Open Frequency
Each month Open Frequency will feature new and recent projects by both emergent and established artists based in Scotland. These artists are nominated by a national network of curatorial advisors - artists, curators, lecturers and critics.
Open Frequency is hosted by Axis and since its launch in 2003 has featured Scotland-based artists Katy Dove, Jim Lambie, and the Becks Futures prize-winners Toby Paterson and Rosalind Nashashibi.
Ellen Munro is a recent graduate of the MFA, Edinburgh College of Art. Following her BA Fine Art Degree from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee (2002) Munro has exhibited widely, principally in Scotland, and is now a committee member of the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh.
Munro’s work relates tangentially to memories or stories she has picked up over time. She employs an eclectic vocabulary combining traditional craft processes with sculpture, often using found objects imbued with memory which are then transformed into ‘objects of the extraordinary’.
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Installation view (detail), 2004, Edinburgh College of Art
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Her show at Edinburgh College of Art (2004) was an installation of sculpture and works on paper in a studio dramatically lit by stage lights. Munro lined the panels of the studio doors with drawings and painted cut-outs, set around a singular spot-lit object on the gallery floor. |
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For ‘She Sells Sea Chaise' (2004), Munro embossed a Thonet chair with a stylised scallop shell pattern, painted with nail enamels to simulate a mother of pearl inlay. The chair balanced elegantly on a perspex 'heel' giving the illusion of levitation or movement.
'Téléporte' (2004) featured an Art Deco motif on a panel of the studio door, a design based on the decor of a Parisienne boulangerie. A watercolour on the adjacent panel featured three faceless female figures in front of a still-life of white geraniums, an unfinished novel and a lit cigarette. |
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Installation view, 2004, Edinburgh College of Art |
'Psychic Psycho' (2004), hung low on the wall to catch the light escaping from a floor lamp, is an ink drawing of a skull partially obscured by black metallic butterflies. The skull was adapted from the advertising poster for the Polish release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
Round Room, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 2004
| Munro’s first solo show, From Sea to Shining Sea was a site-specific installation at the Round Room, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (6 March – 6 April 2004). Here, Munro conjured an imaginary landscape drawn onto a polka-dot voile curtain: rising from the sea is a new land combining the mountains of Scotland and Iceland. |
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2004, Round Room, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh
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Munro has exhibited twice at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh. In No-How (6 January – 20 February 2004, with Paul McDevitt, Nathaniel Mellors, Victoria Skogsberg and Michael Stumpf) Munro showed ‘Batmat’ (2004) a double-pegged rag rug exhibited on the gallery floor. The design is taken from a DMC cross-stitch pattern book c.1910.
2004, Hessian, cotton, wool. Photo: John K Macgregor |
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Recently, Munro was included in The Birthday Party (13 August – 9 October 2004), a celebration of 20 years of the Collective Gallery featuring 60 artists who have exhibited there over the past 10 years. For the opening event, Munro installed ‘Sunrise’, a table of 345 coloured fairy cakes placed in a design based on the 1930s ‘sun rise’ pattern, popular after the first world war. |
| ‘How to Work Better (After Fischili and Weiss)’, 2003 was made specifically for They Had Four Years, an annual show which gives four graduates from Duncan of Jordanstone College an exhibition one year on from graduating. The work makes reference to the Dutch artists Bik Van der Pol’s drawing of a hand-written note of Fischili and Weiss’ ‘10 Points’, taken from the installation Library Drawings at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2002). |
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2003, Plastic canvas, wool, lurex yarn
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Past Standing, an exhibition selected around the theme of souvenirs and mementos (The Changing Room, Stirling) featured ‘Sweet bird’ (2002), which references a Victorian child's sampler verse quoted in The Subversive Stitch (Rozika Parker, The Women's Press, 1984):
Sweet bird thy bower is evergreen
Thy sky is everclear
Tho has no sorrow in thy song
Nor winter in thy year |
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2002, Changing Room, Stirling. Photo: Ruth Clark
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Select Exhibitions
The Birthday Party, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2004
MFA Degree Show, Edinburgh College of Art, 2004
From Sea to Shining Sea, Round Room, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh 2004
No-How, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, 2004
Edinburgh-Korea, SM Gallery, Dae-Gu, Korea, 2004
A Tonic to the Nation, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, 2003
Exhibition 2, Starboardhome, Newcastle, 2003
Past Standing, The Changing Room, Stirling, 2003
MFA Interim Show, Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show 2003
They Had Four Years, Generator Projects, Dundee, 2003
Brie on the Knee, Edinburgh College of Art, 2002
BA Fine Art Degree show, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee, 2002
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