Nicola Atkinson Artist & Curator Beautiful Materials
Nicola Atkinson | A Solo Exhibition of new works
Nicola Atkinson in conversation about her new works in Linlithgow with Lynsey Moyes, who is a radio producer who has created audio arts content for BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio 4 and the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art.
Nicola Atkinson | A Solo Exhibition of new works
Friday 23 May to Sunday 21 September 2025
At its heart the exhibition of new works by Nicola Atkinson, Beautiful Materials, asks How do we look at art and its materials and what are its boundaries?
Here in the exhibition the vessel is a container for ideas, and materials, but perhaps we too are also containers in some ways. Nicola puts the visitor front and center in an active role of questioning art, how we digest what is around us, how we take part and then, what does it all mean. Themes of containment, scale and transformation pervade every surface.
Some experience of the artwork can only be in person, in the Gallery, this is where the tactile scale of the hanging velvet and georgette artwork is truly present. The vessels have gone on a journey of material metamorphosis from painting on wood, to printing on beautiful fabrics.
The artist extends what is the exhibition proper, out through the window of the Linlithgow Burgh Halls Gallery Space onto the Bus Shelter on Linlithgow Cross Stop no: 6290LW08. You can experience the artwork further at the artists’ talk, in your home, by wearing it, by listening on your phone and in a book.
She has published a stunning pocket-sized book to accompany the exhibition which you can acquire at for £10 at
Supported by West Lothian Council
Linlithgow Burgh Halls, The Cross, Linlithgow, EH49 7AH
Open everyday 9am - 5pm
Thank you : Alan Hawthorne, Basharat Khan, Barbara McCarren, Ben Fletcher, Bill Breckenridge, Camille Archer, Claire Atkinson, Harrison Reid, Jill Vedebrand, Ju Row Farr, Kim Noble, Lesley Brown, Lorna Cunningham, Lorna Swinney, Lynsey Moyes, Maeve Redmond, Marney Walker, Michael Wilson, Peter Allam, Rosemary Cunningham, Sally Pattle, Sarah Bissell-Hobbs, Seth Howe, Spencer Dent, Stevie Jackson, Stuart Kerr, Tom Hickmore & OuterSpaces for my studio space.
Picture by Johnnie Wales© : Nicola Atkinson in the Linlithgow Burgh Halls Gallery
Nicola Atkinson by Michael Wilson
If there is one universal emblem of both domestic utility and family ritual, it’s surely the vessel. Cups, dishes, vases, and bowls have been fixtures of still-life painting ever since Willem Claesz Heda, Willem Kalf, and other artists of the Dutch Golden Age used them to demonstrate technical mastery while commenting on the material culture of their time. In its formal simplicity, the vessel also continues to offer endless possibilities for creative variation, both as a subject of representation and as an object in its own right. Nicola Atkinson’s repeated use of the ubiquitous form as both visual motif and social unifier resonates with her abiding interest in the intersection of art and design, and in the ways in which these fields change and evolve when considered in the context of community and the practice of everyday life. For Atkinson, these familiar containers hold not only physical stuff, but also the ideas of both artist and viewer. They have the capacity to enclose and convey nascent thoughts and, as urns, to preserve their fragmented remnants.
The centrality of the vessel in this exhibition also reflects Atkinson’s interest in the discipline and history of ceramics. And just as most ceramic forms have been glazed and fired before arriving at their final, permanent shape, so Atkinson’s printed images have undergone a process of material transformation that goes beyond simple manipulation at her own hand. Beginning as small-scale paintings on repurposed wood panels — which themselves began as discarded loom components — they have been enlarged and reproduced onto unstretched sheets of fabric to create a group of hanging banners. Despite the peculiarities of this concluding format, however, the gestural quality and translucent coloration of the original renderings prevents the works from appearing rigidly heraldic — they’re too individual and too irregular for that. Instead, they feel closer to ornamental tapestries, or even to the accidental compositions that appear on ground sheets in the course of interior decoration.
Atkinson has referred to vessels in several other projects over the years. In 2013’s All You Need, for example, she enquired after the subtle impact that a set of hand-molded off-white crockery might have on the everyday lives of eighteen Glasgow households, causing its users to become newly aware of their own habits and idiosyncrasies by introducing a new set of “essential” objects into their established routines. No Manners (2015–16), which began life as a collaboration with Benedikt H. Hermannsson centered on a set of unique porcelain bowls, arrangements of which were used by musicians in a sequence of live performances at project space Mengi in Reykjavik, artist Stephen Glassman’s loft in downtown Los Angeles, and a storefront in Berlin. And back in Glasgow, Crumples (2020) involved participants choosing which of 366 delicate porcelain containers they felt fit best into a closed hand. Each piece was marked with a date in the coming year—hence the number of objects—anticipating a future moment of positive change.
