Dog walks, cold-water swimming and seal perspectives replace traditional maritime responses.
When Aberdeen Art Gallery asked local artists to respond to the city as a maritime place, they got a ceramicist making folkloric brownies, a photographer documenting cold-water swimmers, and someone building a wearable seal mask from recycled textiles. No boats, no harbours, no industry. Just three deeply personal takes on what it means to live beside the North Sea.
The Micro-Commissions programme received 40 applications this year, nearly double last year’s number. The brief may be tied to Aberdeen hosting the Tall Ships Races, but the selected projects show how open interpretation can produce more revealing work than literal responses.
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From dog walks to folklore
AJ Simpson, who won Channel 4’s The Great Pottery Throwdown in 2022, walks their dog along the beach in Old Torry, collecting “treasures” and watching wildlife. Those walks led them to Aberdeenshire folklore about Brownies, mischievous house spirits who collect odd things from the shoreline and can turn into troublesome Boggarts if displeased. The Old Torry Brownie fuses childhood fascination with daily beachcombing into ceramic form. Simpson usually makes brightly coloured characters and sculptural pieces from their studio at Deemouth Artist Studios, so this feels like a different direction.
Kirsty Hilda Cameron took an equally personal route. Her project Tides that Bind documents the wild swimming community at Aberdeen Beach through 35mm film photography layered with illustration and swimmers’ own words. Rather than looking at Aberdeen’s relationship with the sea through history or commerce, she’s capturing the people who choose to immerse themselves in cold North Sea water year-round.
A seal’s perspective
Bethany Reid is creating an interactive textile seal mask from recycled materials. The piece works as both sculpture and wearable item, inviting people to see Aberdeen’s maritime identity from another species’ point of view. She drew inspiration from George Mackie’s Aberdeen at Work and Edwin Landseer’s Flood in the Highlands from the gallery’s collection, then filtered it through her practice of creating animal forms that blend environmental questions with humour.
Reid, who recently won the Scottish Society of Artists’ New Graduate Award, uses found and recycled materials throughout her work. The seal mask approach is typical of her interest in making people rethink their relationship with non-human life.
The finished pieces will join earlier Micro-Commission works already on display throughout Aberdeen Art Gallery. You can see how different artists have used the collection as a starting point in Galleries 1, 15, and 19, where previous recipients’ work sits alongside the historical pieces that inspired them.
