Graystone Gallery in Stockbridge, Edinburgh is showing Maps and Memories, an exhibition bringing together seven contemporary artists whose works examine how personal memories reshape familiar places. As the Gallery’s information puts it, the artists, ‘through metaphor, record keeping, semi-abstract landscapes and cityscapes’ focus on forming ‘the themes of remembrance of the past and foresight into the future.’
The entrance of the Gallery is dominated by the mood Gary Anderson creates with his bold brushstrokes and powerful use of colour. His earthy, warm tones, which shift with the fall of the light, resemble Edinburgh’s colours, while distorted perspectives evoke memories of the city. Born and raised in Edinburgh, he captures familiar places in the city, yet they are not actual scenes: they are collages of his past that are left in his mind. He has been interested in black-and-white photography for a long time and says that even though he relies on his memories rather than photographs or sketches, his paintings resonate with those photographs of Edinburgh.
To create a visual collage, he introduces a slightly abstract side in his paintings, as he has done in From the Train. It’s not a fixed view but a feeling of looking through the window of a moving train.
In Cockenzie Blethers, light and shadow become definitive elements. He uses darker colours to create visual and mental depth, layering the memories. His human figures appear half-absorbed into shadow, almost as if they were ghosts.
Lindsey Lavender’s architectural background shapes her artistic approach, and her paintings mainly focus on Edinburgh, where she has lived for the past 35 years. Florantine Study, set in a real place in Stockbridge, stands out with its blue chairs and bright red awnings shining in warm sunshine. Her passages, walls, stairs, overpasses, pavements, and pedestrian infrastructure – parts of the urban landscape we pass by without paying attention every day – become aesthetically powerful in her work.
Ella Williams graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2025. Her paintings assemble moments from a life story with a dreamy, uncertain perspective.
Allowing us to see the brushstrokes, she evokes a childlike sense that suits the paintings’ narrative.
The viewer witnesses a timeline that begins with a childhood in which she uses abstract, playful movements and progresses to a grown-up phase, where you relate to a man’s enjoyment as he eats ice cream on the beach.
John McClenaghen is a Scottish painter who grew up on a farm in the Falkirk area, surrounded by his family. The works return to those years when his mum, aunts, and uncles told him stories, to see the surroundings from that child’s-eye level. His paintings are of daisies and other wildflowers that spring up from the Scottish landscape, ‘when farmers leave the land to rest and regenerate.’ As a part of the natural Scottish climate, the flowers are windblown and rain-washed and ‘definitely not perfect’. He explained to me that he used sticks when painting the daisies.
David’s Loan is a powerful piece with its vivid colours. It’s where his mum, when she was a child, was a road that led her to the farm where she grew up. In his partly-imagined, partly-remembered scenes, he seeks to create a space where we might connect with our own memories. Layers and textures become points of recognition – he builds not only through brushstrokes but through tonal relationships, placing warm and cool together. Although he usually responds directly to the landscape, these paintings were made in the studio, allowing for a slower process of remembering rather than an immediate, responsive one.
Poppy Cyster is the daughter of an aviator. She recalls her childhood spent seeing the world from an open-cockpit biplane, and the shifting colours of the skies and the geometry of the landscape are evident in her paintings today. In her semi-abstract, layered compositions, she reveals her way of seeing.
Onwards is a piece in which she builds-up tonal layers of oranges, yellows and blues. Through the mirroring of colour, she evokes the sensation of a sea horizon.
Her abstract mixed-media paintings demand close inspection through carved layers, which give the paintings a depth of the past and remembered landscapes. The crosses sit on the painting like wounds, a perfect disruption to the past’s fogginess. She scratches and scrapes using various tools, such as ‘old pencils, sticks, cardboard, chopped up credit cards and also purpose-made silicon tools which come in varying thicknesses.’
Each vessel by Jennie McCall is like a small planet. I found myself trying to move around them with childlike curiosity. She reminds us that a canvas is not necessary to create a painting; instead, she constructs her own environment, shaping the landscape through clay. As the gallery text notes, ‘although McCall was raised in the heart of the Scottish Borders, her affinity for the east coast’s rugged landscapes was deeply felt.’ Her interest in the shoreline has a distinctive impact on her works: the pebbles she collected, the sand she played on, and the sky that was carved into her mind, with the sun warming the days, are evident in her use of colour and material today. And yet the question remains: how can a ceramic vessel hold an entire mood of Bamburgh Beach?
All of the artworks in the exhibition are online for preview and purchase, or can be seen in Graystone’s Stockbridge exhibition space. The Gallery supports the Own Art finance scheme, which makes purchasing artworks more affordable through payment by instalments.
With thanks to Omur Sahin Keyif (Insta: @theartsreporter) for this review.
