Head to Head

Untitled, a marble bust created in 2013 by Edinburgh-based artist Jonathan Owen, will be part of a fascinating array of portrait sculptures, drawn from the collections of the National Galleries of Scotland, which will form a new exhibition set to open in Edinburgh this week. Head to Head, which opens at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery on 6 June, will bring together around 50 busts and sculpted figures in a huge variety of styles and media, dating from antiquity to the present day.

Head to Head will explore the many ways in which sculptors have treated and re-imagined that most engaging, most primal subject, the human head. It will be spectacularly staged in the Portrait Gallery’s contemporary space on the ground floor, and is the first National Galleries exhibition to feature sculptures drawn equally from all three collections.

For Untitled Owen has carved directly into the head of a nineteenth-century portrait bust, turning it into a cage made of an intricate three-dimensional star pattern, with a marble sphere trapped inside. Owen’s transformation of the original bust into a new object illustrates one of the ways artists continue to reference the tradition of the sculpture portrait, while also seeking to break free from it.

EDINBURGH’S CULTURAL VENUES ANNOUNCE NEW STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP

Today The Edinburgh Cultural Venues Group announces the findings of an Impact Study funded by Scottish Enterprise into the social and economic impact of Edinburgh’s larger, year-round cultural providers. 

ECVG is a consortium of the city's key publicly funded cultural organisations, which came together in 2013 to maximise the effectiveness, appeal, and reach of Edinburgh's richly diverse year-round cultural offer.


The Group currently includes eight leading organisations – the Filmhouse, Festival City Theatres Trust (the Festival and King’s Theatres), National Museums Scotland, the Queen’s Hall, the Royal Lyceum Theatre, the Traverse Theatre, the Usher Hall, and the National Galleries of Scotland. In addition to delivering their individual programmes of work throughout the year, all these organisations enable an even wider range of activity – working in collaboration with Edinburgh's festivals, arts and heritage organisations, community organisations and schools.

The group aims to present an authoritative collective voice for the city's year round cultural provision, serving residents and visitors with a high quality programme of theatre, dance, exhibitions, music and film. Going forward it also aims to support joint programming and promotions, business efficiencies and skills sharing, and to partner other umbrella initiatives (including Festivals Edinburgh, the Edinburgh Tourism Action Group, Desire Lines and Culture Counts) in championing the importance of the cultural sector in maintaining Edinburgh’s overall success and prosperity.

The Study documents the collective social and economic benefits of these organisations for the first time. It outlines the scale of participation in educational activity at the venues, as well as their impact on employment and talent development, and their wider commercial value to business suppliers and the tourism and hospitality sectors.

The Study highlights that participating venues deliver:

§ 5,000 FTE jobs and £194 million Gross Value Added (GVA) in Scotland as a whole - of which over 3,200 FTE jobs and £156 million GVA specifically benefits the Edinburgh economy

§ 6.2 million visits to the arts venues collectively

§ 1,600 events and productions - with over 6,100 individual performances

§ almost 150 collaborations with co-producers and event partners

§ and brings an additional £129 million spent by venue visitors to the wider Edinburgh economy

In terms of return on investment, for every £1 invested by the City of Edinburgh Council, the Scottish Government and Creative Scotland the group generated £4.62 for the Scottish economy and a total of £194m of economic benefit.

The study also illustrates how investment in the arts delivers wider curriculum benefits, helps to create the artists of tomorrow and builds future audiences for the arts. Participation figures across ECVG show high levels of engagement with schools as well as with young learners outside school, and with adult learners:

§ over 12,000 young people participating in out-of-school skills development

§ over 80,000 adult attendances at learning and participation events

§ nearly 120,000 school attendances



The acting Chair of ECVG, Duncan Hendry, said: “Edinburgh has world class museums, galleries, theatres and venues for music and film. This study highlights the wide range of activities that Edinburgh’s cultural venues undertake throughout the year and the tremendous benefits, both cultural and economic, that this brings to the City and to Scotland.”

The National Galleries of Scotland are excited to announce Halloween: By Night.

The National Galleries of Scotland are excited to announce Halloween: By Night, the third event in the 2013 By Night series, inspired by Witches & Wicked Bodies and headlined by The Eccentronic Research Council ft Maxine Peake.

The Eccentronic Research Council are a self-styled collective of artists, sound designers, experimental pop performers led primarily by Sheffield musicians Adrian Flanagan and Dean Honer (formerly of The All Seeing I). The band have performed at various venues across the UK are we are very excited to see them add the National Galleries to their list of performance spaces.

The gig at the Scottish National Gallery on 31 October 2013 will include a performance, in full, of the ERC’s 2012 record 1612 Underture. The 14-track collaboration with British actress Maxine Peake is inspired by the tale of the Pendle witch trials and compliments the thematic Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art show, Witches & Wicked Bodies, which charts 500 years of the depiction of witches in art. The narration on the album performed by Peake, which will be reinterpreted for the Halloween performance, is based around a (part fictional) account of a psycho-geographical trip taken by a priest and a nun from Salford to Pendle to learn more about the town's most notorious daughters.

Maxine Peake is well known for her extensive work across British Film and TV. From the first series of Shameless alongside James McAvoy and Anne Marie Duff to Victoria Wood’s Dinnerladies. Peake’s recent TV work includes the BBC crime series Silk and STV’s The Village.

The event, in the form of all By Night events, will provide a unique opportunity to explore the Gallery in a new light, after hours, with bars, music and performers. There will be poetry readings by Blake Morrison, rediscovering his work on the Pendle witches, alongside Tarot readings, DJ Fudge Fingas and the film The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Other Halloween happenings are to be confirmed.

Halloween: By Night 

Tickets are £12
31 October 2013, 7.15pm – 10pm at the Gardens entrance of the Scottish National Gallery.

By Night from the National Galleries of Scotland

Listen to ‘Maxine’s Dream’ from 1612 Underture.

Witches & Wicked Bodies

Maxine Peake and the ERC on the Culture Show February 2013.