Travelling Gallery headed for Orkney!

The Travelling Gallery, a brightly coloured bus which has been bringing contemporary art to communities around Scotland for more than 40 years, is visiting Orkney again in early May, with the ongoing support of Orkney Islands Council and Northlink Ferries. 

Launching Travelling Gallery’s 2025 programme is an exhibition of new collaborative work by artists Rachel McBrinn and Alison Scott, made following a period of research and development at St Andrews Botanic Garden, where they have been artists in residence.

The work on display centres around the recent decommissioning of the glasshouses at St Andrews Botanic Gardens and their research into the ideologies and histories these structures represent - working across moving-image, writing, and with a focus on archival materials.

The exhibition will be visiting:

• Tuesday 6 May – Papdale Primary School
• Wednesday 7 May - Stromness Academy (Open to the public from 3.15 to 4.15pm)
• Thursday 8 May - Westray Junior High School (Open to the public 3.30 to 4.30pm)
• Friday 9 May – Broad Street Car Park, Kirkwall Open 10am – 4pm 

Entrance is free and all are welcome during public visiting times. 

Emma Gee is Arts Officer at Orkney Islands Council who has helped facilitate the Orkney visit for years now along with colleagues in schools and the Council's Roads team: “I’m delighted to say that every two years Orkney gets to host The Travelling Gallery from Edinburgh, bringing contemporary art to the County in its iconic gallery bus.

"The Travelling Gallery is a brilliant addition to our incredibly rich visual arts landscape in Orkney, and its work in schools as well as in the wider community is a joy to welcome.

"The public open day is once again in the centre of Kirkwall at the Broad Street Car Park on Friday 9 May, and this year there is an opportunity for the community to visit the bus in Westray and in Stromness.

"We hope folks will take the opportunity to see some exciting new art and enjoy the experience of this wonderful travelling gallery!”

In the exhibition Rachel and Alison present the figure of ‘the glasshouse’ as a structure intrinsically linked to power and privilege — with the artists bringing into focus specific histories relating to patriarchy and imperialism.

The exhibition is centred around their film, After Glass that weaves together both archival and found footage with their own research imagery to unpick the different ways in which glasshouses have been employed to display, preserve, contain and eradicate particular species and narratives. 

As well as its visit to Orkney, the exhibition has toured to arts venues, community centres, high streets and schools across Scotland including in Angus, Aberdeen, St Andrews, Edinburgh & Midlothian and the Highlands, between March and May 2025.

Details of future tour dates and venues can be found at: https://travellinggallery.com/tour-dates/

Partner thanks go to St Andrews Botanic Garden and the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive, and Northlink Ferries. The research and development of this project was supported by Creative Scotland’s Open Fund for Individuals.

Travelling Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in a bus. Since 1978 it has been bringing exhibitions to communities throughout Scotland. The gallery space offers an open and welcoming environment for people of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities to discover and enjoy contemporary art, in their own familiar background and locations. Over the past forty years, Travelling Gallery has brought innovative exhibitions to every part of Scotland reaching hundreds of thousands of visitors and school pupils. Travelling Gallery is a ‘not for profit’ organisation, regularly funded by Creative Scotland and supported by the City of Edinburgh Council.

For more information, please see: www.travellinggallery.com/current-exhibition/              

The gallery has ramp access for wheelchairs; hearing loop and will have large print format exhibition interpretation. 

Artist Biographies

Rachel McBrinn is an Edinburgh based artist whose work often emerges from long term site-responsive and archival research. With a critical lens on conservation, maintenance, and archiving practices, recent work has formed around themes of land management, town planning, and urban and rural ecologies.  Between 2021-23 she was artist in residence with Rhubaba, where she developed the film ‘Are you going my way?’ which centred around her hometown Livingston, one of Scotland’s post-war New Towns. Her work has been shown recently at Fruitmarket Gallery, Market Gallery, CCA Glasgow, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Cove Park, and the Oban Phoenix Cinema.

Alison Scott is an artist, writer and art-worker based in Arbroath. Her work is research-led and forefronts collaborative approaches, often working with other artists on projects. Alison’s work tends to be context-responsive, working between writing, performance, and audio/video. Recent projects—drawing on encounters with weather, oil and land—engage with aspects of environmental politics on an everyday, situated level. Alison is a practice-based PhD student at Gray’s School of Art, focussing on art, forestry and the commons, and is a member of the Board at Generator Projects. Her work has recently happened at Collective, Cove Park, Fertile Ground, Hospitalfield, the collective ‘open-weather’ and Radiophrenia.

Rachel and Alison’s work together solidified around their film Congenial Soils and Favourable Situations, a 2022 commission from Cove Park and Argyll and the Isles Coast and Countryside Trust, who together with Creative Carbon Scotland formed the Argyll Climate Beacon.  

Image Credit: Pinta Milk, still from archival film, c1970, courtesy STV.