Scott Lawrie Gallery

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Scott Lawrie Gallery

UK-based gallery practice that connects hearts and minds to the liberating power of art - via shows, public projects, and critical essays.

07/10/2026

Sorry I haven’t posted since last week. Dot was in hospital with COVID (she’s much better now and back home) while I’m suffering a bit of a mere cold.

Still, that doesn’t take away from the warmest of welcomes you all gave to the four artists in MOANA_5. Thank you for a very special evening, and especially to (L to R): Jimmy Ma’ia’i, Linda Va’aelua Serene Hodgman, and Gary $ilipa.

CNZ Pacific Arts Strategy gave the artists a travel grant to attend the opening, and meet with Scottish curators, Gallerists, and academics - which they’ve all managed to do, largely on their own initiative too!

This is the fifth show in an ongoing series highlighting contemporary art from around the Pasifika / Oceania region. While some are household names in New Zealand and Australia, others are new - or at least emerging - from what is a very vibrant and dynamic arts scene.

The show is on until Sat 24th October. Hope to see you soon! More pics soon.

Linda Va’aelua
Serene Hodgman
gpseeleepah
🅙🅘🅜🅜🅨
Creative New Zealand

01/10/2026

OPENING TONIGHT 5-7pm all welcome!

MOANA_5 is the fifth group show of artists from Oceania, all of whom work in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Featuring four terrific artists, Linda Va’aelua, Gary $ilipa, Serene Hodgman, and Jimmy Ma’ia’i, it features beautiful new work that acknowledges old traditions - but in a very contemporary way - while exploring the connections between their Samoan heritage and Scotland.

It’s a beautiful show, and we’re grateful for the support of Creative New Zealand’s Pacific Strategy Fund, which has enabled the artists to be here for this very special showcase.

Join us for a drink at 2 Chuckie Pend from 5-7pm tonight to give these artists a very warm Edinburgh welcome.

Creative New Zealand
Linda Va’aelua
gpseeleepah
🅙🅘🅜🅜🅨
Serene Hodgman

23/09/2026

This Saturday is the final day of Pauly Pocket’s Everything Must Go, so we’re finishing things off with a conversation in the gallery at 12 noon this Saturday 26th Sept.

Pauly and I will sit down and talk about the show, where the work comes from, why he’s drawn to these particular bits of everyday life, and what happens when fragments from ordinary urban spaces suddenly find themselves inside a gallery. Should take about 30-45 mins.

We’ll probably get into class, nostalgia, materiality, the high street, bingo, public spaces, what counts as an artwork, and whether galleries are actually very good at recognising the culture that exists outside them (answer: not really).

I’ll record it too, so I promise it won’t be overly formal or academically dull.

This is your last chance to see Everything Must Go before everything, well… goes. Open from today until 5.30pm this Sat. 🙌

Pauly Pocket

16/09/2026

Thanks to the everyone who came along to the opening of Pauly Pocket’s show EVERYTHING MUST GO! It’s a fascinating exhibition which has raised more questions than answers about the state of contemporary art - indeed, what art even means to the here and now.

The show is on for another two weekends only, and closes 5pm on Saturday 26 September, so get your skates on!

Here’s ’Bingo’ from the show, a rescued light box from Leith with its orginal poster (and additional spray paint by some unknown artist!)

Pauly Pocket
Scottish Society of Artists (SSA)

03/09/2026

OPENS NEXT THURSDAY 10 SEPT 5-7pm.

For his new exhibition, EVERYTHING MUST GO! Edinburgh-based artist Pauly Pocket brings together a collection of objects, signs and fragments rescued from the ordinary urban landscape. The old chippy sign, a glowing poster from a shuttered bingo hall, a NEWS sign at the scruffy corner shop - all places recognisable to anyone growing up in Scotland. But hardly the stuff of art, surely?

Pauly isn’t particularly interested in tidying these things up for an art audience. And even the gallery doesn’t get to decide how these symbols should behave. They’re hung at the height they were found, using the old screws, brackets and fixings wherever possible. Their usefulness may have gone, but they remain, still advertising, instructing and pointing towards places that no longer exist.

But hang on. What’s changed? What qualifies this as art? How is the artist even involved? Is it about the object itself, maybe? Or how and where we experience it?

By now you might be manifesting a wee bit of Warhol, perhaps Koons; the old Pop Art trick of taking the language of consumption and legitimising it through the doors of the institution. Nah. Pauly’s too street smart for that. Rather than exploit the vacuousness of the spectacle, he shows us what’s left – the massive void in our imaginations (what Mark Fisher called “depressive hedonia”) stunted by over four decades of neoliberal cultural logic and algorithm-infused junk dopamine.

EVERYTHING MUST GO! chucks a half-Niddrie at this funny, sad – but ultimately liberating – contradiction.

Pauly’s opening event is from 5-7pm next Thursday, 10 September. All welcome, as always. Until then, the gallery will be closed for the install.

