Memoria Exhibition

Audrey Grant

In the 2023/24 academic year Audrey Grant has been the University Artist in Residence.  Throughout her residency she has interrogated the landscape, uncovering undiscovered aspects of a parkland whose primary function is now as a university institution, but whose landscape contains the echoes of the lives of those who have lived and worked within its boundaries.

Developed over her year-long residency, Memoria considers and responds to the visible and invisible traces left in the landscape of the historic Airthrey Estate through various media: photography, film, paint and sculpture. 

Audrey Grant grew up in Grangemouth and lives and works in Edinburgh. She is an award-winning painter whose practice includes drawing, photography, and installation. Grant trained at Leith School of Art before showing figurative work in Edinburgh from 2011 and at Panter and Hall, London where her most recent exhibition was Paradise in 2020. In 2019 Grant explored the complex nature of long-durational drawing for her collaboration, The Long Look: The Making of a Portrait with the National Galleries of Scotland.

Grant’s work has regularly been selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), Society of Scottish Artists (SSA) and Visual Arts Scotland (VAS) Open Exhibitions. She has won a number of awards including the Anne Redpath Award and the W. Gordon Smith Award at the VAS Open, and the Open Eye Gallery and Tatha Gallery exhibition prizes at the SSA Open.

All of Grant’s work is underpinned by intellectual ideas derived from, and inspired by, poetry, literature, and philosophy.

In 2020 she was awarded an RSA Residency with Cromarty Arts Trust to undertake research into a major new project – Morgenthau Plan for Creative Renewal. Her premise for the residency was to explore real and imagined landscapes through an engagement with the mythic and to experiment with new mediums beyond painting, such as photography and site-specific installation. The residency took place during the first Pandemic lockdown in March and April 2020.

On her return from Cromarty, Grant was awarded Creative Scotland funding to develop Morgenthau Plan for Creative Renewal further.  This led in 2021 to Inscriptions in Arcadia, a commission from Forth Valley Art Beat for a series of site-specific installations on the theme of real and imagined landscapes in the area around the Bothkennar Pools, near Skinflats. It was here that Grant first began to cast discarded shotgun cases as a reflection on the dark side of the Arcadian dream. Treatise on the Wound was exhibited as part of the Scotland Small? exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2022, this installation work built on Grant’s work from both Cromarty and Bothkennar, expanding her practice into gallery installations using photography, sculptural and found objects to explore the nature of the ‘wound’.

In autumn 2022 she was awarded one of the inaugural mini residencies at the Arcadia Sculpture Centre, near Drymen. During this residency Grant explored Rilke’s poems about autumn to explore our ever-changing relationship with nature. Grant created a site-specific installation of a woodland shelter as well as installations using found objects. 

In May 2023 she was appointed Artist-in-Residence with the University of Stirling, a yearlong residency to research and respond to the university landscape and campus culminating in a exhibition in 2024.

Visit Audrey's website to find out more.