SCHOP Gallery, Edinburgh : Architecture Information

10 Aug - 10 Sep Mon-Fri 9am - 5.30pm

The proposed Edinburgh tram and Waverley Line may well be the last publicly funded transport infrastructure projects for many years but they will have to do more than just get a few people from A to B in order to justify their funding. Fortunately this prescient Edinburgh Arts Festival exhibition will turn any tram/train skeptic into a proselytizing supporter.

Moment by Nick Kehagias:

Previous Schop exhibition

Paul Gilling Exhibition - 'Edinburgh - Life on the Edge'
12 Feb onwards
Schop Gallery, 36 St Mary's Street



The images exhibited are of mislaid landscapes; places so familiar and prosaic that they are overlooked, ignored, forgotten. Paul Gilling draws his inspiration from the lesser postcard-worthy topography of Edinburgh's outer limits. Bleak vistas, barren landscapes and lost figures all combine to tell a fairy-tale like story of an invisible Edinburgh.

Schop’s 3rd exhibition - Nigel Peake’s ‘Making Ends Meet’
5 Jun - 4 Sep 2009

The show will comprise an idiosyncratic collection of drawings depicting small time adventures and vernacular buildings. Nigel Peake was awarded a RIBA Silver Medal
Commendation while an architecture student at the University of Edinburgh. Since then his art has been exhibited in Antwerp, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Shanghai and his drawings have been used in a variety of projects for clients including RHS, Habitat and Ninja Tune.
In the past few years collections of his work have been published by Analogue Books, including ‘Maps’ and ‘Sheds’.
From his attic studio on a quiet road a few miles from the coastline of County Down, Nigel continues to enjoy making and drawing things.

Schop’s 2nd exhibition - Donald Urquhart
9 Mar - 15 May 2009



Location: 36 St. Mary’s Street, Old Town

IN LAND Donald Urquhart
New exhibition at ‘Schop’ art + architecture gallery

Donald Urquhart is widely considered to be one of the most significant artists working in Scotland today. His work, although grounded in the disciplines of drawing and painting, has diversified in recent years, with commissions in both landscape and architectural contexts. At the heart of it all, however, is an appreciation of landscape and the need to respond to it. It is work that can be characterised as being reductive and highly formal, yet always seeking to engage the viewer in a quiet and poetic dialogue.

The exhibition ‘IN LAND’ at Schop features five ‘Line Sky’ drawings and two gallery specific pieces, namely: ‘Double Displacement: Lewis’ and ‘Balance: Harris’. Much of Urquhart’s recent work has taken the form of permanent site-specific installations in which he has responded to a wide variety of landscapes. These commissioned works include An Turas on the Isle of Tiree (2003) and Endpoints: Coal/Sand to mark either end of the River Ayr Way (2007).

Alongside these public projects Urquhart continues to maintain a studio practice and to exhibit internationally. Recently he has held solo exhibitions at the Butler Gallery in Ireland and Lionheart Gallery in Boston, USA. He was included in the survey exhibition Here+ Now, Scottish Art 1990 - 2000, organised by Dundee Contemporary Arts. In 2007 Urquhart installed Recurring Line : North/South - a permanent artwork within the grounds of the IMMA in Dublin.

Urquhart is currently integrating a series of artworks in various Glasgow projects including the new Stobhill Hospital, a new arts complex Trongate 103 and the new Gartnavel Royal Hospital. He is guest curator for a major Art in the Landscape project for 2010 at the Zuiderzee Museum in the Netherlands and is developing work for several forthcoming exhibitions.

Donald Urquhart's previous projects include work at An Turas

Oliver Chapman Talk to Urban Design Group Scotland at Schop
13 May 2009
‘From boxroom to Knockroon’

Address: 36 St. Mary’s Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1NA
Phone: 0131 477 4513
Schop : art+architecture gallery and events

SCHOP [noun] : a shop; a workshop; derived from an old Scots word.
“In his SCHOP or booth certane drogs & mendicaments” - 1644 Edinburgh Testament.
“That litle merchand SCHOP... upon the west syd of the gait” - 1678 Douglas Bequest.



Inaugural Exhibition at ‘SCHOP’
27 Nov 2008 - 27 Feb 2009
The exhibition ‘Archived’ by Bridget Steed marks the launch of a new gallery in Edinburgh’s Old Town. The space is to be called ‘SCHOP’ (derived from a 17th century Scot’s term for shop or workshop) and comprises the front room of a traditional shop in St. Mary’s Street. This imposing Victorian block was designed by David Cousin + John Lessels as part of the city’s ambitious Improvement Act of 1867 and is now home to a lively mix of small businesses with tenement flats above.

‘SCHOP’ is an initiative by Oliver Chapman Architects, who also occupy the remainder of the property. Their curatorial policy is to organise four exhibitions per year and invite artists who have a real engagement in architecture and the built environment. The gallery space is open to the general public during working hours and artists are encouraged to challenge expectations and develop new ideas about the city and the representation of contemporary living.

In March 2009, Donald Urquhart will occupy ‘SCHOP’ and host the gallery’s second exhibition. Urquhart is an Edinburgh-based artist and widely considered to be one of the most significant artists working in Scotland today.

BRIDGET STEED at SCHOP

Bridget Steed (23) from Catterline, Aberdeenshire, graduated this year from the Edinburgh College of Art’s School of Drawing + Painting with an MA in Fine Art, specialising in printmaking. She is the most recent winner of the prestigious Catriona White Prize and will be showing new work alongside drawings from her final year project, which documents the history of 37 Inverleith Place, Edinburgh.

Until 2007, the property at Inverleith Place housed the postgraduate school + printmaking department of Edinburgh College of Art but was once the family home of the whaling fleet owner, Theodore Salvesen. Through prints, photography, drawings and objects Bridget has recorded the various strands of the building’s recent and distant past.

“It is this connection with whaling that my drawings primarily explore,” she explains. “The building’s association with the whaling industry fascinated me and after a lucky purchase of three sperm whale teeth in an Edinburgh Bethany shop, I began looking into the Salvesen whaling company. This has led me to a new location, the remote Leith Harbour on South Georgia, Antarctica, home to Salvesen’s whaling station. With a Scottish Arts Trust bursary, I plan to travel there in 2009.

These two allied but distant sites come together in my drawings. Using both traditional and digital techniques (a process informed by my printmaking practice) they combine imagery from the decorative interior of 37 Inverleith Place and the whaling industry. Sailors made scrimshaw, drawing on whalebones, to create mementos of home and I see my drawings as a reminder of these two lost places and their histories. A sperm whale’s tooth metamorphoses into the vast scrimshawed body, ripped apart by whalers; a piece of cornicing from 37 Inverleith Place becomes a whale’s gigantic tail and a map of Antarctica is transformed into an intricate ceiling rose.”

Oliver Chapman Architects

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