Showing as part of Dunoon Burgh Hall’s 150th anniversary celebrations, a new exhibition by Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins (born 1938) showcases a group of twenty works on paper made between 1975 and 2010. Celmins’ drawings and prints are rarely seen in the UK: this collection is drawn from Artist Rooms – a national collection owned by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate.

Celmins creates intricate works featuring oceans, night skies, galaxies, deserts and, in her later series, spider webs. Based on what she calls ‘redescription’ – a process of translating photographic images from one medium to another, her painstakingly slow method of composition results in extraordinary precision. She is part of a generation of artists, in particular those based in Los Angeles during the 1960s, who made work using found images – in her case, including photographs and clippings of planets and lunar surfaces appearing for the first time in the media.

A refugee from Soviet-occupied Latvia, Celmins was relocated to the United States in 1948, and with no English, she turned to drawing as a means of expressing herself. She has been the subject of over forty solo exhibitions, including major retrospectives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She continues to live and work in New York.

Since 2009, some 200 Artist Rooms: exhibitions of works by international artists have been shown at nearly a hundred UK museum and galleries, drawing over 50 million visitors.

In celebration of its 150th anniversary, The Hall is raising funds to help modernise the building, aiming to collect 150 pledges of £150.