Since as yet, Scotland has not forced its right to separate nationhood, I can still make my answer to be the Edinburgh Festivals. Day 2 Sunday 16th August 2026 Edinburgh Events: 1. Patrick Gale & Lisa Ridzén at The International Book Festival; 2. The multimedia sculpture including sound and light play of Anne Hardy in her show Feelings at the Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh (Art Festival); & 3. Studiomuiz in the City of Sunderland in Corey Muizelaar’s Behind Closed Doors, one of the finest queer dramas I have seen (the Fringe).
The weekend is over and I can concentrate on yesterday’s events, that show the multi-dimensions of multi-culture in a way that is currently threatened not by nationalism – for Scottish Nationalism heretofore has been a benign force (though hiding some horrors) but of the force of the thin ideologies of English nationalism which reduces culture to populist phenomena of a de-educated working class – greasy fish and chips, and , in Scotland, fried Mars Bars.
We were late for our earliest event and thus missed the readings and the interview with Patrick Gale, who I have heard many times, but did hear Lisa Ridzén talk beautifully about her novel Lisa is a phenomenon particular to Sweden and I doubt whether today any novelist would consider themselves less a writer and as much as a sociologist which Lisa is. There was in what she said something glorious and still rooted in the liberality of long traditions of social democracy and community values over the personal that is almost entirely eradicated no in the UK. It speaks in the disappointment of the major character at his son turning to political conservatism. It speaks in Lisa’s own forcefully gentle beliefs that, in the world of social caregiving, everyone tries to do the best they can. Does the novel always show that – especially of every aspect of established care system, though it does very fully in some.
Books signed by Patrick Gale and Lisa, we knew we only had an event to see at after 3 o’clock, so we took the chance to fit in the Talbot Rice Gallery’s show for the Art Festival this year, which I had already seen to suggest a strong pull for me, not least because the university curators have a long tradition of showing the best and opening up my eyes to the innovative. But this year’s was a great event. Below Geoff stands in the Gallery’s sub-gallery known as ‘The Georgian Gallery’, but it is hard to capture how eentry to that huge hall opened up the senses:
Next to Geoff was the apparently simplest work on the podium in the centre of the room, known as Wand, a piece based on of found art from the 2025 exhibition on which the Talbot Rice show was based- a dried twig from an Empress Tree, shaped and then cast in bronze. Even in itself this work speaks of the blend of the industrial and natural cultures that speak through the exhibition, alongside the apparent magic of aesthetic shaping, assembly and configuration with other pieces, in some senses not separate at all. but in the room, which you enter the full force of the sculpted environment, which uses rapidly shifting changes of light from very ordinary looking strip lighting just below the level of the Gallery’s upper terrace that runs around the whole Gallery accessing the sight of the landscaped art below. The changes in lighting appear random to the visitor but are actually set to live information of live changes in the environment of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, where British-born Hardy was artist in residence.
On the terrace itself the lighting was obscured by the shadows created from the configured lighting below and each work displaced there was as much sculpted by its innovative back-lit lamps that often evaded lighting what was beneath the found configured objects of natural and post-industrial-use material, some with the look of an entirely alien culture like te mask atop of the piece on the left in the collage below. You walk that gallery in ‘darkness visible’ most lof the time, barely distinguishing shadow from substance. I will return to the delights of the mounted pieces above later. But there too we note the other element of the sculptured environment, landscape, architecture or place of (perhaps sacred) ritual.
The room is sealed before entry because light variations act in temporal configuration with a ‘sonic landscape’ composed of sound patterns, part natural to their desert inspiration in Marfa, and part to its ndustrial heritage – the sound of machinery is what some here but I didn’t. The free guide describes it thus:
remnants of of a worlds left desolate, gusts of wind through dry grasses, rain falling on concrete and the lonely voices of birds. It also crackles with another energy – of electric power, airborne signals and shifting frequencies attempting to tune into one another.
