ONE of Scotland’s most important contemporary artists is to present a new show celebrating the 40th anniversary of Collective in Edinburgh.
Born in Kirkcaldy in 1963, Moyna Flannigan studied at Edinburgh College of Art before receiving her Master’s at Yale University School of Art in 1987.
She has become known for her paintings that focus on women with her inspiration drawn from myth, art history and pop culture.
In the 1990s Flannigan was a committee member during Collective’s time as an artist-run initiative. She went on to lecture in painting at Glasgow School of Art for 10 years and was a teaching fellow at Edinburgh College of Art from 2015-19.
Throughout her career, she has worked with galleries across Europe and the United States.
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Her earlier work includes a highly acclaimed collection of portrait miniatures, first exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2004.
Recent exhibitions include presentations at Ingleby (2021), the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (2018) and GENERATION: 25 Years Of Contemporary Art In Scotland (2014).
She will be presenting a body of new work as part of her solo exhibition Space Shuffle at Collective, which has been created in direct response to the unique architecture of Collective’s City Dome gallery on Calton Hill.
It will feature collages alongside a constellation of paper sculptures that extend the principles of collage into three-dimensional form and space.
“It will be nice to go back as in the 1990s I was quite heavily involved in the Collective,” she told the Sunday National.
“It was almost like doing an unpaid job because we were always trying to fundraise and I was on the committee, then on the board.
“The idea was to give exposure to young artists and provide a stepping stone because at that time there was nothing between being at art college and a much bigger public gallery.”
Part of the forthcoming exhibition includes CD cases turned into various artworks which were auctioned to raise funds. Two of the ones Flannigan bought are on display, including one of a drawing by Scots poet, writer and campaigner Hamish Henderson of Irish author James Joyce.
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“It’s on university notepaper and has a shopping list on the back of it which is quite funny,” said Flannigan.
The other is by sculptor William Brotherston who poured aluminium into his plastic CD case and made an “amazing” metal trophy out of it.
“These were important ways of raising cash to keep Collective going,” she added.
Flannigan said that while there was still some way to go for women artists to be better recognised there had been “a definite shift” over the last few decades.
“When I was at art college there were very few women to look to,” she said. “I’m interested in the way women have been represented in art which from a male perspective has often been about the muse. Some more recent contemporary artists have tried to deal with the complexities of life from a female perspective and that is what I am trying to do.”
She said the art world was also opening up more to people of different ethnic profiles and cultures as they, as well as women, had been excluded.
In addition, Flannigan said the barrier had broken down in contemporary art between disciplines, meaning artists were more inclined to work across different forms.
The internet is another change.
“A lot of students have never known anything else and it is their primary source of information which is quite a big difference from when I was at college,” she said.
“They have a very different way of experiencing the world so it produces a very different kind of art. They do still want to make things which I think is positive. They might dip in and out of things like AI and different digital technologies but they are still interested in making things with their hands. I think that is a human need.”
The exhibition will run from Friday (June 28) until September 13
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