiles seen Federico Fellin’s 8 1/2 (also released in 1966). This parade of deliberately obvious references matched with an attempt to travel through time, eliding truth and fiction on the way, by layering London then over Edinburgh now might sound like the stuff of a pretentious philosophy undergrad’s wet dream, but Brady manages to pull it off. This is in part thanks to his restrained palette of three colours - black, white and silver - that acts as a sort of sturdy aesthetic bridge between works, but is mostly down to Brady’s nuanced understanding of the exhibition space and his relationship to it, which makes for a show that is, for all its conceptual toing and froing, a deeply personal attempt to come to terms with the difficulties of making art, here and now, in this particular place.

Alexander Heim: Doves is at doggerfisher until 13th September, Chad McCail is at Edinburgh Printmakers until 6th Septmeber and Hugh Brady: 39 is at 16B Lennox Street Lane until 25th August. This review was first published in The Herald on 22nd August , 2008.

For ten years, Ingleby Gallery was housed in a Georgian townhouse on an out of the way terrace in the New Town, a place that lent the space a rather proper air, undercut by ambitious, almost eccentric projects, like the breakneck programme of twenty-six shows that marked the gallery’s anniversary year.

Now, Ingleby, in a move more ambitious still, has shifted to a new location on Calton Road. It’s a huge, three-storey affair, with a room given over to prints and editions, a small street-level gallery, and a genuinely breath-taking exhibition space on the first floor.

This huge room comes close to overwhelming the work of Kay Rosen, an American artist who makes quiet, subtle work that explores the use of words as images, deftly altering meaning with the application of colour. Memory of Red is a large wall drawing in a sturdy sans-serif typeface, that reads ‘Remembered’, the word divided, with that final ‘red’ picked out in pink, and the clipped ‘remembe’ in red. This simple tactic has a strange effect, what you might call a linguistic illusion, sending the reading mind and seeing eye into a bit of a tizzy. In another large piece, Rosen offers her version of seascape painting, with the words ‘sky’, ‘fog’ and ‘sea’ layered over each other in grey on a grey background. Her prints offer sight gags and puns: the word ‘yellow’ in yellow is split in half to form a ‘yell’ and an ‘ow’, the first word describing the second. Greyer G invents a palindrome, with the letters fading from dark at the edges to light at the centre.

There’s humour to be found downstairs, too. Edinburgh-born Susan Collis makes work that immediately calls to mind the old gag about the critic who lavishes attention on the gallery fire extinguisher instead of the sculpture beside it. This is because Collis celebrates the most mundane objects, rendering the contents of hardware store draws in precious metals and gems. Riffing on the freshly refitted status of the space she is showing in, Collis has inlaid mother of pearl into the gallery floor to form a shimmering monument in miniature to spilt paint. Fixed is a wall-spanning installation that, from afar, looks like unfinished preparations to hang a show of paintings. Up close, the rawl plugs are made of irridescent coral, and the tiny screws have been fashioned from 18 carat white gold and inset with diamonds. A broom in the corner looks ready for the tip, but the splatters on its handle and the paint that clogs its bristles are crafted from a list of materials that reads beautifully, from citron cyrsoprase to white howite.

Outside, there’s the first installment of a year-long public art project dubbed Billboard for Edinburgh. Mark Wallinger is the first of four artists to occupy the space with a stark text reading “Mark Wallinger Is Innocent”, of what crime I’m not quite sure. One thing is certain, though: Ingleby Gallery has made a fine start in its new home.

Kay Rosen and Susan Collis are at Ingleby Gallery until 24 September.

This review was originally published in The Herald.

The title of this career-long survey of political pieces by Richard Hamilton is something of a misnomer: for the most part, these aren’t Protest Pictures at all. Sure, it’s not hard to guess where on the political spectrum Hamilton’s views lie, but the works on show at Inverleith House aren’t tub-thumping, flag-waving calls to arms. They’re much more subtle than that, ranging from ambiguous reportage to finely tuned satire, via keen observation of the media’s role in presenting and filtering ideas and ideals.

The show begins in 1967 with the Redlands case, when the Rolling Stones and art dealer Robert Fraser fell victim to a dubious drug bust. Hamilton focusses on a single image culled from a newspaper photograph of Fraser and Mick Jagger, handcuffed in the back of a Black Maria and shielding their faces from the press pack. The first of the repeated re-workings add a coloured tint, the next borrows the style of court sketch artists. A poster work collects a scrap book of cuttings on the Stones’ court appearances. It remains unclear whether Hamilton is condemning this last gasp attempt by a stuffy establishment to punish the figureheads of a new lifestyle, or cooly documenting the process.

