About Us

Dancing Light Gallery is an exciting rural art gallery with changing exhibitions throughout the year where you can find landscape, wildlife and figurative paintings as well as hand-made original prints and photographs.

We also exhibit beautiful sculpture, glass, wood and ceramics and we have a selection of hand-made jewellery on show in silver, gold and other media. Our textile work ranges from scarves to handbags, using some of our finest Scottish wools and fabrics.

All of the work on show is truly unique.

We're at Whitmuir The Organic Place, where you will also find a restaurant and food hall in a contemporary low-energy building powered by renewable energy. Whitmuir is less than 45 minutes from Edinburgh and 25 minutes from Peebles.


Opening Hours:
Mon-Fri 1100-1700
Sat 1100-1700
Sun 1100-1700

Phone: 01968 660200

 

As The Crow Flies

"Crow gazed after the bounding hare
Speechless with admiration."

Ted Hughes, from "Crow Goes Hunting"

Joyce Gunn Cairns MBE

In the words of Duncan MacMillan of The Scotsman: "Joyce Gunn Cairns.... has taken to printing like a natural in a series of powerful screenprints.… In several she combines an image with a text.... The orderly text, whether written or printed, complements the ragged, inquiring line of the artist's drawing, just as the words complement the image." Joyce’s work in this exhibition includes screenprints, oils and works in oil and pencil.

Gillian Murray

Gillian runs the screenprinting department at Edinburgh Printmakers. Over the last few years she has been travelling around Scotland, sketching and taking photos of the landscape. "Encountering raw, elemental and often beautiful landscapes and documenting their ever changing character is what draws me away from the city where I live and work."

Andrew Restall

Andrew graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1954 and went on to establish the new School of Visual Communications. His large-scale paintings are influenced by of the interaction between man and nature, against the constant backdrop of the Scottish Borders. These large and powerful works are displayed in the restaurant.

Elizabeth Waugh

A sculptor, Elizabeth worked under the tutelage of Sean Crampton at the Anglo French Art Centre in London and benefitted from visiting tutors including Leger and Henry Moore. At 81, Elizabeth still works with much enthusiasm and energy and follows her fascination with human and animal forms in creating her wonderful sculptures.

Ceramics

We have two new pottery exhibitors joining us this summer, Phil Revell and Jane Kelly.


Phil makes functional, woodfired stoneware, ‘honest pots’ as one customer described them recently, intended to be enjoyed in everyday use. All pots are made on the wheel and are fired in Phil’s two-chamber, wood-fired, climbing kiln. Various ashes are used along with shino and tenmoku glazes and the pots record the passage of the flame with flashing and melted deposits of fly-ash.


Jane concentrates on thrown pots such as jugs, teapots and mugs. She was commissioned as part of the Wych Elm Project to produce a set of tea bowls using the Raku pottery technique, heating her kiln with sawdust from the wych elm wood and we are delighted to include a number of these in the exhibition.


We are pleased to have more work from Veronica Newman, who specialises in a range of fine porcelain bowls and vases as well as producing a selection of domestic porcelain. All of her pots are handthrown and she likes to push the clay to its limits, trying to capture the fluidity of the wet clay and exploit its translucency after firing. Her beautiful new collection of bowls and vases illustrates her love of natural colours and forms.

Angela Learoyd’s new collection of jewellery is stunning, combining semi-precious stones and silver to create colourful and very stylish neckpieces and earrings. Angela manipulates silver by doming, folding, hammering and rolling allows her to produce three-dimensional pieces, especially hollow beads.


Ana Herranz Molina has produced a lovely new collection of silver necklaces and bangles, incorporating pink rhodolite, pearls, amethyst and peach moonstone.












Jo Mitchell is exhibiting with us for the first time. She studied at the Bath Academy of Art and has been making her colourful and often quirky jewellery since 1990, incorporating a number of different materials, from silver and coloured metals to glass. Her work can also be found at Liberty and the Royal Academy of Art in London, and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Ingeborg Bratman has also sent a new series of jewellery with shapes inspired by nature and colours plucked from every rib of the rainbow. The Victoria & Albert Museum and the Science Museum in London both have examples of her work in their permanent collection.




Philip Hynd, another new exhibitor, is a recent graduate of the Glasgow School of Art and has created a new collection of contemporary jewellery with his sister Jennifer Robson. The collection is inspired by Glasgow’s Victorian buildings, and incorporates the delicate floral patterns to be seen in the "wally closes" still found in so many original tenements.

For the first time at Dancing Light Gallery, you can see Harriet Sanders’s gorgeous leather bags. Harriet graduated from London College of Fashion in 2009 and has been a fast-rising star since then. She has been featured in Look magazine for her Rococo Collection and was labelled the next Patrick Cox in Grazia. Her hand-made Gladbags collection are beautiful to touch, stylish, and made from ethically produced leathers.

As The Crow Flies