The Society of Scottish Artists (SSA)’s 127th Annual Exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy’s Upper Galleries features works by 229 artists, selected from 2,000 submissions through an open call. This year’s show presents a wide range of artworks, including ten selected installations and video works. Founded in 1891, the Society aims to broaden Scotland’s artistic vision, focusing on diverse practices and artists’ independent creativity. This year, the disciplines include hand-made techniques, new technologies, textiles, craft, and film. The artworks offer social and political commentary from both local and international perspectives, and the exhibition offers ten new graduates the opportunity to exhibit their work alongside established artists.
One of the most remarkable installations in the exhibition is by this year’s Purcell Paper Prize winner, Tally Tunnell, who graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2025. Her installation A container of contradictory reflections. Whose reaching limbs recall my own? explores how a human interacts with non-human landscapes. Her main interest is who has access to green spaces; she discusses it from the perspectives of users and ownership. The artwork is a curated collection of nine pieces, made of a variety of materials: steel and aluminium, ink and pencil on board, card and paper and a stone lithograph on paper.
On the upper ends of the wall, she positioned reveted aluminium frameworks resembling pylons, that she had drawn, to emphasise how humans frame green spaces. The drawings are on canvas, card and a very thin Japanese paper called kuranai. She used this very fragile material to remind us that human control is invisible and almost unnoticeable.
She layered the artwork to support this idea. She says, ‘These were a reflection of how we interact with our landscape, especially in Scotland, it’s quite wild, and it dictates us as much as we dictate it, but we still have this quiet invisible control’. Layering comes from her exploration of studio practice, ‘…where everything comes together, and I like things talk to each other, they take on new meanings or find new connections between these moments where I’ve drawn them from.’
On the left, she positioned a pylon drawing that she made in Glasgow, by the canal, using ink and a stick she found at the canal’s side. Its panoramic aspect is a result of her positioning on the site, where many dog-walkers asked if she was OK, on seeing her leaning to draw with the stick. The artwork is her personal exploration, ‘…drawing onsite with the wind, whipping my paper around and the rain blurring ink.’ From the upper left to the bottom right, she stretched a steel wire resembling Do not enter signs. This wire also reminds us of the human framework in nature, such as pylons, telegraph poles, and phone lines.
Tally Tunnel grew up in South Queensferry and has family on the Isle of Coll. While her starting point is the personal experience of where she grew up, her art’s main focus is universal: when talking about the idea behind her art, she states, ‘These are all universal conversations. We all have a right to access these green spaces and these wild places. This is coming from a very Scotland-centric, localised perspective, because those are the places where I can go out and spend time with and interact with the landscapes. But these conversations across land ownership are completely universal, and everything’s entangled.’
As SSA champions artists international as well as local, the exhibition features artists from overseas. Ilana Pichon, a Canadian artist known for her large-scale colourful murals that respond to the spaces and architecture they inhabit. She holds a Master’s degree in architecture from Université Laval and works with geometric forms and abstract patterns.
In her wall-piece at the RSA, she used felt and tufted wool to create a domestic, tactile effect. Her colourful monster motifs, paired with cut felt shapes, recall traditional stories and engage the viewer’s inner child. She describes the work as ‘…a balancing act, where the two groups of monsters (on the right and left) pirouette to catch the ice creams growing in the flower in the centre as quickly as possible.’
Ilana Pichon participated in the SSA Annual Show in 2019, creating a mural with silkscreen prints, noting that experience helped her to respond to the space: ‘I was already familiar with the technical possibilities. That’s why I created this original composition for the venue.’
A multidisciplinary artist-researcher based in Shetland, Susan Pearson was awarded an invitation from the SSA for her piece Becoming Island at last year’s annual exhibition, and here she presents a compelling installation inspired by a myth. The Fates are three goddesses who assign the ‘destiny of mortals by spinning, measuring and cutting their threads of life.’ The artwork comprises three abstracted chairs of varying sizes, a door, a stone panel, clay figures, and hand-spun wool. The wool she is using is seared by her husband and hand-picked by her – the tightly-intertwined elements are all foraged materials.