Atkinson’s use of unstretched velvet as a support for the paintings adds associations with both luxury and kitsch. This distinctive fabric also has a highly tactile quality, to which an added top layer of lightweight georgette adds an ephemeral dimensionality. The practice of painting on velvet, which originated in Middle Ages Kashmir, achieved popularity in the rural United States during World War II following American soldiers’ discovery of Hawaiian artist Edgar Leeteg (1904–1953). In the 1990s, the practice underwent a further revival after new painting factories in China and India kicked into high gear. It feels appropriate, then, that Atkinson has printed, not brushed, her images onto the fabric, employing an industrial process rather than producing the works entirely by hand. (She employed a similar strategy in her project Drip (2024), using the aesthetic filter of the paint-to-photograph-to-print sequence to “test the strength” of each composition while it was being made.)
In its embrace of repetition and avoidance of context beyond that which is provided in the gallery by a timeline of the artist’s career, Atkinson’s project evokes the work of German artist Peter Dreher, who painted the same water glass placed on a table in his Black Forest studio more than 5,000 times over a forty-year period for the series Tag um Tag guter Tag (“Day by Day, Good Day”) (1974–2014). It also echoes Allan McCollum’s Perfect Vehicles (1985–), an extended series of identically shaped but differently coloured and scaled sculptural interpretations of a single traditional Chinese ginger jar. McCollum’s vessels, which sometimes reach incongruously monumental size, have no openings, eliminating their expected use-value and turning them into, in the artist’s words, “an homage to the idea of one thing standing for another.”
But while Dreher applied a crystalline realism to his Zen like undertaking, maintaining an uninterrupted focus and introducing only subtle variations in pursuit of representational mastery, and McCollum maintains a rigorous consistency and neutrality in the making and presentation of his physically sealed yet metaphorically available containers, Atkinson’s approach is all about improvised alteration. In this, her undertaking is perhaps more resonant with the work of an earlier artist, Giorgio Morandi, whose outwardly modest still life arrangements achieve a transcendent beauty though their silent interaction with ambient light and space. In Atkinson’s work, the aesthetic and the functional continually overlap and change places, the ordinary continually exceeding or stepping outside our expectations, the artistically rarified turning out to be more accessible than we might have imagined.
Finally, Atkinson again reaches out into her immediate surroundings and compounds her audience through several strategic additions to what some viewers may have thought of as the exhibition proper. Look out of the window and you’ll notice a bus stop on which further images of vessels, rendered in a flatter style and brighter palette than their ink-on-velvet counterparts, have been printed. Inside the gallery, meanwhile, the Wear Art Music event invites visitors to see and model original handmade scarves by the artist. A soundtrack of new ambient music produced with Belle and Sebastian’s Stevie Jackson resonates with the translucent Georgette fabric’s rich combination of colour, texture, and the movement. Finally, a model of the interior itself offers miniature takeaway versions of all the works on view, underscoring the themes of containment, scale, and transformation that run throughout the project and inviting viewers to consider the various ways in which we digest and distribute things—food, drink, art, ideas, life. May 2025
Nicola Atkinson & Stevie Jackson | WEAR ART MUSIC
MOVING is one song in six songs in the Sweet Cake Album
by Nicola Atkinson & Stevie Jackson & Friends
Nicola Atkinson Vocal, Stevie Jackson Guitar, George J Murray Trombone, Aby Vulliamy Voila & Bill Wells Bass Guitar.
Recording produced by John Cavanagh 2008
WEAR ART MUSIC | Linlithgow Burgh Halls Gallery
Bringing extraordinary Beautiful Materials garments & music to Linlithgow. A Music collaboration between Nicola Atkinson & Stevie Jackson.
Date: Saturday 23 August 1pm
Location: Linlithgow Burgh Halls Gallery Space EH49 7AH
Bringing colour and expression to everyday life, take art off the wall and into the hands of the participant. Made with a zero-waste approach to pattern cutting, this is a unique chance to wear the 'artists’ work. You will be able to participate by wearing the scarves, experiencing the energy of the rich bold colours, and the movement of the translucent Georgette fabrics. Set to an ambient original soundtrack, the music from a collaboration between myself and Stevie Jackson, Belle and Sebastian. ©2025
Supported by West Lothian Council
Linlithgow Burgh Halls, The Cross,
Photographer© Nicola Atkinson : Model by Rosie Cunningham at my studio at Outer Spaces
Beautiful Materials Publishing | Nicola Atkinson
Published by Beautiful Materials Publishing, a publishing company founded by Nicola Atkinson, it is a pocket-sized book, with beautiful reproductions of the artwork featured in the exhibition Beautiful Materials at Linlithgow Burgh Halls Gallery Space.
It contains a collection of the vessel's paintings and an insightful interview with the artist by Lynsey Moyes, who is a radio producer who has created audio arts content for BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio 4 and the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art. An essay by the writer Michael Wilson who is the author of How to Read Contemporary Art: Experiencing the Art of the 21st Century and his writing has featured in Artforum, Art Monthly and Frieze.
