The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh is presenting its May programme, bringing together three artists deeply engaged with the natural world: Sheila Anderson-Hardy’s immersive wild garden landscapes are on show alongside a multi-disciplinary installation by Guy Royle and Dawnne McGeachy’s powerful evocations of sea and memory, supported by films, workshops, events and coffee mornings.
Wild is Sheila’s first solo exhibition is a celebration of the wild garden she has shaped over the past decade in the Scottish Borders, and a testament to the transformative power of living within nature’s cycles, unfolding through the gardener’s year, with each month bringing its own focus: hawthorn berries and rosehips in November, hogweed and thistle in winter, the greens of early spring, the blossom and birdsong and swelling hedgerows in April through the full-throated bird chorus of May and so on to meadow flowers and goldfinches in high summer and thereon to the harvests of autumn.
Born in 1956 in Portpatrick and a graduate of Glasgow School of Art, Sheila paints at her base in the Borders and is inspired by close observation of hedgerows, field margins and woodland edges, their flora and wildlife. She works with Sumi-e ink washes, watercolour and collage, building densely-layered, delicately-drawn compositions. She is a member of The Scottish Wildlife Trust and was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour.
Dawnne McGeachy’s exhibition Holding Water is a powerful body of new paintings, shaped by sustained engagement with the sea. Drawing on her experience of growing up a close neighbour to the sea on the Kintyre peninsula, Dawnne painstakingly builds-up her paintings, the surfaces worked and reworked until they hold a sense of movement and instability and evoke an atmosphere, depth and distance, evoking the human presence in the sea’s vastness.
Guy Royle’s exhibition Spring Song combines jewellery, handwoven rugs, sculpture and printmaking, not as separate strands but as part of a cohesive way of thinking through making. Based in Cornwall, Guy has developed a visual language shaped by landscape, touch and process, his work reflecting a deep understanding of materials and an intuitive and precise commitment to making, characterised by sensitivity, integrity and the enduring value of things made by hand.
