DELUGE

About

DELUGE is the final show of Edinburgh Printmakers at Union Street, in spring 2019 the new gallery and studio space will open at Castle Mills in Fountainbridge.

Our relationship with water is universal and nowhere more so than here in Scotland. From the rains and mists that beat and shroud our landscape to the waves and storms that lash our shores, this elemental force is engrained in our national character. Over the millennia we have learnt to tame this life force in all its myriad of uses, re-directing it through pipes, drains, canals, industries and creative tributaries. This is evident at 23 Union Street.

From its inception as a municipal washhouse through to its current use of Edinburgh Printmakers studio, galleries and shop, water has been central to the activity of the Victorian building. In the beginning, water was used to wash the clothes now it is fundamental to lithography and screen-printing. Water has always permeated the building and the actions within its walls. With the upcoming relocation to Castle Mills at Fountainbridge by the Union Canal, another chapter of this building’s colourful and watery history draws to a close as a new one opens for Edinburgh Printmakers community.

Curator and artist David Faithfull comments: “Through the DELUGE exhibition, members past and present, were invited to consider water in all its manifestations, uses and symbolism; responding to this aqueous element, in whatever form of their choosing. Casting their imaginations to mountain brooks and lowland burns, highland lochs and forest pools, across oceans and seas, upwards into the cloudscapes and meteorological mantle that veils our land. I wanted to question why there are so few pictures of rain and weather in Scottish art, there’s misted mountains but not much more.”