As Pearson explains, ‘The three chairs represent the three Fates, and the tangles of yarn represent the entwined destinies of the human and non-human.’ She uses the Shetland dialect word Paes-Wisp (a tangled or ravelled mass of lines or threads) to think through her work, and inspired by natural forms, landscape, and the human figure, it features earthy tones to emphasise an ambiguous, surreal, dream-like scene, which could be from anywhere, and any period of time. The perfectly-settled dust on the cracked glass door emphasises a lived-through feeling. A mum of four, Susan is pursuing a Master’s in Contemporary Art and Archaeology, investigating the connections between art, archaeology and philosophy.
Divya Sharma is a London-based British Indian artist with Tamil heritage, whose work weaves together ancestral knowledge, myths, and rituals, creating atmospheric pieces that reflect on migration, femininity, and cultural legacy. Sharma is the founder of the Neulinge Collective and the Post Colonials Collective. In the ruins, we remember, a 10-metre-long, 1-metre-wide immersive tufted textile installation, references the Tamil and Gaza genocides expands fluidly from its central position, and expands fluidly through the space, encouraging viewers to move around it to experience different perspectives depending on their position.
From afar, the ‘sacred labour of the hands’ can be seen embedded in the work, while closer-up, glass beads, gesso, and embroidery are revealed, woven into the tufted wool and hemp-acrylic yarn. Sharma states, ‘At its core, the installation draws inspiration from Pablo Picasso’s Guernica – particularly in its monochromatic palette, the scale, and the psychosocial context of collective trauma and resilience. The piece seeks to create a language of fibre that speaks to lived experiences of trauma, memory, and healing.’
The main body of the work is connected with the ground through calico strips, onto which poetry is cut. On the floor, a muslin installation, embroidered with tufting and beads and printed with an X-ray of a broken ankle, referencing injury and healing.
Carlotta Mateus de Hildenbrand is from Portugal and graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2025. She has two artworks in the exhibition, focusing on women’s rights. The first, Compendium of Jewels, is a group of vulvas, made as accurately as possible from visual references and curated without hierarchy, on the wall. All are distinct and sourced directly from real-life anatomy photos from a women’s health organisation. Noting the rise in vaginoplasty, she states, ‘There’s beauty in natural anatomy. Nowadays, with the rise of AI porn and so much more porn in general, people are desensitised to what a woman’s anatomy looks like.’
The vulvas are made of terracotta clay and coated with opal glaze. Carlotta, whose art practices include jewellery, wants them to look precious, almost like a jewel. She invites the viewer to come closer and take a look at these shiny objects to see what they are. ‘I’m living for that moment where people get very unclose, they decide it’s something pretty to look at because of the glaze, and then they are confronted with what it is. I think that helps you learn a bit about anatomy as well.’
Carlotta explains to me that some women are happy to be represented on the wall. She also gives examples of negative reactions: ‘In my degree show, I was lucky enough to walk around with my family, and we went into my room, a group of men were staring at the wall, and they just started to absolutely hate on it. But it’s great, at least you have a reaction to the work. They were like, ‘I could have made a wall of penises and put it on the wall. But that’s exactly it. You can walk around the major galleries, you see women’s nude bodies all the time, but you never see women’s vulvas. It’s always hidden, whereas the male anatomy is shown and something to be proud of. So if I have a wall of them, you can’t really hide it, and it’s not quite the same thing as a wall of penises if you will…’
Carlotta’s other work is Control, a pewter installation emphasising women’s health and sexual education, comprising life-size sculptures of contraceptive methods from IUD to pills, located in a vertical line on the wall. Carlotta criticises censorship in contraceptive education worldwide: ‘Many websites are being blocked, information being taken down and people regulating our knowledge about our bodies.’
