This Fragile Earth: Pioneer Scottish Artists who anticipated the climate crisis

This exhibition focusses on a group of pioneering Scottish artists who as early as the 1970s and 1980s were responding to the threat of climate change. They are painters Frances Walker (born 1930) and James Morrison (1932-2020); visual artists and constructivists, Will MacLean (born 1941) and Glen Onwin (born 1947); artist/filmmaker Elizabeth Ogilvie (born 1946); and expeditionary artist and photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper (born 1946).

What are the threads that bind them? First, a common instinct, driven by geography, to engage with the topography, ecology and wildernesses of the North, which they see as stretching from the Scotland’s north-western coastland and archipelago to Canada’s High Arctic and in one case, to the North Pole itself. History also plays its part, notably the economic disruption known as the Highland Clearances, which in the 19^th Century saw the forced emigration of highland communities due to industrial scale sheep farming, a monoculture which also led to widespread deforestation.  This scar has attuned these artists to the plight of today’s indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle and those in other precarious environments. 

Critically, it’s not all about the past. As emerging artists in the early 1970s, they came into close contact with the towering figure of the early environmental art movement, the German activist, teacher and conceptualist, Joseph Beuys, whose installations and performances at successive Edinburgh International Festivals, staged by visionary curator Richard Demarco, had a profound impact on much of their work.

The creative prescience of these six artists in anticipating the now full-blown climate crisis has always been part of themselves and their art resulting in works of intense feeling, meaning and beauty.

This exhibition is hosted in collaboration with the Fleming-Wyfold Collection.

About Human Experience

Each academic year, all of the Art Collection’s exhibitions, events and workshops are directly inspired by one of the University research themes.  In 2024-25 our chosen focus Human Experience will examine topics such as displacement, climate change, social deprivation and covid-19, highlighting the resilience of the human spirit and our ability to continue to create art through and about troubling times.

For details of outreach events being run alongside this theme and further information look on our what’s on page.

The Pathfoot Gallery is free to visit and open to all. See our further information about access and getting here.