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Are you about to embark on a substantial piece of writing and feeling daunted? Or maybe you are stuck in the middle of your dissertation? Perhaps an appointment with one of our Royal Literary Fund Fellows would help! This year our Fellows are Mary Paulson-Ellis, Lucy Ribchester and Lesley Glaister, all experienced and published authors.
You can book a one to one in person appointment with one of our Fellows, at the Main Library George Square, and there are also appointments available at Kings Buildings.
For more information take a look at our RLFF webpage.
Many of our students used this service last year and found it incredibly helpful to have in person one to one support and coaching for their writing.
We are delighted to have a pop up display of books relating to British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003), at the A&A Library, to coincide with the new Thinkbelt exhibition at the Mathew Gallery, Minto House.
The exhibition celebrates the legacy of Cedric Price and prompts reflection on how architecture can be useful, timely, delightful and permeable to respond to current environmental and social challenges.
Curated by Prof. María José Martínez Sánchez, Dr. Ana Bonet Miró, Martin Brown, the exhibition runs from 11-22 November 2024.
The exhibition’s centrepiece features two original market stall prototypes from the Drawing Matter Collection, designed by Price and never exhibited before. Alongside these prototypes, a range of archival materials – including prints of original drawings, texts, ephemera, film extracts and audio recordings – offers a glimpse into the diversity of Price’s practice and the interdisciplinary conversations that animated it.
In the spirit of Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt project, this initiative aims to stimulate discussions about some of the key principles of his architecture – such as the provision of user-centred designs that increase choice, encourage change, do more with less, facilitate easy assembly and disassembly, and create responsive designs that delight the communities they serve – in relation to a selection of pedagogies and practices at each school. It prompts some of Price’s key design questions: Who do we design for? How little need be done? For how long is it useful? How to make time visible in our designs? What might design for pleasure and delight mean today?
Our new display explores journeys to islands both real and imaginary, centering on Voyage Boxed: sea journeys, island hopping & trans-oceanic concepts, by Imi Maufe and others, (2014), and including in addition, an Atlas of Remote Islands, by Judith Schalansky (2010), The Fascinating secrets of oceans and islands, (Reader’s Digest Association, 1972) Archipelago: an atlas of imagined islands, by Huw Lewis-Jones (2019) and Dreaming the Gokstadt: northern lands and islands, Thomas Joshua Cooper, (1988).
At ECA Library we are surrounded by many original artworks. Each piece conveys the College of Art’s close links to prominent artists and benefactors.
As you enter the library, Janet Boulton’s piece Little Fields Long Horizons flanks the doorway. Only if you stand in just the right place can you make out the words in relief without the reflection obscuring them. Donated by the artist in September 2009, it is a standout example of her method for paper pulp relief work. Boulton passed away in January of this year, and this piece represents her lasting legacy as an artist-in-residence at ECA in 2006.
Janet Boulton
Boulton’s focus on garden design and history brought her into collaboration with Ian Hamilton Finlay, an internationally renowned poet, writer, visual artist and avant-gardener. Finlay’s ‘philosophers garden’, Little Sparta, in the Pentland Hills served as an immense source of inspiration for Boulton, and the subject of her residency at ECA. This piece draws on Finlay’s poem, engraved on three pairs of stones at Little Sparta. We can recommend Boulton’s book, which describes in exquisite detail Boulton’s works on Little Sparta, and there are two copies available to loan at ECA Library. Janet Boulton : remembering Little Sparta : watercolours, reliefs, garden works, 1993-2009. For all books by Janet Boulton, including original Artists’ books featuring her paper relief works, click here.
Fittingly, a piece by Finlay joins Boulton’s on the same wall at ECA, Evening / Sail. Known for his contribution to the genre of concrete poetry, Finlay has long been a focus of study at the University, including a symposium in 2017 which explored his art and poetics. Books about Finlay’s diverse artworks, including Artists’ Books, can be explored here.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Moving to the windows by the current journal wall, we pass the immutable gaze of Andrew Grant, Edinburgh College of Art’s most prominent benefactor of the 19th century. This piece is by Kenny Hunter in 2015, a leading Scottish artist and then Programme Director of Sculpture at the College. With Andrew Grant’s generous support, the ECA Main Building on Lauriston Place was built in 1907, and the Andrew Grant Bequest was established, which since 1930 has provided scholarships for ECA students. The sculpture is painted bronze, including the base, which succeeds in disguising itself as wood.
