The Travelling Gallery's 2025 programme launches with collaborative exhibition by artists Rachel McBrinn and Alison Scott. The exhibition will tour across Scotland from 14 March to 10 May 2025.
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.
Working across moving-image, writing, and with a focus on archival materials, the work on display in the gallery centres around the recent decommissioning of the glasshouses at St Andrews Botanic Gardens and their research into the ideologies and histories these structures represent.
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.
Both artists regularly work with archival materials in their practices as a means to investigate and rethink the past in the present — as well as make connections that would perhaps not be made otherwise. The film moves from scene to scene, collaging together their many references, driven by a voiceover recorded as part of workshops at St Andrews Botanic Garden.
At times the narrative draws on historical events, for example the suffragette act of protest at Kew Gardens in 1913, or the bombing of the glasshouses in St Andrews during WW2 in 1940, using fiction to expand upon the historical record. Sometimes the scenes are personal or like a diary entry, with accounts referencing Alison and Rachel’s visits to both St Andrews and Edinburgh’s botanical gardens. Anchoring the work are the film rushes from an STV report of a beauty pageant held at Kibble Palace, Glasgow c.1970, sponsored by the milk board. The artists have slowed down this footage, which loops on a small monitor as the main narrative unfolds. Connecting the scenes is the overarching narrative that pointedly places ‘the glasshouse’ as a site and space that has continued or contributed to patriarchal, colonial and class divides.
Accompanying the film are three framed botanical samples from the herbarium archive at the St Andrews Botanic Garden; a sago palm and two orchids. Both plant species are mentioned in the film (the Cycas Revoluta (sago palm) being one of the plants that survived the 1940 bombing), acting as both evidence and witness to the narrative they portray. The history of plant science has been strongly marked by political and economic interest since botany was mobilised in the eighteenth century.
The exhibition also includes a new text in response to Alison and Rachel’s project by Glasgow based writer Hussein Mitha. Titled Glass Before Its Time, the text provides a wider historical context considering the botanical glasshouse as a particular cultural and political expression.
Launching in Edinburgh at the Collective Gallery, Calton Hill on Friday 14 March from 10am to 5pm, the exhibition will tour to arts venues, community centres, high streets and schools across Scotland including in Dundee & Angus, Aberdeen, St Andrews, Edinburgh & Midlothian, Orkney and the Highlands.
The exhibition runs from 14 March - 10 May 2025.
Details of confirmed tour dates and venues can be found on the Travelling Gallery website.
Louise Briggs, Curator, Travelling Gallery said:
We are delighted to be working with Rachel and Alison on this exhibition and to be presenting the creative outcomes of their research and time spent at St Andrews Botanic Gardens. This exhibition launches our 2025 programme with our exhibitions this year themed around the Environment and Climate Emergency. All the artists and partners we plan to work with this year are thinking through ecological issues as well as our relationship with, and connection to nature, often doing so in unexpected ways, which we hope will be of interest to our audiences, encouraging them to perhaps think about nature, the world and our interconnectedness in different ways.
City of Edinburgh Council Culture and Communities Convener Val Walker, said:
It’s fantastic to see season one of the 2025 Travelling Gallery begin this month. Through their compelling exploration of the glasshouse as both a physical and symbolic structure, Rachel McBrinn and Alison Scott invite us to reflect on the complex histories of power, privilege, and environmental stewardship.
It is so important to make art and culture as accessible as possible to a variety of people, and through our ongoing support of the Travelling Gallery, art is brought straight into the hearts of town centres. I hope everyone takes the opportunity to pay the exhibition a visit.
Travelling Gallery would like to thank NorthLink Ferries for supporting the exhibition's journey to Orkney as part of our Season 1 2025 tour. Additional thanks go to St Andrews Botanic Garden & the National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive. The research and development of this project was supported by Creative Scotland’s Open Fund for Individuals.