Later versions of the scene, made in the early 1970s, seem to acknowledge Hamilton’s own role in crafting an iconic image and see him acting as a seer, presaging the status of the scandal, like that later disaster for the Stones, Altamont, as a pop cultural turning point. In a pair of prints that borrow their title from a contemporary headline - A strong sweet smell of incense - Fraser and Jagger are obscured behind a layer of decaying celluloid, as if the image has been replayed over and over again. These are followed by a final commemoration, a screenprint that describes the scene in flat panels of bright colour, as if Hamilton is committing the lurid, gossipy tale to collective memory.

The Treatment Room, an installation dating to 1983, is chilling enough, and a clear condemnation of Thatcherism, but again Hamilton resists the urge to shout, preferring to whisper, however bitterly. Occupying a room of its own, the walls painted in that familiar, queasy NHS green, the piece is a stylised radiography room, complete with bed, stool and protective screen. On the gantry where an X-ray machine is usually mounted, there is a television emitting a different kind of radiation, in the form of a party political broadcast by Mrs. Thatcher.

Upstairs, still in the 1980s, comes a room dubbed The Troubles, dominated by three diptychs. The Subject shows a marching Orangeman set beside a blurred scene showing what might be headlights, or a riot in progress. Next, in a rusted frame, The Citizen is a Republican prisoner on hunger strike, the second panel blurring his dirty protest into near-abstract sworls. Last, The State, a soldier, his weapon and camoflague uniform are precisely rendered, with real fabric pockets applied to the painting’s surface, emphasisng the apparatus over the man inside it. The power of these works is in Hamilton’s ability to present the situation in Northern Ireland from conflicting viewpoints: the titles veer between representing the paintings’ subjects from their own point of view and that of outside observers, the three works are doubly mediated, through Hamilton and through his source, a television documentary.

This tension between source material and finished work is explored again in the Kent State series. First come photographs of TV footage of the campus anti-war protest of 1970 and the National Guard retaliation, which resulted in the death of four students. Next, a series of twelve proofs of a screenprint based on contemporary footage, which begin with a pale blue ground, and end with the image of a student lying prone. Then, the finished print, with a thirteenth stencil applied to reveal bright red bloodstains on the student’s body. A coda of sorts comes in the form of a pastel drawing, rendering the scene in sickly, hallucinatory bursts of colour, with loose lines suggesting a sort of moral heat haze.

The show closes with a new work, Shock and Awe, which casts Tony Blair, done up as an avenging cowboy, both hands on his six guns, ready to draw. Behind him, the sky is a post-apocalyptic red, and oil fires rage. That might sound a little trite, but even when he appears to be making a quick, cartoonish satirical jab, Hamilton hangs on to the subtlety and ambiguity that runs through his practice as a whole. The head that Hamilton has grafted on to a gunslinger’s body isn’t the boggle-eyed grimacing former PM of a Steve Bell strip, instead bearing a look that suggests Blair, beneath a half-hearted attempt at a steely glare, knows that something has gone very, very wrong - he looks, aptly enough, like a man caught in a lie, trying desperately to bluff his way out of it. It looks like Hamilton is nodding in the direction of Warhol’s silvery screenprint of Elvis, too, adding another layer of satire (or kicking a man when he’s down), by reminding us of the days when Blair caught flak for nothing more than the minor, if cringeworthy, crime of hitching his wagon to Cool Britannia, posturing with his Fender Stratocaster and posing with Britpop stars.

Beside Hamilton’s broadside against Blair hang a series of works dating back to the early 1960s, revealing that the artist has come full circle. Portrait of Hugh Gaitskill as a Famous Monster of Filmland attacks the then Labour leader for his policies in favour of nuclear deterrence - like Blairs Iraq adventure, a stance that hardly reflected the views of his party’s rank and file - by layering up a mask fashioned from B-movie bogey men over Gaitskill’s face. In combining Jack the Ripper, The Man with the Atom Brain and The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Hamilton casts his subject as a monster-villain, and predicts a mutant future should the Cold War powers choose to test the doctrine of mutually assured destruction.

There are one or two off-key notes here, as when an infographic of the first Gulf War is shown on a television dripping in blood, or posters protesting museum fees cast institutions as political prisoners, but in both cases, one suspects that Hamilton has an eyebrow raised. Those slips aside, though, this is an outstanding body of work, proof that, in the right hands, explicitly political art can rise above agit-prop or hamfisted condemnation.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 1st August , 2008.

