A new exhibition at Edinburgh’s Graystone Gallery brings together seven contemporary Scottish artists who navigate the territory between remembrance and place, past and present.

There is something quietly ambitious about an exhibition that takes maps and memory as its subject. Both are acts of translation: the attempt to fix something fluid, to give form to experience, to hold onto what time insists on blurring. Running from 27 February to 21 March at Graystone Gallery in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge district, Graystone Gallery’s Maps and Memories brings together seven contemporary artists who each take a distinct route through that shared terrain.

The exhibition does not impose a single definition onto its themes. Instead, it allows seven individual artistic visions to accumulate into something richer: a composite portrait of how we record, imagine and inhabit the places that shape us. Working across painting, mixed media and ceramics, the artists featured are Gary Anderson, Poppy Cyster, Lindsey Lavender, John McClenaghen, Jennie McCall, Kerry Souter and Ella Williams.

 

The Map as a Form of Belonging

Several of the artists in Maps and Memories approach cartography not as a technical practice but as an emotional one. Lindsey Lavender builds a map of her own life through a vivid visual language that positions the city she lives in at the centre of everything. The city becomes less a place on a grid than a personal constellation, the kind of map that only makes sense from the inside.

Gary Anderson works from a different kind of distance. Having moved away from Edinburgh, he documents his time lived there, manifesting through paint a feeling of continued connection to a place no longer physically occupied. His work asks what it means to carry a city with you, to remain in relationship with somewhere you have left behind. It is a question many people ask quietly, without knowing quite how to answer it. Anderson’s canvases give that question a visual form.

 

Memory as Material

For John McClenaghen, memory is less personal than inherited. His paintings weave together a tapestry of recollections passed down through his mother and her siblings, drawn from stories of the farm where they grew up. The result is a layered, textured work that treats second-hand memory with the same weight as lived experience. It raises a question that sits at the heart of the exhibition: whose memories are these, exactly, and where do they end?

Kerry Souter approaches the past through abstraction. Her mixed-media paintings build a map of time rather than geography, layering mark, texture and colour into compositions that feel like sediment, the accumulation of moments compressed into surface. Her work The Distance Between Us captures that quality precisely: a landscape that is recognisable in feeling if not in fact, warm and hazy, as if seen through the particular softness of recollection.

Ella Williams works in a similarly liminal register. Her paintings embody the in-between state that exists in the mind when past and present coexist, dreamy and suspended, neither fully one thing nor the other. There is a gentleness to her work, but also a precision: she understands that memory does not simply replay the past so much as reimagine it, and her paintings honour that creative act.

 

Skyscapes, Porcelain and the Texture of Experience

Poppy Cyster’s contribution draws on the specific circumstances of her childhood as an aviator’s daughter. Her semi-abstract skyscapes use colour to evoke a sense of belonging rooted in a very particular relationship with sky and altitude. The aerial perspective carries its own emotional weight: a sense of the world seen from above, of home as something always slightly below and behind.

Jennie McCall works in porcelain, bringing a different set of material qualities to the exhibition’s concerns. Ceramics carries its own relationship with time: it is fired, fixed, fragile, capable of holding both the mark of the maker and the distance of years. McCall uses the medium to evoke mystery and intrigue, creating objects that seem to hold their meaning just out of reach and demanding a slow, attentive engagement.

 

A Gallery Built for This Kind of Work

Graystone Gallery is based in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge district with a focus on contemporary Scottish art and a clear commitment to creating space for work that rewards genuine looking. Located at 52 Hamilton Place, the gallery has built its programme around curatorial depth rather than volume, working closely with artists and presenting nine exhibitions a year across painting, sculpture and ceramics.

Maps and Memories is the kind of exhibition Graystone is well positioned to host: thematically coherent without being restrictive, allowing each artist’s practice to speak distinctly while contributing to a larger whole. The gallery operates an open-door policy and welcomes visitors whether they are seasoned collectors or encountering contemporary Scottish art for the first time. Works are available across a range of price points, and the team offers personal guidance to anyone looking to learn more.

 

Existing in Multiple Places at Once

What connects all seven artists is an interest in the human experience of existing in more than one place, and more than one time, simultaneously. We carry our histories with us. We hold maps in our minds that bear only a partial relationship to the territories they claim to represent. We remember places that have changed, or that we have changed, and we find ourselves in relation to both the place as it was and the place as it is.

Maps and Memories does not resolve these complexities. It sits inside them and finds them worth exploring. That is, in the end, what the best group exhibitions do: not impose a thesis, but create a conversation. This one is well worth joining.

 

Maps and Memories: Exploring the Nature of Journeys and Remembrance is showing at Graystone Gallery, 52 Hamilton Place, Edinburgh, from 27 February to 21 March.