November 11, 2024
We’ve now got the keys to The Paper Factory – the vast industrial site that we’re transforming into a vibrant hub for creatives, with plans for a full-scale arts festival in spring 2025. We’re also opening up a section of the huge complex for a special venue launch party on 22-23 November, to give audiences a special preview of the venue for two nights of live music, visual art and performances.
With access to such a huge space, the visual arts programme will include an incredible selection of immersive installations. Inspired by our theme of “Past, Present, Future“, visual art curator Jill Boualaxai has invited both new and returning artists, with a selection of works specifically for the site. “We’re exploring time, history, and archaeology,” says Jill, “and the idea of nature creeping back into that industrial space.”
The cavernous venue for the event launch provides an exciting opportunity for artists to work on a (literally) industrial scale. Our artists will use the space to amplify their visions, offering an immersive experience that blurs boundaries and invites audiences into histories both real and imagined.
Here’s some of what you can expect to find inside The Paper Factory this November…
Aimée’s installation, A Thurifer’s Crucible, explores ritual and transformation through sculpted replicas of thuribles, vessels used in Christian liturgy. Her work will interact with the industrial space, merging the imagery of religious ritual with the foundry’s crucible, where fire and smoke originate. The installation will feature a bronze piece capturing the act of holding fire, alongside drawings that further explore this theme.
Alice’s intensely worked drawings are a sensory-seeking journey, which undulate, buzz and crackle with energy. Her work responds to the sensory and material properties of her chosen medium and is often guided by stimuli internal and external to the body. She employs systematic layering, ritualized, repetitive movement as mark making – a crucial support to her non-verbal communication and exploration. Presented in partnership with The Art Studios at Garvald Edinburgh, providing learning disabled artists with the facilities and resources to explore and express their creative voice.
The expansive nature of Hidden Door’s Paper Factory venue has allowed for the return of Beth Shapeero and Fraser Taylor’s collaborative textile banners, first exhibited at Hidden Door 2021 in Granton. These works, created through a dynamic printing process that merges spontaneity and control, blend different visual elements into cohesive and layered compositions. It will be exciting to see how this new setting enhances the impact of their process-driven collaboration.
Bronwen has exhibited widely, with her work held in numerous collections around the world. For our event Bronwen presents a collection of abstract, geometric, layered etchings, with an intensity of line, form and colour, investigating attitudes to space as expressed through architecture and its relationship to the landscape.
Christian’s work explores themes of futurism and environmental disaster, examining the materials and structures that will define the legacy of modern society, such as concrete, metal, glass, and plastic, contrasting them with the stone, wood, and clay of ancient civilizations. Through repetition and simple forms, his sculptures provide a contemplative experience that reflects on the chaos of modern society, juxtaposed with the imposing presence of large structures.
Fiona is a prolific artist who has developed a large and vibrant body of work inspired by animals, fairy-tales and mythology. Fiona varies medium and scale in her work and has developed her practice to involve overlaying her base layers with distinctive dot and line pattern elements. Presented in partnership with The Art Studios at Garvald Edinburgh, providing learning disabled artists with the facilities and resources to explore and express their creative voice.
Iona is an interdisciplinary Scottish artist whose work explores changing communities and relationship to our landscapes in the time of the climate crisis. Her sculptures imagine how technology has altered our methods of communication and surveillance in even the “remotest” of landscapes.
James’ Hot Take consists of person-sized sculptures, each with its own variants in materials and colours, creating nuances in the work: sculptures held together with luminous pink gaffer tape or with cardboard structures covered in screen-printed forms. There is a spontaneity and casualness to the works, pushing towards a playfulness in presentation and allowing the work to open into different readings. The arrangement encourages the viewer to meander, the details held within the works and relations between them encouraging longer or repeat viewings.
Jemima Hall spent over a month in solitude on the uninhabited Shiant Islands and several weeks living in a cave on the island of Gometra. It is in these landscapes that Jemima learns about seaweeds and their changing strengths, their weight, durability, gathering methods, and is captured by their translucency which exhibits a display of golden and green light. Seaweeds, with their rich ethnobotanical history, tell a story of human resilience, creativity, and survival. This exploration echoes the broader challenges of our changing climate.
“The Flood” is an immersive installation inspired by Jo’s experiences of traveling and living between Scotland and England throughout the pandemic. This work delves into personal experiences, relationships, and memories, reflecting on the transience and fragility of life through a torrent of emotions, evoked by imagery of downpours, shifting skies, the sea, and the raw beauty of the landscape. “The Flood” transforms in response to our venue, dynamically altering the surrounding space and challenging traditional boundaries between the viewer and the artwork.
Justine transforms discarded domestic objects into intimate sculptures, examining the intersection of craftsmanship and sustainability. At the heart of her practice is a desire to transform mundane, domestic, yet profoundly intimate artefacts of our daily existence, considering the relationship between the corporeal and the crafted.
Lucy Wayman is a fibre artist whose practice transforms discarded materials into intricate sculptures. Retethered explores the transformation of discarded rope from the Fife coastline into intricate fiber sculptures that balance form, labor, and memory. Each piece honours the worn shape, texture, and character of the rope, carrying the imprint of its former life.
Marly’s practice explores imagined and alternate realities, creating artworks that provoke ideas around new and better places in which to exist. Focusing on ideas of ‘otherness’ and rejecting societal norms, Marly’s artwork for our event uses wearable sculpture to question a person’s own lived reality. By wearing the sculpture, you become part of a different reality – submerged into a new space, a place of newness and reinvention.
Martin will create an installation of stencilled paper tiles and typographic video projection. The patterns on the tiles are based on decorative modular typographic elements which were designed to embellish printed letterpress materials. The projection shows another side of typography where letterfoms and typography are pushed to the point of being abstract and potentially back to the point of decoration.
Known for her mixed-media installations, Rachel explores rituals of the body and the “monstrous feminine” through painting, ceramics, papier-mâché, and film. Rachel’s work delves into the complex relationship between human and non-human interactions, which aligns with the theme of nature reclaiming industrial spaces that characterises this November’s Hidden Door art program.
For Hidden Door, Rachel Stanley will be showing a series of small, tender paintings which play with the intersection of body and landscape.
Remi’s artistic practice is influenced by the power of secrets and personal incidents that queer life holds. Their ecologically-inspired works highlight the idea of nature reclaiming industrial space that we are bringing to life in our November art program.
[DE]COMPRESS is an audio-visual installation by Siân Landau exploring the stories of Deep Time held between layers of rock across four sites, and the history of human interventions at each of them. Presenting an imagined conversation between Dunino Den, Wemyss Caves, Blackford Hill and the National Mining Museum Scotland, the work is made up of an 8-hour sound work played in 4.0 surround sound, a large-scale wall image, and a projection.
