Vessel Exhibition

Our concluding Vessel exhibition features artist collective Huniti Goldox (Jordan/Germany), and artists Tonya McMullan, Jenny Pope and Claudia Zeiske.

The exhibition is the second-part of Art Walk Projects’ Vessel programme taking place within their Art Walk Extended programme with work featured from four of their current residency artists.

New work includes Huniti Goldox’s commission Measuring Time through the Fall of Water, centred around an immersive video installation. The work features contemporary reenactments of a water clock – a time-keeping technique from ancient times that relies on the fall and flow of water through a vessel. It critically engages with colonial perspectives and scale, examining how territorial control is exerted through human-made structures like time zones, dammed rivers, and aridity lines. It provokes reflection on scientific and indigenous forms of knowledge, as well as the fates of unmeasurable objects, subjects and relations within the natural world.

Tonya McMullan concludes her Repel and Attract project focussed around tomato plant seedlings found thriving at the local Seafield Water Treatment Plant, with her interest in developing work around connections to waste, water, ecology and scent. This new installation involving a water-collection sculputure is informed by McMullan’s interest in interactions between humans and insects, as well as the unique scent and growth patterns of tomato plants.

Jenny Pope exhibits her coracle-form as part of her Buoyancy in Unprecedented Times project, representative of a hand-built ‘lifeboat’ which she has created from clothing donated by local residents. The vessel evokes the possibiity of navigating hope in uncertain times, and follows on from its launch into Portobello Sea along with community led singing and swimming earlier in September as part of the Art Walk Porty programme.

Claudia Zeiske exhibits her embroidered tablecloth she has carried across the 500 mile journey she has walked from Dunnet Head to Portobello as part of her Slow Coast 500 project which considers the role of tourism in making (or breaking) places. Often intended as a boost to local economies, tourism can contribute to problems for local communities and their environment. Along the way, she carreid this orange tablecloth the colour of an OS ‘Explorer’ map, using it as a picnic blanket to encourage conversation. Step by step and stitch by stitch, Zeiske is embroidering her journey, which will conclude at the Scottish-English border in October, questioning the role and impacts of tourism today.