Making and Meaning at Aberdeen Art Fair
See work in progress, meet makers, and discover something beautiful to take home.
Aberdeen Art Fair is back at the Music Hall this weekend, 29 to 31 August. It brings together artists from the North East, across Scotland, and overseas. For 12 years, the goal has been pretty simple. Give you the chance to discover new art, speak to different artists, and find something amazing to take home.
If you like meeting makers, this weekend is for you. Walk the halls, look, then speak to the artist. There’ll be print collaborations, new work shaped by Scotland’s coasts, and projects that mix film, sound and spoken word. Here is what stands out.
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Cross-border ideas with local roots
Printmaking Sans Frontiers, led by master printmaker Jonathan Comerford, brings collaborations with more than 30 artists from South Africa, Europe and the United States. It reads like a studio stretched across continents, reminding you that plates, paper and ink can move ideas between people as surely as spoken language.
Elsewhere, Lucy and Roy fuse pop art with intricate Japanese beadwork to build small, precise worlds. Umlungu threads African and Scottish influences through abstract canvases, finding a shared rhythm rather than a neat blend. The stall-to-stall contrast keeps the conversation lively.
As director Gerry Muldoon says, the fair is about “stories, ideas and connections.” That feels accurate when you follow the work from one stand to the next.
Art that thinks with its tools
Dutch-born, Aberdeen-based Kate Steenhauer will show off The Landscape of Intelligence, a tribute to computing pioneer Ada Lovelace. The piece combines printmaking, spoken word, sound and film. It is a good fit for a city shaped by engineering, showing how code, paper and voice can pull in the same direction.
Steenhauer treats tools as collaborators rather than supports. The result invites you to think about how an image is built, and what happens when you let different mediums meet. The technology is present, but the attention stays on making and meaning.
From suburban stillness to surreal snacks, stormy skies to smiley satire, these four artworks by Frances Walker, Fee Dickson Reid, David Gilliver and Jonathan Comerford each twist reality in their own way.
Scotland’s edges, reimagined
Many exhibitors return to Scotland’s coasts and high ground. Ru Goodchild’s acrylic and ink paintings of Highland crofts use strong colour and texture to suggest weather, work and shelter.
After decades of travel, Allan McNally has come back to the West Coast in his painting. Michelle Anderson works plein air in pastel across Aberdeenshire, catching small, everyday rhythms.
Fee Dickson Reid makes her debut with atmospheric oil seascapes painted alla prima, in a single session, after walks along the East Lothian shore. Anne Marie Trudgill builds layered collages from Scottish flora and countryside.
A chance to gather, talk, and buy
Peacock Visual Arts marks the 95th birthday of Frances Walker with a new print release. It is a modest gesture that speaks to influence and to the long, local chain of people who learned to look with her work nearby.
For anyone who makes things in the North-east, the fair is a chance to compare notes. You can move between polished pieces and honest conversations about the messier middle. “Scotland’s landscapes are endlessly varied,” says spokesperson Naomi Brown, and the range of responses bears that out.
Aberdeen Art Fair runs from 29 to 31 August at the Music Hall. Full details about the event can be found on the Aberdeen Art Fair website.
