We are looking forward to welcoming Andrew back for his third solo exhibition, Between Concrete and Wood.
Between Concrete and Wood brings together new paintings and drawings focusing on two significant modernist buildings in the Scottish Borders, coupled with responses to an area of woodland near the artist’s home. The paintings were made over a period of a year, through a long process of applying and removing paint.
The architectural paintings are based on Bernat Klein’s wood and glass modernist house near Selkirk, called High Sunderland, and the nationally important Netherdale Stadium in Galashiels, both designed by the British architect Peter Womersley in the 50’s and 60’s. The resulting paintings celebrate the stunning beauty of these structures and their subtle relationships with the landscape, while also gently questioning the legacies of modernism. Andrew visited High Sunderland in early 2023, where he spent a day drawing and photographing the house and landscape.
Alongside these are a series of paintings showing aspects of an area of clear-fell in much-loved woodland very near Andrew’s home, partially felled by Storm Arwen in 2021 and recently cleared and replanted. The paintings give painstaking attention to this place, showing layered imagined future trees, protective tree-tubes, a log-pile, a viewing platform and a fire-exit (lifted from a back street in his local town and placed in the woodland), commenting on the fundamental importance of everyday life cycles occurring under our noses. They prompt questions around human entanglement with the landscape; whether a revered modernist classic building, a cleared area of woodland, or a back street fire-exit.
