Stephen Thorpe, who recently won the Saatchi “Places and Spaces” competition, creates colourful, precisely executed paintings with rough edges that make them look like they have been ripped out of the wall. He usually works in oil, canvas and expanding foam, but this exhibition is the first time he’s worked on neon. His paintings have also taken a new direction and a deliberate shift away from his older work of dreamlike and surreal interiors that are sometimes described as claustrophobic.

It’s hard to place Thorpe in a category. His paintings create a sense of displacement, and their compositions challenge the rules of physics and trick your sense of perception. They are almost like optical illusions. Even when Thorpe’s working process is organic and his approach towards this exhibition has been more experimental, there is preciseness and purposefulness to his technique. The way Thorpe prepares his canvases creates random imperfections in the surface, which are only revealed upon closer inspection. According to the artist, his work is about “tension between surface and subject, and literal and conceptual.”

Quantum physics is the running theme in the exhibition and the titles of the paintings reflect this. Three of the paintings are titled after particles: Lepton, Boson and Fermion. The paintings appear very geometric and architectural and feature bright blocks and drips of colour. Two other paintings, Deviant Higgs and Event Horizon have a more organic feel ¬– almost like theatrical sets in surreal, natural outdoor environments.  Reflections and blurring the boundaries of space are all apparent.

The exhibition includes two neon works, both created as collaboration. First of them, a work called “22” is a play on contrasting materials: fragile glass and broken rubble. It also represents the collaboration, two individuals working together.

Although at first glance the neon work doesn’t quite belong with the paintings, they are joined together by the largest painting, Untitled (Gala) 2012, which includes a painted red neon sign. Also, the exhibition takes its title from one of the neon works: the words “Once It’s In You It Never Goes Away” situated high up on the wall. As the artist wants to leave the interpretation of the sentence to the viewers, it’s hard to know how it relates to Quantum Physics.

Once It’s In You It Never Goes Away is an exhibition that will make you challenge how you view your surroundings. It’ll definitely make you wonder what remains with you forever.

The exhibition continues at Summerhall, Edinburgh until 22 February 2013.

By Heidi Kuisma

Find out more: Website

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I worked freelance for a while after graduating in Fine Art but my first ‘real’ job, as my Dad would call it, was with the University of Dundee’s Museum Services. I was Assistant Curator of Arts and my principle role was to correctly acquisition Duncan of Jordanstone’s art collection into the main University collection. One of the best jobs was the re-housing of a print collection bequest by the Scottish Arts Council, which can now be seen at the Visual Research Centre in Dundee. I also got to clean the zoology collection – I hoovered an emu and buffed a giant tortoise.

From there I went to the Exhibitions Dept at Duncan of Jordanstone as the Assistant Curator and I had the immense pleasure of working with Jenny Brownrigg. The Brownrigg taught me many things and I owe her a lot. We had a great time and produced some excellent projects such as Jerusalem Syndrome with Nathan Coley, discparc an audio label and Paul Butlers Collage Party. We had 7 great years of creative fun.

I then had the urge to sell all of my worldly goods and travel across Canada, get married and have a baby. In between this I was Dundee’s City Coordinator for the Six Cities Design Festival. This was a great experience as I really got to know and love Dundee and make many new contacts.

After the birth of my amazing daughter I became Cultural Projects Officer for the University of Abertay. I ran an annual programme of events and exhibitions in the Hannah Maclure Centre and in their performance space. This is where I become involved in the NEoN project. For the first manifestation of the NEoN Digital Arts Festival my assistant Clare Brennan and myself were asked to curate an interactive exhibition for the public.

By early 2010 we had become fully-fledged NEoN committee members and we help deliver an excellent programme of events in November 2010 having the pleasure of working with Akinori Oishi, Tado, Pictoplasma and Ken Perlin.

This brings me to me to my two current jobs! I am still on the management team for NEoN and my personal ambition is to make this festival Scotland’s leading platform for digital and technology driven arts, which I am sure is the ambition of the committee also. My main day-to-day job is Curatorial Director of Fleet Collective. Lyall Bruce and I set up this art collective out of frustration really – we wanted to bring together the arts and creative industries, mix the organic process of creativity with the structure of business and get the individuals together to make a powerful creative force.

Fleet is commitment to increasing provisions for the creative community and to tackling retention issues by keeping work, opportunities and talent in Scotland. Under one roof we empower a community of creative people by fostering collaborative working practices, we represent artists and manage multi disciplinary creative projects. Fleet Collective is new, fresh and unique, brought together out of a commitment to the arts and a passion to use it to make a better world.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Within my current body of work I am interested in exploring the tension between reality and representation by constructing transitional, three-dimensional map-like objects.

The act of mapping is a powerful tool for constructing new realities out of old facts, to visualize alternative worlds and to enable interrelationships between previously unrelated layers of information. Maps are evolving structures, rhizomatic in nature, able to unfold identities, to give room to exploration and procedures of relating.

Cognitive and mental mapping allows for new images of space, time and relationships to emerge and to illuminate a path through the memory structures of our minds. It is precisely this ‘potential to reveal’ that I am interested in, this tension between reality and representation that fascinates me. Engaging with the landscape – may it be mental or physical – and changing perceptions by expanding the field to include differing viewpoints enables me to uncover previously unseen or unimagined realities and foster connections between fields.

I specialize in a technique often called flameworking, lampworking or scientific glassblowing and within my current body of work I have started to investigate a little explored combination of scientific glassblowing and Neon sign industry skills to create unique new work.

Due to the nature of illuminated sign technology and a lack of scientific glassblowing know-how within the Neon industry, Neon signs are usually constructed from single, continuous glass tubes, using lead-free or soda-lime glass. These types of glasses are often referred to as ‘soft’ glasses due to their lower melting temperature. Shapes are achieved with bends only and connections with other glass tubes are rare. In my work, instead of using traditional ‘soft’ glass common in the Neon sign industry, I am using ‘hard’ borosilicate glass. This allows me to extend the main illuminated body with further detailed glasswork that would be difficult to achieve in soft glass.

The resulting work is a unique combination of illuminated sign and scientific glassblowing skill.

See more work by ukedjulia here.