exhibition

Eight contemporary artists at Traquair House

• Gordon Brennan
• Ken Cockburn
• Mark Haddon
• Jane Hyslop
• Paul Keir
• Andrew Mackenzie
• Deirdre Macleod
• Mary Morrison

Eight artists, (seven visual artists, and one writer), were invited to show work in the two garden pavilions at Traquair House. Each of the artists presented work in one of the pavilions and also a related ‘paired’ work in the main house, or somewhere in the grounds.

Traquair House, the oldest continuously inhabited house in Scotland, presents an enormously rich and diverse array of objects, artworks, and architecture which evidence, on the one hand, direct involvement with the mainstream of historic national and court politics and affairs of state, and on the other, the modest and domestic accumulations, ‘collisions’ and layerings which happen over centuries in a well-loved, inhabited, place.

One of the pavilions has, as its centrepiece, an anonymous ceiling painting depicting an episode in the story of Diana and Actaeon, immediately prior to the transformation of Actaeon into a deer. The survival, intact, of this rather beautiful artefact, embedded in the fabric of the building, exemplifies many of the special qualities of the site as a whole.

The group of artists, which included emergent and established practices, and representing a diverse range of conceptual and technical strategies, propose works that were prompted by the marks of habitation, change and accretion, which they found here.