29/08/2026

It’s the last day to experience Jake Chapman’s Nicesis: The unwellness of Wellbeing. As well as being our most popular show ever (averaging 40 people a day) it’s been a transformative experience for many visitors; I think it’s pushed boundaries of what art can mean for them. That in itself is a brilliant and beautiful result.

Short essay link in bio (large one still to come, can’t find the bleedin’ time to finish it! Not long now…)

One day left - make it count. Gallery closes at 5.30pm See you at Chuckie Pend!

Scott x

26/08/2026

It’s the final week of the Festival and Jake Chapman’s show NICESIS: The Unwellness of Wellbeing. We’ve had over 600 people come to the gallery to see this snow, which for me is massive. In fact, in terms of visitor numbers, it’s my biggest UK show ever. So much so, I’m now losing my voice! (Yes, even me!)

There’s also a short 2-page essay (which is a condensed version of a talk I give to every visitor, if they want it) if you need help going to sleep. Link in bio. I’ve been brewing a bigger one - which I’m still working on but determined to release into the wild this week…

AND this Friday at 6.30pm we celebrate the last weekend of the festival with an acoustic set from Y.I.OT.A (Your Illegal Operations of Transgender Aliens) a 4-piece emerging band based in Edinburgh combining punk, metal, psych, and pop, they’ve created a set that simultaneously hits (and misses) all four genres! They’re fabulous and fun and a cool accompaniment to the free drinks I’m putting on. The perfect end to a busy week? I’d say so.

All welcome. See you then!

14/08/2026

ARTIST TALK NOW ONLINE! ‘Jake Chapman in conversation’ is now up on the Talks section of the gallery website - link in bio. It’s a really open and insightful conversation about life, art and ideas. Please ignore my feeble questions, but for once (!) I was keen to shut up and just listen. Jake is one of the most interesting artists working anywhere today - and this talk proves why.

I’m still wrestling with the essay btw, but think I’ve found my muse somewhere between Bataille and Trainspotting…

FREE GIG THIS SATURDAY!
I’m excited to have the artist play an acoustic set for us in the gallery as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe - please join us for a night of songs, chat and maybe even a few drinks on the house as part of the show Depression Culture (it’s not depressing) 😉 Venue 560, 2 Chuckie Pend EH3-8BG, 6-7.30pm ish. All welcome, free drinks, bring friends.

📷 Hunted Projects 🙌

10/08/2026

FREE event this Saturday 6-7.30pm (ish) - music, drinks, chat and more with singer songwriter (and radical psychologist) Nilima Chowdhury! All welcome!

“What does living in the current moment feel like? And why? Who are we aspiring to be? What is the prototypical contemporary ‘mindset’? And what impact does this have on our psychological well-being?”
 As a social psychologist, Nilima has been exploring these questions in her research for the past eleven years. As the singer-songwriter , she has been writing songs about the ‘neoliberal experience’ since her participation in The Voice of Germany as a quarter-finalist in 2013.   Depression Culture is an attempt to bring the two together by interweaving theoretical reflections, improvised performance/rant, and music. Audience participation is highly encouraged!

Nilima holds a PhD in social psychology from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and currently works as a senior research fellow in health psychology at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. In her research and writings, she explores how our cultural “common sense” shapes how we think, feel, and act. (Which riffs beautifully with the current show by Jake Chapman - incidentally our talk is now live on the website!)  Nilima has been active as a singer-songwriter for over 25 years, and is currently preparing for her concert tour in 2026.

See you there - it’s an open invite, so do bring friends - all welcome! Now I just need to find a guitar to borrow…

Scott

WHEN: Sat 15 August, 6-7.30pm ish. WHERE: VENUE 560, Scott Lawrie Gallery, 2 Chuckie Pend (lane behind Filmhouse), Edinburgh. EH3 8BG

01/08/2026

MOMA, Tate Modern, Serpentine, Royal Academy… and now Chuckie Pend. Jake Chapman’s exhibition history is pages long and his kaleidoscopic contribution to art indelible. He has no need to show in a tiny Edinburgh gallery still finding its feet. And yet, he gave this show everything.

Jake blows up even the most comforting of our ideologies, opening up new questions - if not possibilities - across the history of art and ideas.

But in a very real way, Jake IS the artwork.

He drove all the way up to Scotland to support a tiny independent gallery. He chatted away generously to people at the opening (from academics and artists to kids thinking about art school). Then went to the pub with a wee crowd and entertained everyone for the night. What a fu***ng legend.

You have a point of view. You start a thing. You grow a thing. And along the way there are the usual heartaches, breakthroughs, joys, worries, tears and successes. But it’s artists like Jake who make every second of it worthwhile.

Art remains the best way I know of to make us better humans. And we have a truly great one in the form of Mr Chapman.

Thank you Jake, you’re a real hero to many of us here in Scotland. We’re still buzzing from the experience of having you.

Scott

Ps. my subjective experience of living in a castle does not objectively make me bourgeois 💅

Jake Chapman

Pic by Alan Holligan

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https://scottlawrie.com/

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