Nicola is an internationally acclaimed multi-disciplinary artist and designer whose career has been influenced by time spent on the West Coast of America, in Sweden and living in Glasgow.
She has had numerous exhibitions in international venues including Long Beach Museum of Art, CA, USA, Tramway and The Lighthouse, Glasgow, Scotland, Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana, Cuba, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, The Museum of Modern Art, NY, USA and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK. ©2025
Supported by West Lothian Council & Far From the Madding Crowd Bookshop
Linlithgow Burgh Halls, The Cross,
Photographer© Nicola Atkinson©: The Beautiful Materials Publishing books.Title: Beautiful Materials VESSELS
Artist: Nicola Atkinson
Authors: Nicola Atkinson, Lynsey Moyes & Michael Wilson.
Editor: Nicola Atkinson
Design: Nicola Atkinson
Curatorial Continuity: Spencer Dent
Photograph of Nicola Atkinson by Harrison Reid
Paintings Credits & Copyright: Nicola Atkinson
Publisher: Beautiful Materials Publishing
Pages: 87
ISBN: 9781836881292
Vessels on Loan | Nicola Atkinson
You can borrow one of the Nicola Atkinson Beautiful Materials artworks for your homes.
“As an artist I spend a lot of time living with my own work after I have made it. I hope that this will enhance the experiences of the Beautiful Materials exhibition, by connecting your home to the Linlithgow Burgh Halls Gallery Space”
In a recent survey for museums, it said that a person spends on average 28 seconds looking at a piece of art. This exhibition offers the visitor an opportunity to have a little more time with an artwork, to understand how the relationship to it can grow or change, in the comfort of their own home.
The artwork was a choice of a vessel on velvet, in a 25cm x 25cm white box frame. This is a chance to spend more time with the artwork in your own home.
LOCATION - Linlithgow Burgh Halls Gallery Space EH49 7AH
Supported by West Lothian Council
Linlithgow Burgh Halls, The Cross,
Photographer© Nicola Atkinson© : The Linlithgow DIY store with borrowed artwork.
Nicola Atkinson | Linlithgow Bus Shelter
Linlithgow Bus Shelter connects the interior with exterior, and extends the boundaries of the Beautiful Materials exhibition.
Date: Thursday 8 May - `due to public suport to remain.
Location: Linlithgow Cross Stop no: 6290LW08
A bus shelter can be a thoughtful place, thinking about the journey ahead, when the bus is coming and beyond. It is a shared space in the world, where a captive audience occurs to experience art. Inspired after Nicola Atkinson recent public art works on three bus shelters in Winchburgh, this work features transparent colourful vinyl and drawings.
There are two significant aspects of this particular bus shelter location, one is that you can see the bus shelter from the Linlithgow Burgh Halls windows, connecting the interior with exterior, and extending the boundaries of the exhibition. The other one is that this is the site where chloroform was invented which enables the alleviation of human suffering. For safe indentation this was housed in blue glass vessels.
BUS SHELTER TRANSFORMATION (DAY 1)
‘It took me three days in total to install the bus shelter, West Lothian Council transport department cleaned it initially and had kindly replaced two badly damaged panels. My first day was spent cleaning it making sure it was ready for the transparent vinyl, it needed to be very clean free of dust for best effect, an extra clean was needed. I meet so many people who just stop to thank me for cleaning it. To make this happen I had a lot of support from Camille Archer, Music and Public Art Officer Community Arts, Lorna Cunningham, Transport Department West Lothian Council, Lesley Brown, The staff at Linlithgow Burgh Halls, Linlithgow Town Management and High Street shops. The people at Linlithgow DIY store were very helpful with sorting out what tools to buy. The special brushes for windows and the extra strong spray bottles, so that I could reach the roof for the extra clean. Being very patient when I returned for many buckets of hot soapy water.
DAY 2
The second day of installation I worked with Sarah Bissell-Hobbs, an artist and a professional vinyl installer who helped me with the large, more tricky pieces of vinyl. Since a gust of wind could mess up the vinyl and you cannot do it this part alone. It was during that day that the people at the Turkish Barber (Zenas) who bought us coffee and we made friends with them. They stored our extra supplies and provided us with water also. The Four Marys pub was very helpful as well, storing my larger tools overnight.
DAY 3
The third and last day I worked alone, installing 500 hand cut pieces of vinyl. These were pre cut and took about a week to make. The bus shelter has the effect of a painterly and a stained glass quality because of the transparent layers of the hand cut pieces. I was so lost in my work and getting it finished I never noticed that the whole street was watching me . It was only on my return that I met people who told me that they had seen in the morning on their way to work and looked forward to seeing how much progress I had made upon their return home.’
©2025
Supported by West Lothian Council
Linlithgow Burgh Halls, The Cross,
Photographer© Jim Payne : The Linlithgow Bus Shelter at sunset