Clare Scott is an inspiring visual artist whose practice has involved site-specific temporary installation, painting and sculpture. She holds a degree in Visual Arts and an MA in Art and Process, and has shown her installations internationally.
Clare Scott uses recycled or found materials to fill a limited space in limited time. In the neoclassical RSA building, she used the interior alcoves as a break from the exhibition flow. She doesn’t want us to see only the outcome; she invites us follow the process. It’s an ‘…experience of navigating life itself’, as she calls it. Holding my head up, standing like a child at two sides of the installation, I let my curiosity navigate me… I’m following the flow, sometimes natural, sometimes artificial. There’s a lot of tension and negotiation going on, but also a lot of fun bits that made me want to play with them… random wood sticks, fabric pieces used to tie the wood, and metal bits hanging like a mobile above my head. I love the possibility of encountering these kinds of materials, randomly positioned on a street corner when I leave the building.
Sarmed Mirza is a Glasgow-based artist, born and raised in Pakistan. His artwork Zero Ground: ReGenesis consists of 204 small paintings mounted on a board. With its vibrant colours and textured brush strokes, the piece evokes a sense of freedom and commands attention like a magnet and comes from the artist’s personal history. As he explains, three years ago, while working on a series of paintings titled Monument Valley, which runs along the Utah-Arizona state line – a sacred place for the Native American Navajo Nation and featured often in Western films: ‘When I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of Western films. I had an airgun I used to play with in the garden, just like in the Western films. And one day, I shot a bird, and it fell down, and it changed me. I was 11 or 12 years old. I was very upset that I could do it. I felt love and compassion for it (the bird).’ Mirza considers that moment in his life to be an end and a beginning: ‘So that bird died, was ground zero, but it was also zero ground, because I started again.’
Sarmed embraces that his choices in art come from his own experiences. He began painting the small works that would later form Zero Ground: ReGenesis with left-over paint from the Monument Valley series, using the blue, red, yellow, and white, then changing to a more vibrant palette after a visit to Rome, and after painting 500 of them, chose 204. He told me that viewers see many things in the paintings, from phoenixes to clouds.
Patrick Morales-Lee earned a place in this year’s annual show by winning the SSA prize at the Society of Graphic Fine Art (SGFA) 104th Annual Open Exhibition in London. Known for creating drawings ‘exploring themes of motherhood, trauma, family, and identity’, this painting creates a layered impact, just as his brushstrokes do: nothing about it is expected, but also nothing feels unnatural. He uses unusual colours, green and red, on the face to emphasise the woman’s fatigue and the background story behind it. Her eyes look like she is constantly remembering while functioning for the sake of this moment. A hand on her shoulder – is it a support or an unescapable past trauma? – appears in extension of the peachy colour behind her. The layered, textured brushstrokes evoke a sense of discomfort and interruption – an intimate contact with the wounded part of an everyday woman, and with its harmony of technique and narrative, it’s a composition to remember.
As the SSA enters its 135th year and joins the RSA in marking the latter’s bicentenary, the Society is showcasing artworks by the first RSA Presidents, Robert Noble, Robert Buchan Nisbet, and James Cadenhead, from its Collection. On the wall opposite is a series of 30 x 30cm paper artworks, included this year to represent local and international artists not included in the overall exhibition.
The Society also prides itself on showcasing graduates’ work: as Luke Vinnicombe, Co-President of SSA, highlights, the Society is ‘…showing where our beginnings were in the Society, all the way up to the emerging artists who are coming through.’ According to fellow SSA Co-President Frank To, the Society is paying homage to its history, underlining its ethos one more time: ‘Part of our ethos of the SSA from the very beginning was to provide a platform for artists to develop their creative practice… and it’s very, very important that we provide artists, especially today, that platform because we want an artist’s practice to flourish as part of our Society.’
Tickets: £5 entry, £4 concession; Free for under 16s and SSA members. Free entry for all on Mondays.
With thanks to Omur Sahin Keyif (Insta: @theartsreporter) for contributing this review.
