Modern Edinburgh Film School combines moving image, curating, collaboration, publications and critical writing. These work together on themes of learning about film and its ideas, working with moving image artists and their films, sculpture and poetry. Find out more about their latest project, MOTHS below.

MOTHS is a partial or pretend narrative presented between public and private (hidden) spaces alluding to their multiple and prior occupancy and historical functions and across artists’ images, films, readings, performances and sculptures. It employs cues from a spectrum of dark and light and comedy and tragedy with gestures that attach to and detach from themes of human interactions with animal information, natural and synthetic substances and methods of healing, evocative, sensorial or secretive sculptural actions, their material properties and suggested narratives, and recollections of the factual and science fiction.

It has been inspired by works by the Glasgow-based visual artist Lucy Skaer, and her particular approach to sculpture and moving image: “As an artist who once claimed to have secreted moth and butterfly larvae into the Old Bailey and reportedly left a scorpion and a diamond lying side by side” as well as sculptural works in copper, resin and mahogany and screen printed photographs for her show Harlequin Is As Harlequin Does at Murray Guy Gallery in New York in 2012: “these sculptures are like figures that act, interrupt, deflect, and solicit. Each has the pretence of a narrative, the mahogany, for example, is over a century old; it was salvaged from a riverbed in Belize where it had sunk while in transit to the UK.”

The core of the MOTHS project is a broadsheet newspaper edition with a series of 8 screen printed ‘colour supplements’, a schedule of film and video screenings, a reading and performance, and sculptural objects whose material properties relate to the ephemeral and to metamorphosis. Some of the works in the exhibition are hidden or slight, ephemeral or like the newspaper and editions, made to disappear, to exit the gallery.

Strain Andromeda The by Anne McGuire

Work by Mairi Lafferty

Contributing artists are Zoë Fothergill who re-screens her video ‘Fur, Bizmuth & Spiny Oyster’, a work where she explores tactility and the sensorial, the state of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response: a perceptual and pleasurable response to visual, aural or tactile stimulus. American artist Anne McGuire will screen her video work ‘Strain Andromeda The’, the 1970s seminal science fiction film about an extra-terrestrial virus, cut scene-by-scene in backward chronology, documentation of Lucy Skaer’s sculptures will be reproduced in the newspaper alongside a new print by Edinburgh-based artist Mairi Lafferty, Glasgow based artist Katrina Vallé will present a reading which takes as its starting point an exploration of the spectrum from light to dark, dusk to dawn, while Amy Pickles will present a new performance. London based film artist Anna Lucas will be screening her film ‘Una de Gato’ which documents her journey to find the home of this rare plant, also known as Cat’s Claw, her film alludes to its association with numerous medicinal, spiritual and superstitious beliefs and in a double bill with Australian artist Allison Gibbs’ work ‘SPIRIT SHADOW SPECTRE BONES and PHANTOM’, a work based around the making of ‘Tabu: A Story of the South Seas’ (1931), the final film produced by the German Expressionist director F.W Murnau. It starts with an article published by Allison in the magazine ‘Tahiti-Pacifique’, an exploration of the Polynesian Ti plant and a visit to a medium.

SPECTRE by Allison Gibbs

Bone by Jenny Brady

Dublin-based artist Jenny Brady screens two recent films – ‘Bone’ which draws on research into methods of non-verbal exchange developed in animal science, it considers whether language is primarily an instrument of communication or control and ‘Wow and Flutter’, which alludes to a scientific collaboration between animal cognition scientist Irene Pepperberg and an African Grey parrot she trained in elements of human language. While Bobby Niven represents sculptural work from his film ‘ISLAND’, shot at Inchgarvie, underneath the Forth Rail Bridge, the film explores its intricate and strange cultural landscape, military outpost, isolated refuge for syphilis victims, later a prison and quarantine for plague victims.

