The 50th anniversary of Peacock – a workshop for art, Aberdeen’s renowned print studio, is being marked with an exhibition of the New Aberdeen Bestiary at Aberdeen Art Gallery.
The exhibition is the culmination of a three-year collaborative project involving Peacock printmakers and seven international artists from a variety of cultural and artistic backgrounds, from performance art to textiles. The artists are Abdulrazaq Awofeso, Delaine Le Bas, Joy Charpentier, Carla Felipe, Julio Jara, Sadie Main and Pedro G Romero.
Delaine Le Bas is one of the four nominees for this year’s Turner Prize, the UK’s most prestigious prize for contemporary art.
Bestiaries are a form of illuminated manuscript popular in northern Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Derived from classical texts about the natural world and early Christian works, a bestiary is a compendium of animals, paired with moralising or allegorical explanations.
The New Aberdeen Bestiary has been inspired by the 12th-century illuminated manuscript known as the Aberdeen Bestiary. It arrived in Aberdeen during the 17th century when it entered the library collection at Marischal College. It is now in the collections of the University of Aberdeen. Prompted by the amount of marginalia in the medieval text, the notes, comments and corrections, sketches and doodles, the New Aberdeen Bestiary looks at the liminal spaces between categories, where categories shift and morph into one another; the blurry areas between animal and beast.
The seven artists were each invited to choose an animal, real or imagined, and explore its symbolic, social and cultural significance in a collection of prints. These have been exhibited individually at the worm, Peacock’s gallery space, over the last two years. Now, in Peacock’s 50th anniversary year, the prints are being shown together for the first time as the New Aberdeen Bestiary at the Art Gallery.
Peacock - a workshop for art (previously Peacock Printmakers and Peacock Visual Arts) was established in 1974. It took its name from Frances Peacock, the eminent 18th-century Scottish dancing Master who lived in the Castlegate. Over five decades Peacock has supported thousands of artists in the production of artworks, ranging from prints to video works, photography, performance and site-specific public installations. Peacock’s ‘open access’ approach to workshop usage is key to its success – it is open to everyone regardless of skill level.
Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums supports Peacock by providing a secure store for its extensive print archive. The project to digitise the entire archive is ongoing, and can be explored on the e-museum pages of the AAGM website. Helen Fothergill, Service Manager – Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums, said: “I’m excited that the Art Gallery and Peacock teams have been able to work together to present art in the Gallery in a new way. The New Aberdeen Bestiary has completely changed the look and feel of Gallery 16 and we’re really looking forward to welcoming visitors and hearing their reactions.”
Nuno Sacramento, exhibition curator and Direct of Peacock & the worm, said: “The New Aberdeen Bestiary project has gathered new stories and new voices over the past three years. It is rooted in Peacock’s ethos of making, using contemporary art and printmaking to propose an ethos of collaborative working. This year we are proud to be celebrating five decades of telling stories through image-making, of training thousands of artists, and of preparing the leaders that will take Peacock into the future - so that in another 50 years, the Peacock is still singing and dancing.”
Image: Two of the exhibiting artists, Abdulrazaq Awofeso and Sadie Main, pictured at the Art Gallery with exhibition curator Nuno Sacramento, Director of Peacock & the worm
Exhibition information
New Aberdeen Bestiary –
Unexplored territories along the margins
8 June 2024 – 5 January 2025, Aberdeen Art Gallery (Gallery 16), admission free.
For visiting information go to www.aagm.co.uk
Follow the link to find out more about the New Aberdeen Bestiary https://worm.gallery/informations/the-new-aberdeen-bestiary
Explore the Peacock Archive Collection via the AAGM website at
https://emuseum.aberdeencity.gov.uk/collections/112275/peacock-prints-selection
Find out more about Peacock – a workshop for art at
https://peacock.studio/contacting