by Amy Brown-Joyce
On Wednesday the 17th May, myself and some fellow Year 10 students went on a trip with the Art department to Edinburgh. We began the day by meeting at central station to travel by train.
The minute we stepped off the train we headed on our way to the first of four galleries; the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. There I was met with a wild array of exhibitions, but the one that caught my eye was an exhibition called ‘The Lamp of Sacrifice’ by Nathan Coley. It was a cardboard scale model of every ‘Place of Worship’ listed in the 2004 edition of the Edinburgh Yellow Pages telephone directory. There were over 280 cardboard models on the floor.
At our third gallery, the Scottish National Gallery, we spent a lot of time in a large, silent gallery that displayed a wide range of paintings all linked by the theme of ‘God’. Each one, whether it was on a large or a small canvas, showed some type of religious link, either through a bishop, a dove, a crucifix or a baptism. There was a correlation, a pattern, but they were all stunning in their own way.
After that we headed towards our final destination, the Fruitmarket Gallery, conveniently located right next to the train station. At this gallery of Contemporary Art we learnt about an artist called Mark Wallinger and his piece entitled MARK. This piece was a play on words, as he could have meant to mark something or he could be referring to the gospels of Mark in the Bible.
