Edinburgh Art Festival: Underseen Artists Across the City
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- Del LaGrace Volcano opens EAF with images of 1980s London queer nightlife and lesbian goths draped over Edinburgh graveyards, described as "intimate, confrontational, erotic, totally defiant."
- Sandra George (1957–2013), a Black photojournalist who documented life in Edinburgh's impoverished Craigmillar area — skinheads, Hare Krishnas, Jamaicans, housing-scheme kids — never publicly exhibited her work before her death; City Art Centre now displays her self-portraits and community photography.
- Wendy McMurdo's Scottish National Portrait Gallery show digitally strips computers and tablets from images of children using them, producing "isolated figures interacting with nothing" — a critique of kids "drifting into online worlds."
- Jamie Fitzpatrick's Edinburgh Printmakers show satirizes UK statues memorializing "war criminals, land barons and slavers," rendering the figures as Georgian-wigged caricatures with red plasticine grins threatening to collapse into clay.
- Frank Walter (1926–2009), an Antiguan painter who never publicly exhibited the thousands of paintings and drawings he amassed, anchors a group show at Ingleby Gallery alongside Rose Wylie and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
- Eva Rothschild's Fruitmarket show features rubber hoses coiled around metal frames and half-graffitied concrete blocks the critic calls "Memphis Group aesthetics gone goth" — though a downstairs display of modernist riffs failed to land.
- The reviewer ultimately describes EAF as "too big and complex, with too many moving parts" but concludes the festival still delivers "loads of hidden stories and undiscovered narratives" worth the trek.
Why it matters: EAF is one of the few platforms giving posthumous public exposure to artists like Sandra George and Frank Walter, whose thousands of pieces never reached galleries in their lifetimes — a rare corrective for creators long relegated to obscurity. For festivalgoers, the photography-heavy sprawl demands stamina, but the critic argues standout work like Fitzpatrick's satire and George's community portraiture "deserves to be seen far outside the city's confines."
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