At first sight, the work of Lotte Gertz appears rather slight. The pieces on show at Mary Mary all share a washed-out look, with light grey backgrounds and a muted palette, torn edges, apparently apathetic marks made with pencils, crayons or oils, and various bits and bobs tentatively stuck to their surfaces.

Stand before one for a while, though, and it becomes clear that Gertz isn’t in the business of hastily dashing off vague abstracts, but a precise, thoughtful maker of images that take time to resolve. When they do, that first impression fades fast. The title of Mr Sophistication (I Am Stage) gives a hint, but look before you read and it slowly becomes clear that the rectangle missing a side is indeed a stage, and the flurry of curved lines above are the curtains that frame it. Its neighbour offers a little more, with zig-zag marks in black wending their way across the paper to offer the barest suggestion of the pitched roofs of a row of houses, and, with that realisation, the six little marks on the right become a table, with a sewn-on button completing the picture of domesticity. And when Gertz edges over the line into outright representation, she remains subtle, with clock faces reduced to a circle and two lines, and interior space boiled down to a few angled lines.

This experience of looking, and looking again, sets up the viewer well: with a few connections made, more hove into view, and Gertz slowly but surely exposes her themes, and, perhaps more importantly, her method of making work.

The first clear signal of that method is Gertz’s refusal to restrict herself to a single medium. Every work on show combines collage, drawing, painting and printing, with a few tiptoeing toward the sculptural. Woodcut prints are sliced or torn then put to use as a surface on which to draw or paint, or, in little slivers, applied in turn to a woodcut surface. Other elements are rendered with everyday objects. Matches, half-unravelled threads, off-cuts of leather and elastic bands are glued over drawings, buttons are sewn onto paper.

These materials are not, though, simply everyday detritus. Many have a common source, clothing, and most are items that we all lose easily or discard with little thought. Buttons pop off shirts and roll away, loose threads are picked at and flicked off, spent matches are dropped to the floor, red Post Office elastic bands litter closes and streets. With these familiar objects, which must be lost for her to find them, Gertz is subtly evoking bodies moving through space and time, building a physical human presence out of the faintest possible traces. And, alongside these distinctly human materials, there are recurring motifs that reinforce the idea of a barely-present body in transit: boxes and containers are everywhere, and, more obviously, houses and theatres.

To call this shadowy presence a character would be a step too far - you can’t, after all, tell much about a person from a few bits of frayed nylon, the odd button and a hint of an unpacked box - but, as these materials are used again and again, Gertz creates the distinct impression that her works are inhabited, by someone.

That someone might well be Gertz herself. Every one of the collaged works on paper in this show bears very deliberate traces of the artist who made them. Some are subtle - those woodcut backgrounds are peppered with fingerprint smudges - others are in plain sight, and delivered with a nod and a wink, as in Blue Box: Match Play, Match Spent, in which the walls and roof of a house are built of crayons drawn with crayons.

If the missing figure is Gertz, her sources and references are almost absent too. The architectural forms only-just-represented in Blue Box or Standard Houses: History, Her Story have their roots in the houses of Gertz’s native Denmark. More specific still, those clock faces are lifted from a single scene in Casablanca. The evocative title of To The Roof! With A Couple Of Things That Looks Like Wings is a distorted quotation from a Brecht poem. Few, if any, viewers would catch these allusions, and it is clear that, just as Gertz makes a given piece using a process of revision, layering up elements from what might be called preparatory works, only to paint or draw over them, so she lights on a source, turning it over in her mind, discarding some elements and retaining others, until that first thought or image becomes something else entirely.

And it seems safe to say that these processes of thinking and making are not just similar, they are intertwined, with materials suggesting new thoughts, and references reconsidered as the possibilities of a drawn line, painted smudge or applied object offer new directions. Much of this internal dialogue is, of course, private, known only to Gertz herself, but just enough leaks out to the viewer. The result is a curious mirroring, as gallery-goers seek to tease out the imagery and meaning in these works - are, for example, the two hands of Hands and Graphite Wheel applauding the unseen performance implied in Mr. Sophistication (I Am Stage)? - or consider the intention behind the use of materials, they reflect Gertz’s mode of practice. And so these private, subjective works, when they are released into the public sphere of the gallery, become private and subjective once more, in the minds of those who see them. It’s an indirect, subtle and almost teasing form of communication between artist and viewer, this, but a powerful one. By never stating her case, and working in whispers and hints, Gertz passes on her ideas with a sort of generosity. By abstaining from bald statements she rewards those willing to put in the work required to uncover the ties that bind these pieces together. Gertz cares little, I suspect, whether her audience’s specific thoughts match her own, satisfied that the gentle experience of discovery her work prompts in the viewer corresponds with the dialogue between ideas and materials at the heart of her practice.

