Edinburgh’s acclaimed arts centre Summerhall is launching its 2024 Festival visual arts programme, comprising a truly eclectic variety of uncompromising work by hand-picked artists working in a broad sweep of media, from photography and paint to metal sculpture.

Known to the broader public for Dreaming Spires, her life-size giraffe sculptures standing outside the city’s Omni Centre, Helen Denerley turns scrap metal into life-like animals and birds (see top image). Beyond being mere representations of domestic and wild creatures, they seem to have a personality of their own. The forms are never whole, the use of negative space making them come alive and creating form where there is only air. 

Also showing in Summerhall’s Festival programme are Calum Colvin’s This Living Hand (above), reflecting on mortality, creativity and the essential role of the hand in artistic creation, Sam Kissajukian’s Paintings of Modernia (also above) – work created during a manic bipolar episode, Hard Art, photographs of the Washington DC punk scene (below), Robert McDowell’s The Medium of Madness (also below), a retrospective of paintings created between 1968-98 and Jo Coates’ Restoration, showcasing the many techniques used to restore paintings (see bottom).