Together with the flickering electric light, many media may attempt to ‘tune into one another’, but I wonder f communication and community is necessarily their goal or telos. The elements of the sacred feel a much the elements of a Dennis Wheatley evil magic as a divine supplication, the runes as satanic, or pagan or neither. There is no doubt that the tailed (the tail a seeming vertebra ending in had metal passing through fur) but hollow humanoid creature at one end of the gallery podium -cum-landscape, with pearls in ts empty-glove-as-hand, its unseeing eyes looking down from the empty space of a Parka hood hat fashions its head, at ritual objects below it and the rune like stains on the floor, might be evoking a modern demon.
At the opposite end of that dun-tiled environment -cum-institutional-floor are other larger figure, somewhat suggestive of super-nature from modern popular lore to an amalgam of fetish objects that are shoes, often suffused with pretension to life, natural or supernatural , that sometimes glow with novelty and sometimes seen to decay as if a projection of the decay of the fot within. Let’s look at some of these feet before whole figures with shoe-feet, but will return to them on the gallery. These feet are manacled in different ways suggesting different kinds of slavery, or versions of how fetishes work (psycho-sexually and aesthetically [the second shoes are casts I think] included) not only in their elevation to significance but degradation to waste, like the dirt and used stacked cardboard.
The figures give context however to the presence or absence of lower (and upper) limbs. Below are two collages of the figures that faced you on entry, one helmeted with no face but merely space and feet that are projections from what could be legs encased in a brick tomb (the thighs of the legs being represented by the divergent inverted brances of a tree trunk.
We might be tempted to see the figure (named Being (Warrior) as somehow man regressed into presexual fantasy, the other may be a figure of woman, yet this figure has protuberances seeming to represent breaststroke that may suggest it is a woman or hermaphrodite in representational intention. The other figure (Being (Guardian)) has only one shod foot but also a number of possible limbs. The theme of slavery even of those entities meant to keep us safe, across a range of its meanings, is apparent in tbe bejewelled chains.
Across from tne standing Wand is a prone piece of two cast from sticks, that is named Lovers, that I found intriguing and puzzling.
The upstairs walkway has more of small assemblies roughly interconnected, not unlike Lovers, that hild together disparate things including light and shadow, and perhaps ambient sound associations, in complex wholes that have difficult boundaries to define.
There are more foot/shoe fetishe in which the vitrine itself seemed to offer meaning
.
Later, rough cast plates fired in serial adventures and taking an intended ‘random’ shape, whete the fluidity and the plasticity of the metal.is visible from.its earlier stages. I preferred these to the feet. The sculpted lighting was strong in effect. I felt invited to get nearer to find new perspectives to the consternation of the gallery staff, who were awfully nice about it.
The film and guide help understanding without spoiling the experience. This was a wonderful show. Ensure that you see the brief video before ascending the stairs from the ground. The guide has a map of exhibits (see below).
First stop after this astounding experience was to Blackwells to find a book on Hardy. I did not find one, and then a walk to Hill Street, where the next event was to be found. After locating it we had lunch at Contini on George Street.
The play was Corey Muizelaar’s Behind Closed Doors, ‘one of the finest queer dramas I have seen’ as I said in my title. Based on Corey’s own experience of severe and enduring mental illness, self-medication through illicit drugs and serial suicide attempts, some brilliantly recreated to shocking effect on stage, Corey enacted that role himself to obvious gruelling effect on his nervous system, his musculature often shaking, to visible effect, in a way that was totally part of what the play represented.
The young men were beautiful but torn so by enactment of visceral interactions, down to serial suicide and severe domestic violence that the beauty was as terrible as that Yeats describes in Easter 1916. Corey plays his role superbly but in tbe programme he speaks of auditioning a shortlist from a total application list of 1,104 ‘lads’ who applied to be part of this play. His choice of Ben Robwrt-Cunningham couldn’t have been more inspired.Ben has a smile tnat seemed to be to linger even when the stage went dark. That he commanded tje violence of spee h and body seemed frightening. As its director says this play avoids types, finding in its audiences the possibility of hitherto unimaginable and believed impossible responses.
The music too seemed a urately placed,like choric commentary. Do see tbis wonderful play. If you can.
Bye for now,
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxx
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