Giant instruments, psychedelic swimming pools and Essex girls – Murdo MacLeod does the rounds at the visual arts festival
Lucy Wayman
Lucy Wayman has been commissioned to create a new public sculpture for the cycle path close to Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, connecting Newhaven to Edinburgh city centre. Wayman’s practice makes use of craft techniques, such as weaving, knotting and macramé, but at scale and with a surprising dynamism. This is her first major outdoor commission and is supported by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop’s partner Sustrans, through its ArtRoots programme![]()
Bobby Niven
Palm House – a series of new free-form planters – was created by artist Bobby Niven for the festival’s 2017 commissions programme in response to the unique space of Scottish Wildlife Trust’s smallest nature reserve. Accompanied by a hand-built mud oven, the project is conceived as a social sculpture, a space for production, and for sharing and exchanging conversations, cooking and activities that collectively invite exploration of the reserve
Joana Vasconcelos
Gateway is an art installation swimming pool by Joana Vasconcelos, set within a landscaped formal garden and accompanied by a delicate glass-dome space. A vibrant, colourful drawing pressed into the landscape, shaped from over 11,500 hand-painted and glazed tiles traditionally manufactured in Vasconcelos’s native Portugal, the artwork is a vast communal labour; a celebration of the sociopolitical associations of craftsmanship. The public will be able to book sessions to swim there.![]()
Ever After is Guild’s ongoing dialogue with his knowledge and understanding of art history 
Caroline Achaintre
Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop commissioned French artist Caroline Achaintre to make new work, Encounter, for its large outdoor courtyard. Achaintre is known for her fabric work in the form of tufted rugs, her ceramics using paper clay, drawing, print and watercolour painting. She often integrates small sculptures within larger support structures, called “display furniture”![]()
James Richards
James Richards’s exhibition atCollective features Migratory Motor Complex, a six-channel electro-acoustic installation that explores the capacity of sound to render artificial spaces and locate sonic and melodic events within them. The work is tuned in situ, with Richards reacting to the acoustic contingencies of the City Dome to create a cinematic and multi-sensory experience
Grayson Perry
Housed in the former Victorian bathhouse at Dovecot Studios, Julie Cope’s Grand Tour marks Grayson Perry’s first major solo exhibition in Scotland. The final stop of the tour includes the complete series of tapestries and a selection of artefacts from A House for Essex, an installation designed by Perry with FAT Architecture to evoke a wayside pilgrimage chapel. Instead of a patron saint, it is dedicated to the life of Julie Cope, a typical Essex woman![]()
This exploration of what can and cannot be musically represented is complimented by Young’s colourful graphic scores – which imagine unruly compositions – and items from the university’s collections. New video work Orchestrations (2019) evokes the various attempts to transpose Mo Li Hua (Jasmine Flower), while Muted Situation #22: Muted Tchaikovsky’s 5th (2018) shows an orchestra performing the famous piece with instruments muted 
The exhibition also offers the opportunity to explore the art of tapestry and the different crafts, skills and techniques used to produce these extraordinary objects ![]()
Alfredo Jaar’s I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On features a large neon sign that will be placed across Edinburgh’s “bridge of sighs” linking the Talbot Rice Gallery and National Museum. The eponymous words are taken from Beckett’s The Unnamable and will also be used in a series of public interventions, in which Edinburgh College students will parade them around the city streets on sandwich boards 
The Turner prize-shortlisted Nathan Coley’s The Future Is Inside Us, It’s Not Somewhere Else will temporarily replace five portraits in Parliament Hall with new artworks. They look to a set of imaginary landscapes as the site for a series of evocative texts inviting the viewer to reflect on ideas of utopia. ![]()
Samson Young
Real Music is the first major UK solo exhibition of Hong Kong artist and composer Samson Young. At its heart, new commission Possible Music #2 conjures an impossible, giant musical instrument. Through an ambitious collaboration with the University of Edinburgh’s Next Generation Sound Synthesis (NESS) research group, who have pioneered software to generate the sound of virtual instruments, Young pushes parameters to orchestrate the sound of impossible dimensions, temperatures and forces
Sriwhana Spong
New Zealand artist Sriwhana Spong is interested in the relationship between the body and language. Her new film castle-crystal begins with the writings of the 16th-century mystic St Teresa of Avila, whose book The Interior Castle imagines a castle-crystal, a fictional space that gives her the courage to write. Spong is interested in how Teresa’s imaginary castle creates a free space for the imagination and discourse, a space in which women can authorise their own speaking
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Derrick Guild
Derrick Guild’s Ever After, at the Scottish Gallery, is made up of 40 individual miniature works that relate to portraits by Sir Peter Lely, Sir Anthony van Dyck, Sir Henry Raeburn and Pompeo Batoni. Details and fragments, including eyes, mouth, ears, jewellery and clothing, are presented within small oval frames connected by fine gold chain
