The University of Stirling’s Art Collection is a varied collection and display of Scottish Contemporary art and museum objects, with a focus on making art and culture a part of everyday life for staff, students and visitors, and enabling exchanges between art, research and teaching. The Collection is housed in the Pathfoot building – a working place of learning that has stood among the beautiful modernist lochside University development since its inception in 1967. It boasts an active programme of events that improves access to art, inspiring people to engage with it, and welcoming everyone into a creative environment, where creative thinking and creative acts are at the heart of its identity as a place of learning. The Collection is driven by the belief that a creative environment stimulates creative thinking and can inspire a whole community.
An Artist Talk, hosted by the Art Collection and the Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory, will take place with RSA Academician Toby Paterson on 27th March, 1 – 2pm. A renowned and award-winning Scottish visual artist, Toby’s work considers in-depth the experiences of place and architecture: his painting always begins from a subjective experience of place, building on formal aspects such as colour and materials, through spatial qualities and into the objective socio-political and historical considerations that surround all cities. Toby aims to communicate the everyday fascination lying around every corner, ‘offering the chance for singular perspectives within the complex, collective realities we inhabit’, as he puts it, inspired by architecture’s forms and ideas and experiences of place.
Well-represented in the University’s Collection, Toby was commissioned in 2022 to create two site-specific works including The Open Grid: Sunsets (pictured above) and its sister piece The Open Grid: Sunsets (pictured at top) for the Pathfoot Building. Each is sited over separate, identical stairwells. The informal talk about his practice will be followed by a walk around the Pathfoot Building to view his works.
Open 11:00 – 15:00 on 18th April this year, the Collection’s popular annual Open Day brings visitors for tours, activities and performances of its Pathfoot Project, which showcases new writing and music inspired by the exhibitions.
Inspired by the research on campus, this year’s theme for the Pathfoot building’s exhibitions is Art & Science, with exhibitions examining the shared communities of practice between artists and scientific researchers.
The exhibition includes Species (Coelacanth) II (pictured) – a print by Stuart MacKenzie RSA on loan from the RSA Collections and Le Bouc, a painting by the award-winning artist Alison Watt RSA, displayed in Scotland for the first time, and from September, an exhibition series, Topography, will include work by Annie Cattrell RSA, on loan from the Academy.
