‘Reading Forms’ Opening

The past 6 months have been a whirlwind, it was the fastest winter/ early spring there has ever been for me and the most productive, bringing together my first solo exhibition.

‘Reading Forms’ opened at Innerpeffray Library, Perthshire on the 1st May, a site-specific visual art exhibition set within the site of Scotlands first free public lending library. The project began almost 4 years ago and it has been a wonderful time to finally bring this work together and share it with audiences.

The days leading up to the opening night were, speaking honestly, very stressful! More due to the weight of expectation I was carrying for myself and wanting for it to come together as I had planned. When bringing together an exhibition that has a relationship with its environment, it is hard to know how it will really feel until all of the work is in place.

I find it difficult making decisions but coming up with design and display ideas is one thing I find easy, especially at this stage, when I’ve reached a point of creative flow. So with this in mind, it is particularly difficult accepting that making all of the things I have in my head, just isn’t possible. I would love to keep going, but I certainly have now an abundance of ideas for future projects in this field of work.

Innerpeffray Chapel, where the free public lending library first began in Scotland. A single piece of sculpture placed in this space marks this pivitol movement.

Here in my studio, I am sitting with piles of fabric scraps, notes, collage material, screen print tests, drawings, etc etc, and I can’t yet face packing them away, I am so very pulled to keep making work with this material. So while the exhibition in running and the project at Innerpeffray is coming to an end, the material and early modern history era will feed into my general studio work for sure. I can hear an owl hooting away outside there and I think its time for bed.

Thanks for reading to anyone who actually got this far!

Photography by Ruth Pringle from Blue Noun

The opening night was a really great mix of local folk, friends from afar and new faces, which was perfect. The exhibition has been in my head in pieces for so long, it is strange to see it all in the final arrangement and to be reaching this end point of the project at Innerpeffray.

I have however, a second part to this work, which would take this idea into a portable touring form, ‘The Library Capsule Project’ this is in development, but I hope to share it all at a future date, in the not too distant.

Photography by Ruth Pringle