Kenny Hunter
Moving downstairs, we can see ‘Eight photographs of Blinky Palermo’ by concrete photographer Monika Baumgartl, documenting the momentous ‘Strategy: Get Arts’, 1970. This Edinburgh Festival exhibition of Düsseldorf-based artists took over the College of Art. These photographs depict Palermo perched atop a very tall ladder on the ECA Main building staircase creating his Blue, Yellow, White, Red, a mural of horizontal band of primary colours near the ceiling in ECA’s Main Building. For more about this work, and the ‘Strategy: Get Arts’ exhibition, I recommend this book Strategy: get arts : 35 artists who broke the rules, which is available for loan at ECA Library.
Monika Baumgartl
Finally, perhaps the favourite piece of art for ECA students looking for a cozy place to study, is the grey upholstered arm-chair, a final project made by Laura Virtanen, BA Design & Applied Arts (Product Design) ECA, in 2009.
Laura Virtanen
Come and see these artworks and explore our collections the next time you are passing by West Port and Lady Lawson Street!
Guest post by Elise Ramsay, Edhelp Supervisor, ECA Library
This month we are looking forward to the library’s Dissertation and Thesis Festival, taking place from 21 – 25 October. You can find the programme of events here, there is sure to be something of interest to everyone!
Sessions include:
Decolonising your dissertation
An Introduction to Edinburgh Central Library
Introduction to Reference Managers
EndNote for managing references
Meet your Royal Literary Fund Fellows
Copyright and your Thesis
An Introduction to the National Library of Scotland
We look forward to welcoming you to our festival events, and helping you make the most of your dissertation and thesis writing experience!
Everyone at ECA Librarywould like to give a warm welcome to all our new students, and to our returning students too!
If you are a new student looking to collect your library ID card, please note that new students must book a timeslot to collect their card at the Main Library, George Square, as detailed here.
Find out more about ECA Library here, and take a look at our orientation guides for each library site.
Want to learn more about getting the best out of the library and its collections and services? Work your way through Libsmart1 and 2, at your own pace, on Learn essentials.
If you need a one to one appointment with your academic support librarian look on the MyEd events channel for an upcoming appointment and if none of the times available suit you, drop your academic support librarian an email.
Our display at ECA Library focuses on book works by artist Jane Hyslop, including a recent acquisition: The Oak Tree: a tribute to eternity.
Jane Hyslop: The Oak Tree: a tribute to eternity
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, a biography, and spanning over 700 years, The Oak Tree: a tribute to eternity weaves historical and contemporary fact with fiction, and marks the pivotal point at which we now find ourselves in the face of climate change and declining biodiversity. It follows Woolf’s groundbreaking novel in drawing attention to the very moment of the present, while urging us to look to the future.
Taking the form of an imagined visual edition of the manuscript the eponymous character writes throughout the novel, the artist’s book is accompanied by an introduction and notes written in collaboration with Professor Bryony Randall.
Other works featured in the display include Edinburgh: a visual handbook, 2007, and An Experiment, 2010.
This month’s issue of Library Updates highlights our work on the Library Wellbeing Collection, our new EdHelp enquiries chatbot, how to find yourself in the Library and much more!
Wellbeing Collection at Main Library, George Square
This is the third post in the Library in Focus series, exploring other libraries that could be useful to ECA students.
Today we look at the archive and library at Modern Two, part of the research facilities offered by the National Galleries of Scotland.
The reading room at Modern Two
The reading room at Modern Two is open by prior appointment Monday to Friday, 10am–1pm and 2pm–4.30pm.
The Library at Modern Two covers the history and theory of art from the early fourteenth century to the present. The library has around 100,000 items accessible in the Reading Room, including monographs, catalogues raisonnés, exhibition catalogues, periodicals, auction sales catalogues, audio-visual material, accession files and ephemera. The gallery accession files (sometimes referred to as dossiers) are a unique curatorial resource on every work in the collection, from Titian to Tanning.
The library has been developed to support research into the Collection and the holdings reflect this, with particular strengths in Scottish and European art, and Dada and Surrealism.
The Archive contains over 140 holdings relating to twentieth and twenty-first century artists, collectors and art organisations, and is particularly rich in papers relating to art and artists in Scotland. These include documents, drawings, sketchbooks, correspondence, photographs, textiles, artists’ materials and tools, diaries, newscuttings, audio-visual material and other printed ephemera. There are significant holdings on Eduardo Paolozzi, Joan Eardley and Richard Demarco.
The archive also includes primary materials of international importance in the Roland Penrose and Gabrielle Keiller collections of Dada and Surrealism.
Over 6,000 artists’ books and special books are also available to view in the Reading Room. This collection contains many of the most significant books by artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, and includes a world class collection of Dada and Surrealist publications drawn from the book collections of Roland Penrose and Gabrielle Keiller.
To book a visit and find out more about the collections click here.
