Colstoun Arts, established in 2022 in Colstoun House East Lothian, and a space offering artists access to the surrounding countryside as well as opening its doors to multiple artists as part of its ongoing residency programme. That was the first step in the directorship of Colstoun Arts’s Director McLean (Mackie) Sinclair-Parry and in 2024 it is set to welcome artists from Germany, Korea, China and France as well as the UK.
The plan is to develop a series of 3 to 5 exhibitions a year including a residency group show, an emerging artist solo show, an established landscape artist group show and a new collaboration with Royal Scottish Academy to show work by Scottish artists focusing on landscape and nature.
The first artist to be selected from the Colstoun Artist Residency to mount an exhibition is Joe Grieve whose exhibition The Other Side will comprise predominantly large-scale oil paintings that consider Grieve’s immersive relationship with, and memories of, landscapes within the British Isles, and their corruption and fragmentation over his lifetime.
Grieve says “My artwork is an ever growing and changing culmination of my recent exploration into the land that surrounds me. I find myself instinctively drawn toward landscape painting because of the emotional reverence and painterly freedom it enables. My process is a balance between instinctive, reactive movements and slower heavily considered marks. The laying of paint, the push and pull between fast and slow results in the varied expressions of the landscape…”
“I am interested in the social politics of land, specifically the fight for increased ‘Right-to-roam’ laws in the UK. 92% of the England’s countryside and 97% of its rivers are not covered by the right to roam.
…“My time at Colstoun was peaceful and empowering. Being in a new and unknown thicket of nature allowed me to get lost in the rare magic that Colstoun offers. Being able to live and work in a totally new place with such vast lands to get lost in cleared my mind while painting. It opened me to this other side of life and creativity and was a marked contrast to city painting.”
Director of Colstoun Arts Mackie Sinclair-Parry said “Art has always been a part of Colstoun’s history. When you look at the walls and see hundreds of years of art collected through the generations, it becomes obvious why we should create a sustainable, progressive way in which to collect contemporary art and present it to the wider population. It started with the Colstoun Artist Residency but is now being expanded to include public exhibitions and collaborations with external galleries and museums.”
Colstoun Arts will support the acquisition of artworks for the Colstoun Arts Collection which includes works from established contemporary artists such as Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk, Peter Randall-Page, Conrad Shawcross, Tracey Emin, Carolina Mazzolari, Robin Friend, Alina Zamanova and more, as well as emerging artists Joe Grieve, Lara Cobden, Suhaylah H., James Dearlove and Marina Rennee-Cemmick.
Dates and Venue:
Saturday 4th May – Sunday 19th May
Colstoun House, Haddington, East Lothian, EH41 4PA
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 