297 x 210mm, 24 pages, full colour printing, perfect bound, 2022

Marking the Glaswegian artist’s most ambitious public project to date, Nicola Atkinson’s Slices of Colour, takes place on nine gable ends in her local neighbourhood. Interrupting the neutral grouping of flats, units and streets of Dennistoun the artwork presents rich, bold colours painted with energetic, expressive brush strokes that erupt and cut across the roughcast façades.

The series includes nine sumptuous still life paintings of flowers, hanging on opulent cloth velvet, that are both irresistible to touch and full of deep, shimmering colour. The alluring velvet artworks are presented with the original gestural paintings on canvas. The showing is intimate and tactile and challenges viewers again to slow down, look and carefully observe the materials.

Atkinson’s Slices of Colour takes the concept of the still life painting of flowers being a universal symbol of beauty and domestic living and draws connections to the ideals of our dream interior and the disparities of the built environment. The work challenges us to reframe something as ubiquitous and mundane as flowers into a point of entry to the larger concerns of liveable beautiful neighbourhoods.

Published by