A ground-breaking new exhibition from the University of Stirling and The Fleming Collection celebrates Scottish artists who were way ahead of their time in responding to the threat of climate change.
This Fragile Earth shares the work of pioneer Scottish artists James Morrison, Frances Walker, Glen Onwin, Will Maclean, Elizabeth Ogilvie and Thomas Joshua Cooper. It will take place from September 26, 2024 to August 8, 2025 at the University of Stirling’s landmark Pathfoot Building.
Until now, these artists - although known to one another - have never been perceived as a group with common artistic goals. It was the gifting to the collection in 2022 of James Morrison’s monumental six-metre-long Arctic Mural (1995) that led director of the Fleming Collection, James Knox, to investigate whether other Scottish-based artists shared similar preoccupations around that time or earlier.
James Knox’s search led him to examine the work and careers of Morrison and the five other artists, whose disciplines include visual art, photography, painting and film.
Collectively, these six artists are not well known to a wide public either in Scotland or beyond. And yet they deserve to be, according to James Knox, because of their prescient response, stretching back 40 years or more and stretching from Scotland to Canada, to the now full-blown climate crisis.
Frances Walker’s After the Storm, of the Inner Hebridean island of Tiree, was painted in 1987 when Walker was concerned about Tiree’s sea levels.
Much of Will Maclean’s work – both as a graphic artist and maker of assemblages of found and carved objects - mourns the loss of age-old working communities, victims of the Highland Clearances, and memorialises their links to archaic pasts.
Beyond Scotland, Morrison worked alongside a community of Inuit peoples in the Canadian High Arctic who had been forcibly re-settled from their traditional territories by the Canadian government.
At a time when the climate crisis has rightly become a central preoccupation for artists across the globe, The Fleming Collection believes the time is right to acknowledge those who forged the way.
James Knox, Director of the Fleming Collection, said: “This landmark show installed in the modernist masterpiece of the Pathfoot Building, which incidentally was designed by a Scot, will open the eyes of the public to the sensibility of Scottish artists to the threats and consequences of climate change as expressed through works of great beauty and force.”
Sarah Bromage, Head of Collections at the University of Stirling, said: “We are delighted to be working with the Fleming Collection to bring this important work to the University of Stirling. 'This Fragile Earth is the major exhibition in our themed year of ‘human experience’ which 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.
“An accompanying public event programme throughout the year will enable exchanges between art, research and teaching and facilitate our student, research and local communities to consider the climate crisis."
More about the University of Stirling Art Collection here: www.artcol.stir.ac.uk