Art Advisor and ex-Director of Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby’s, Sophie Camu Lindsay, is organising the first ‘Space to Breathe’ exhibition and festival with husband and photographer, Alexander Lindsay. 

Running from Saturday, 15 July to Sunday, 6 August 2023, it centres around four internationally-recognised British artists, Harry Cory Wright, Susan Derges, Andy Goldsworthy, and Alexander Lindsay. All four artists will be showing work created in Scotland and the UK, including photography, watercolours and large-scale unique works by Goldsworthy. The majority of works will be for sale.

The main exhibition and festival, at Bowhouse, will feature free talks, panel discussions and events. Click on this link for the full programme.

The exhibition’s duration in July and August coincides with peak Scottish arts season and the festival is intended to become an annual event to showcase both established and up-and-coming international artists, photographers and designers, brought together around a curated theme.

The natural world …

This year the exhibition will centre on the physical and mental creative processes of four great artist-photographers documenting the natural world.  Cory Wright, Derges, Goldsworthy and Lindsay approach landscape and nature within their artistic output in unique ways, yet they are linked by their experimentation and the physicality of their creative processes.  For them, the action of making the work is of equal, if not greater, concern than the resulting image. They find creative fulfilment in the journey it takes to the final image.

Organiser, Sophie Camu Lindsay said of the exhibition, ‘The four artists are connected through the time it takes to create their work. There is no rush – in fact the opposite. They can spend days setting up, planning and creating their work – waiting, watching and immersing themselves in their surroundings. Today, everybody is a photographer, but few take the time to slow down, look, feel and respond to their natural environment as intensely as these artists’.

Co-organiser, Alexander Lindsay, said, ‘The idea for the festival was inspired by the success of my one-man exhibition that Sophie and I ran together in summer 2022 at Bowhouse which attracted 4,000 visitors and almost sold out.  Bowhouse is a vast, light-filled space which provides an impressive backdrop to world-class art’.

Bowhouse is part of the Balcaskie Estate, located in the heart of the East Neuk, between Elie and St Monans.  A converted barn and vast space of almost 900 square metres, it is set in open countryside and known for its monthly food market.  It was a dramatic backdrop to Alexander Lindsay’s exhibition in 2022, transforming the industrial space into an extraordinary art gallery.

Need more?

For the festival programme, more information on the artists and their work – and ticket details, please visit their website via this link.

We are delighted to provide further background information on the artists involved …

• Andy Goldsworthy OBE: Born in 1956. Sculptor, land artist, and photographer known for ephemeral works created outdoors from natural materials found on-site. Has permanent indoor and outdoor works around the world including a work for the Holocaust Memorial Museum in New York and an installation for the National Gallery of Art Washington DC.  He had a major retrospective at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2007 and 2008 and was the subject of two documentary films by director Thomas Riedelsheimer: Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time (2001) and Leaning into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy (2017).
  • Image: Andy Goldsworthy. Wool Hand. Dumfriesshire, Scotland 14th June 2019. Photographic Print.
• Susan Derges: Born in 1955. Susan Derges is a British photographic artist living and working in Devon. She specialises in camera-less photographic processes, most often working with natural landscapes, and has had solo exhibitions at galleries across the work including in London, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris and Berlin. Her works are in numerous collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
• Harry Cory Wright: Harry Cory Wright explores our fundamental attraction to place, and the very visceral experience of being in landscape. Born in 1963 he lives and works in Norfolk.  His work was included in Landmark: The Fields of Photography at Somerset House, London (2013) curated by William A. Ewing. Solo exhibitions include Six Hour Place, Creake Abbey (2017) and Anglia, Eleven (2015)
  • Photo credit for image used in the collage above: Harry Cory Wright, Pabbay, 2011, C Print, 68 x 85cm
• Alexander Lindsay: Alexander Lindsay creates photographic landscapes in ultra high resolution on an epic scale. He has developed his own system to capture wilderness regions of the world at and beyond the edges of human influence. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in Arles, France and Christie’s London, and he has had major solo shows in Aspen, Colorado USA), Kings Place Piano Nobile, London, The Vineyard, Cape Town, Jackson, Wyoming USA, Messums Wiltshire UK and Bowhouse, Fife, Scotland (2022).

 

Thanks for reading!