‘Painted Conversations’ is a project that has been organised and facilitated by Lyndsey Gilmour and Peter Chalmers, a collaborative partnership that has formed through their roles as Lecturers and Early Career Researchers in the Painting Department at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, Scotland. The project seeks to consider and test the potential of visual dialogues between painting practitioners by engaging in a sharing knowledge to advance individual and shared solutions.
Gilmour and Chalmers invite painting practitioners, based in Scotland and across the UK, to engage in a two-way practice-based research dialogue. These are initially through the exchange of a painting, which prompts a painted response – resulting in a Painted Conversation. After the initial exchange, and time for a response to be made, the response and original painting is exchanged once more for a further, final response to be made. The resulting visual dialogue creates six pieces of work in total, three by each artist, which provide the content of two-person exhibitions.
When considering invited artists, Gilmour and Chalmers set the premise to ensure one painter in the pairing was connected with Gray’s School of Art, as an alumni or through a current or past teaching or residency role.
The pilot version of the project involved Gilmour and Chalmers and ran from December 2021 with the preliminary output completed in June 2022, disseminated through a public exhibition at Whitespace Gallery, Edinburgh and supported by an online artist talk.
The second instalment of the project invited Gray’s Alumni and Aberdeen-based painter, Marcus Murison, and London-based painter, Sarah Longworth-West. This ‘conversation’ ran from March – September 2022, with the exhibition and online public talk taking place in October 2022. You can access the exhibition poster and transcript of a discussion between Murison and Longworth-West by clicking here. The Hand-Out for Exhibition Two can be accessed here.
The third instalment of the project invited Freelands Studio Fellow at Gray’s (January ’23 – January ’24), Esther Thorniley-Walker, to visually converse with the Scottish painter Ellen Macdonald. This exhibition will run from 17th – 22nd February 2024 at Whitespace Gallery, Edinburgh.
Pilot, Exhibition One, Lyndsey Gilmour + Peter Chalmers
Exhibition Two, Marcus Murison + Sarah Longworth-West
Exhibition Three, Esther Thorniley-Walker + Ellen Macdonald
Lyndsey Gilmour 