The newspaper also carries a text on Henry Coombes’ film ‘Two Discs and a Zed’, which sees a wolf set free in the National Galleries of Scotland to gaze mysteriously at Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’ and Peter Paul Rubens’ masterpiece ‘The Feast of Herod’. This text makes references to Peter Greenaway’s ‘A Zed and Two Noughts’, a gothic fantasy set in a zoo, the ‘House of Wax’ and Peter Weir’s film of disappearance and the sublime: ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’.

With thanks to Gregor Morrison, LUX and Video Data Bank, Chicago.

MOTHS will be at Summerhall, Edinburgh from 4 June – 15 July 2015. 

Modern Edinburgh Film School produced a series of projects in 2013 across Edinburgh on film and sculpture and in 2014 produced ‘The Silver River’, at Gallery of Modern Art, programmed as part of Glasgow International and has curated the film programme for the exhibition ‘Ripples on the Pond’ at Gallery of Modern Art, which is currently on display until April 2016. Recent writing includes Stan Douglas, Isa Genzken, Anna Oppermann, Hugo Canoilas and Florian and Michael Quistrebert. Find our more about Modern Edinburgh Film School on Central Station here.

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So hello, we are SHIFT/, seven of Scotland’s most dynamic, provocative and lyrical spoken word artists (but by no stretch of the imagination, the only ones). Formed by Rachel McCrum and Bram E Geiben, we have joined forces – like some super-powered comic book phalanx – as an artist-led collective to create a platform for poetic performance in the Edinburgh Fringe that works for us.

As well as Rachel and Bram, SHIFT/ is powered by Rachel Amey, Harry Giles, Jenny Lindsay, Ali Maloney and Sam Small. Between us we have a wealth and diverse range of experience. Collectively, we have won slams, shattered boundaries, toured the world, won awards and broken hearts; promoted, wrought and slogged.

As the Scottish poetry scene is running on full, breath taking, power, SHIFT/ exists to take seven unique and exciting shows to Summerhall – crossing bridges between performance poetry and physical theatre, stand-up and live art, spoken word and music, solemn introspection and punk spit – a different show for each night of the week.

Right now, we are writing, devising, crafting our shows, which could touch upon anything including, but not limited to: cyberpunk dystopian opera, political analysis, BSL, love, clowning, messing around in boats, love on drugs, nihilism, optimism, Dadaism, borders and colonialism and Lovecratian tentacle apocalypses.

We’ll be in the Cairns Lecture theatre in Summerhall every night of the Fringe at 9:30. For full line-ups and updates, get SHIFT/ed at www.shiftword.com.

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Art in Scotland is a new TV channel dedicated to reporting on the contemporary art scene in Scotland. Produced by the team behind Summerhall TV, Art in Scotland aims to provide arts-news clips as well as training and work opportunities for new arts graduates. The site already features several interviews with visual artists and tours of their gallery spaces alongside in-depth reports on upcoming festivals.

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For more creative delights we’ve Spotted on the web take a look here.

Paul Robertson (b. 1958, Birmingham, England) is an artist-curator at Summerhall, Edinburgh, a well-known avant garde art-dealer and art historian, a popular if provocative art-critic, writer and broadcaster and avid art collector.

His background in neurophysiology, psychology, politics and art history has allowed Paul to become curator at Summmerhall—the largest private art museum in Europe that programmes its own spaces. As curator, Robertson has overseen or directly curated 70 exhibitions since August 2012 at Summerhall, as well as other shows in Europe and the USA.

Working as a solo artist Robertson creates false taxonomic systems for individual subjects or genres. His Periodic Table of Bowie will be featured in the V&A’s ‘David Bowie is’ exhibition opening in March 2013. The artwork is now part of the V&A’s permanent collection.

Paul’s First 5 Jobs:

- Chairperson of Scottish Labour Students (first ever person to do it full time)

- Research Assistant at ADLO (Association of Direct Labour Organisations). I did this for five months before watching the clock move in hours for minutes made it intolerable. This is the only time in my life where I worked for someone else.

- Freelance writer and broadcaster – usually under a pseudonym – dealing with matters as wide ranging as science, culture, the internet and Scottish football.

- Managing Director of Labour Communications

- Owner of Heart Fine Art (avant garde book and art dealership)

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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.

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

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