This review was first published in The Herald on February 22nd, 2008.

Edinburgh Printmakers has been at the heart of the capital’s art scene for four decades, providing access to its workshop for emerging and established artists alike, and raising the profile of the print in its gallery space. To mark the anniversary, the Printmakers is set to mount an ambitious pair of exhibitions, setting out the institution’s history and surveying work from the past 40 years.

The workshop and gallery opened its doors in 1967 on Victoria Street, set up by gallerist Robert Cox and artist Phil Reeves, along with founding members Roy Wood and Kim Kempshall. For Gill Tyson, vice-chair of the Printmakers’ council, whose involvement with the project dates back to her days as an art student in the 1970s, the timing was right.

“It really grew out of that resurgence of printmaking in the 1950s,” she says, “when printmaking began to move into the fine art department at the art colleges. Then it came down to the fact that there was a lot going on in Edinburgh at the time - there was a strong artistic revival and a strong alternative artistic community, artists such as John Bellany and Sandy Moffat were coming out and keen to continue with printmaking.”

After a stint at Victoria Street, in a cramped room adjacent to Robert Cox’s gallery, the Printmakers moved to Market Street in 1975, then, as now, a hub for artistic activity in the city.

“Victoria Street was, really, entirely unsuitable as premises for a print workshop,” Tyson remembers, “so the chance to move to Market Street was a great opportunity. We were right above the Fruitmarket Gallery, and next door to the New 57 Gallery, which was an incredibly lively place.’ When the Fruitmarket was made independent of the Scottish Arts Council in 1983, Edinburgh Printmakers was forced to up sticks once more, finding, after a difficult search, its current premises in a former wash house on Union Street - Tyson, by then chair, was the first to enter the main hall. This move to a larger space led to expansion, with the Printmakers’ publishing more artists’ editions, and collaborating with non-printmaking artists as well as making its facilities available to members.

The twin gallery spaces also allowed the Printmakers to continue its commitment to bringing printmaking to a wider audience.

“As well as providing the facilities for artists to make prints,” Tyson explains, “a lot of our work has been about promoting printmaking. And I think we’ve done pretty well at that - we certainly have an international reputation.’ That reputation also applies to Scotland as a whole, with workshops across the country opening in the wake of the Edinburgh Printmakers’ early success.

“Now we have Edinburgh Printmakers, Glasgow Print Studio, Peacock in Aberdeen and the workshop in Dundee,” Tyson explains. “Printmaking is a really strong strand to the visual arts in Scotland. It’s definitely something peculiar to Scotland - of course you get print workshops in other places, but to have so many open-access print workshops here? I see that as something of a Scottish success story.”

The first exhibition celebrating Edinburgh Printmakers’ part in that success story focuses on the first 20 years of its output, aiming both to showcase work made by artists in the workshop, or in collaboration with it, and to document the organisation’s history.

“There wasn’t an awful lot in the workshop in terms of archive materials,” says Tyson, “so we had to get in touch with a lot of people who had been involved over the years. It was amazing the warmth and affection they all had for the institution, and we were faced with this deluge of cards, editions and photographs.”

Some of those materials have been put to use in a short film to be screened in the gallery throughout the exhibition.

“For the film, I interviewed Philip Reeve and Roy Wood, the founder members, and Alfons Bytautas, whose been our etching technician since 1974,” Tyson says.

“They told all their old war stories. It’s really remarkable to hear how they did so much, how they made all these international connections, even though there were so few of them.’ Then, of course, there are the prints, by artists including Peter Howson and Stephen Conroy, alongside work by the founding members. “We went for the good ones!”, Tyson jokes, explaining the process of whittling down 40 years’ worth of work into a manageable show. “We really wanted a spread of things that would show what was happening at the time in printmaking, and to have works that represented shows we’d had over the years, as well as a mix of prints by printmakers and by artists working in collaboration with the workshop.’ 40 Years at Edinburgh Printmakers should, then, be an intriguing exhibit, offering a chance to trace trends, to survey the work of a wide-ranging and disparate group of artists, and, perhaps best of all, fully to understand the role of this Edinburgh institution, the first open-access print workshop in the UK, in driving forward the practice of printmaking.

This review was first published in The Herald on January 9th, 2007.