Jane Frere’s vast polemical murals highlighting more sinister aspects of Brexit and Trump were first created in 2017 and remained on permanent display under the aegis of the former owner of Summerhall, Robert McDowell until last summer.
After control of the space was surrendered to newly formed Summerhall Arts, Jane arranged to update some of the key references highlighted on the walls reflecting the changing times and the emboldened rise of the far right on the eve of the Edinburgh festival season.
But an artistic reference to the growth of the extremist neo-Nazi movements in Europe and elsewhere, which most people can recognise from a cursory appreciation of the daily news, was too much for Creative Scotland-funded Summerhall Arts management who took it upon themselves to erase the references from the mural to avoid offending viewers. The sorry tale is best summed up by Herald writer Derek McArthur...click here to read..
This weekend Merz Gallery offers a chance to view and compare a copy of the original mural with the defaced work showing the anti-Nazi references wiped out in an counter-cultural act of erasure, before the entire work, originally intended to be a permanent feature, was removed.
The show, entitled Erasure, is alongside a new exhibition of Drawings Against Genocide by Matthew Collings supported by Artists For A Free Palestine.
Artist Julia Barton has dedicated her life’s work to highlighting the amazing biodiversity of the littoral – the shoreline – increasingly threatened by marine pollution.
Her latest exhibition “MAERL – Seabed Superhome” opened at the Sawyer Gallery at the National Trust of Scotland’s Inverewe Gardens in June and runs until the end of July.
In an extensive interview with curator Ginevra House, Julia explains her work, her commitment, and why MAERL, the tiny coral-like seaweed is vital in the marine eco-system. To read all about it and view Julia’s response to 10 key questions in the interview click here.
Learn more on Julia’s website https://littoralartproject.com/
Julia Barton’s installations highlighting plastic pollution on the seashore and climate change have been shown in several Scottish venues. At Summerhall in Edinburgh https://www.summerhall.co.uk/visual-arts/lost/
and along with artist’s workshops at The Barn, Banchory, during Jane Frere’s exhibition, Ark – We Stand Beside.
#The Tree of Life
Resident artist Jane Frere works across a range of media and subjects, from huge sculptural installation and vast murals to more moderate scale work with pastel, painting, collage, shadow box and printmaking. Jane’s practise spans theatre design to participatory arts projects.
Currently she is focused on a major long term project addressing the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis and aims to continue enlarging a huge pastel mural based on the Tree of Life (segment pictured above) already five metres wide.
The mural was a key feature of her most recent exhibition: The Ark – We Stand Beside at The Barn, Banchory, Deesside which ran from late March to April 2026.
For more detail on the exhibition go to https://janefrere.info/the-ark-we-stand-beside/
To read more on Jane’s nature art and advocacy see https://janefrere.info/nature-restoring-the-wild-confronting-the-climate-and-biodiversity-emergency/
The Flight to the Ark (above) – a two metre wide work in charcoal – highlights the threat already facing biodiversity worldwide as climate catastrophe unfolds and anthropocentric exploitation, industrialisation and development erodes natural spaces and erases eco-systems.
Previously Jane created a huge charcoal work, 2.6 metres tall, called the Falls of Caledon – an imaginary waterfall harking back to the lost forest that covered large parts of Caledonia. It was exhibited at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History during the Nature-based Solutions Conference where she was invited as a panel speaker in 2024.
She was then invited by Prof Natalie Seddon, Oxford professor of biodiversity, to become a co-founder of the newly established Oxford initiative I Stand Beside.
Recognising the synergy with her Ark Project, which began taking form in the dark days of Covid lockdown, Jane invited more than 170 participants to choose species to ‘stand beside’ incorporating each creature in her pastel mural.
She is also an associate artist of Unison Colour. Some of her blogs can be found here. Click here to go to janefrere.info To view a video introduction to a recent project click here.
The London Song Festival saw the premiere in November 2023 of piece commissioned from composer David Ward, with words by Neville Rigby, as part of a concert entirely on the theme of rain.
Music has been the motivating force for composer and former orchestral trombonist David Ward from his early years studying under the Alexander Goehr. David has a fiercely idiosyncratic approach to his music. Much of his work was created while living on the remote island of Yell, Shetland, before moving to his still remote farm cottage in North Aberdeenshire in the late 1990s. He continues to produce remarkable new works, including a series of major operas. His recent ‘Brexit’ opera, B means B, from a libretto by Neville Rigby, was commissioned by Deveron Projects. His work, Weep for the Earth – Songs from Lockdown and Beyond – was premiered in unusual circumstances after the cancellation of its Leith Hall venue due to the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Instead the Songs from Lockdown received their first performance by soprano Jessica Summers and pianist Jelena Makarova at a salon concert at the home of patrons Mark and Fiona Hope in Banchory on September 10 2022. See David’s web pages here.
Pictured above John Pelling with his visceral response to the Russian war on Ukraine, which embeds both clear and coded messages, including an implied notice of the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in condoning or at least remaining silent over Putin’s military machine bringing death and destruction to its neighbour.
Unusually the remarkable artist John Pelling, an Associate of the Royal College of Art, combined a vocation as a clergyman with his dedication to art and pursued his lifelong passion into his 90s in his Chelsea studio.