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

 

Wayfarers

"Reverence is making a passage in dance or paint or song to find yourself back in beginnings."

Henry Marsh, from "Song of the Wayfarer"

This exhibition has as its theme wayfarers, or travellers, and journeys. It is inspired by Henry Marsh's poem and the paintings of Kym Needle and Catriona Taylor, and transcends the boundaries of places, times and people.

We are pleased to be supporting the Peebles Arts Festival 2011 with this exhibition, and we have three very special events taking place during Festival Week.

Kym Needle

"My personal attachment to the Australian Landscape and the journeys that I have made through it are the inspiration for my paintings. Through a Western European tradition of painting I explore an essentially alien landscape and strive to come to terms with the European involvement with that landscape, whilst attempting to make significant the thousands of years of journeys that the Aboriginal Peoples of Australia have made."

Kym's ancestors travelled to Australia from the UK in the 1860s, a sea journey which took many weeks. When they arrived they found a very different and challenging landscape and despite many hardships and setbacks along the way, settled there.

Kym Needle was born in South Australia. He trained at the South Australian School of Art, North Adelaide and his post-graduate work was selected for the 1969 Student Exhibition that toured Australia.




"Kym Needle…an exceptional artist of international calibre…an impressive collection of work" Lorraine Brock, The River News, Waikerie, South Australia

He travelled to Scotland in 1972-3, and settled in Edinburgh where he taught drawing, ceramics and painting in the Art School of Edinburgh Academy. He returned to Scotland in 2005 after several return journeys to Australia for sabbaticals and teaching and now lives and paints in Angus.

Alexander McCall Smith said of Kym's exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in 2009: "These paintings capture the mood of that landscape, and do so in a way which is really quite special, reminiscent of the great work of the Danish geological painter Per Kirkeby".




In "Wayfarers", his paintings are complemented by the moving and powerful words of Henry Marsh, one of Edinburgh's foremost poets.

As part of the Peebles Arts Festival we are hosting an evening of poetry and painting with Kym Needle and Henry Marsh on Wednesday 31 August; click through here to read more.

Catriona Taylor

We are lucky to have Catriona Taylor living locally. She draws on the influences of Scottish landscape and particularly Scottish history, and is interested in lost ways of life, memory and transience; Scottish emigration and the Highland clearances are a catalyst for the expression of these themes.

Catriona received a CABN/Creative Scotland Visual Artist Award to ride the Cross Borders Drove Road from Hawick to Balerno on horseback, and film the journey. The result is a seven-minute multi-layered film "Hymn to the Road" together with paintings and collages; the film will be shown at Dancing Light Gallery on the evening of Thursday 1 September. Click through here for more information.



Of course we also have a variety of work from other artists in this mixed exhibition.

Paintings

Aine Divine has been a professional portrait artist for 15 years and is a winner of the Irish National Portrait Award. She enjoys experimenting with new ways of representing models, using all kinds of materials in different ways.










Jane Duckfield makes a much anticipated return to Dancing Light Gallery. She draws her inspiration from the West Coast and the Highlands and her use of texture and pattern with a strong sense of colour follows the tradition of the Scottish Colourists.




You will recognise Lynn Hanley's paintings from past exhibitions. Recently she has been painting locally, with each painting full of local characters and telling its own story. Deliberately naïve and meticulously painted, Lynn's paintings have a charm that is uplifting.



We are also delighted to welcome back Audrey Hawthorne, whose watercolour paintings of flowers are delicate and at the same time vibrant and colourful, capturing the movement and delicate texture of her subject matter.

Jewellery

Our jewellery collection is expanding all the time with two new jewellers joining us for this exhibition.


Bex Bardon launched her first jewellery range in 2007 and since then has developed her own distinctive style, concentrating on texture and quirky irregular forms.




Julia Wright is inspired by the soft forms of pebbles and bubbles that cluster around them in shallow streams and along the shoreline and her jewellery echoes these delicate forms.



Our regular exhibitors Ingeborg Bratman, Angie Young, Angela Learoyd, Aldona Juska, Laura Moore and Michael Peckitt have all sent new collections.

Ceramics

David Wright's beautiful work is new to us. Every one of his pots is individual. He fires his kiln to temperatures of up to 1300°c and the action of the flame that licks the pots and the fine ash in the fire fuse to the wood ash glaze and the white-hot clay to make subtle and earthy surfaces which are fascinating and unique.

Sculpture

Elizabeth Waugh 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.

Wayfarers