Fiona Bradley on the Fruitmarket Gallery's new season: 'all things are connected'
The Fruitmarket’s upcoming season invites visitors to think about humanity’s relationship with the natural world, writes the gallery’s director Fiona Bradley
Earlier this month we had the pleasure of hosting the family of Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025) as we installed her exhibition Wilding at Fruitmarket. Jaune’s son and collaborator, artist Neal Ambrose-Smith, brought his knowledge and expertise of his mother’s work to us with such generosity and optimism. And he also brought his understanding of land, that “whatever you do to the land, comes back around, that all things are connected. And so if you dig a hole, you need to plant a tree, otherwise your horse will break its leg.” Carrying histories of stolen land, forced clearances and the industrial exploitation of land, Neal, like Jaune, saw parallels between American and Scottish history, and ways in which we might learn from one another across the ocean about how best to steward our world into the future.
In these times increasingly defined by environmental anxiety and political volatility, Fruitmarket’s new season, Attached to Land: mutual accountability in a time of environmental permacrisis, invites visitors to think with us about humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Inspired by the artists we are working with, we move into 2026 with a programme that confronts some of the most urgent issues of our time, rooted in the climate emergency and our shared relationship with land and the environment, here in Scotland and across the globe. Threaded through the programme is an acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of politics, history and environmental responsibility, and the importance that art has in creating space for confronting these issues.
Jaune Quick-to See Smith: Wilding is a poignant way to open this season, with work representing the breadth of Jaune’s career, right up until her all-too-sudden passing in early 2025. From her early Montana Memories series (1989), reflecting on the daily lives of her ancestors, to her final works – the Tierra Madre (Mother Earth) paintings and sculptural canoe All My Relations (both 2025) – watching over the upper gallery, the exhibition reminds us that we are the caretakers, and caregivers, for the land we only briefly occupy. Jaune was not just an artist, but a curator and an unrelenting advocate for her fellow Native American artists. Her son Neal described her as “the internet for Indian America”, travelling and racking up a $500 phone bill every month to link together artists from all across the United States.
.jpeg?trim=0,0,0,0&crop=&width=640&quality=65)
One such artist was Diné (Navajo) composer, performer, and installation artist Raven Chacon, who this year we have invited to curate our festival of new music, Deep Time: I See Red, taking place from 27-29 November, and in direct conversation with Jaune’s work. Lifting its title – I See Red – from a series of Jaune’s paintings, the festival is, in Raven’s words, “an acknowledgement of current urgencies of ecological, civil and political unrest through the liberation of loud noises”. Like Jaune did, Raven fosters a network of creative people and has brought together an international rollcall of musicians from the US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Taiwan and Lebanon – Charmaine Lee, Li-Chin Li, John McCowen, Mazen Kerbaj, and Laima Leyton & Iggor Cavalera – each prompted by “seeing red” and by each other, responding with voice, sound and noise.
Over the last few months we have been working with writer, musician and storyteller Karine Polwart, this year’s Dr Gavin Wallace Fellow, who will share her work with our audiences in the new year. In direct response to our prompt Attached to Land, Karine’s writing project builds on her interest in the way that folk cultures carry traces of recent industrial and deeper ecological histories. Looking in particular at the histories of the Forth Valley, where she lives, her research includes walking part of the John Muir Way. In her work, Polwart juxtaposes industrial histories with the heft of the earth’s forces and the comparative minutiae of the personal, writing of the “gravitational forces in our emotional and domestic lives, which shape the worlds beyond and within us”.
Such a mapping of the personal onto the geological is also what drives the practice of Glasgow-based artist Ilana Halperin, whose exhibition What is Earth and What is Us will open in February 2026. Drawing human time into conversation with geological time, Ilana’s work helps us to begin to understand spans of time that are far beyond human imagining – that our place on earth is only temporary. For the earliest work in the exhibition, Boiling Milk Solfataras (1999), Ilana heated milk in an Icelandic sulphur spring. She has described the work as like “waiting for all the layers of geological time and activity to make their way up to the surface to the point where it’s humanly viable to connect with it”. Central to the exhibition is a body of work that comes out of her visits to the Eldfell volcano off the coast of Iceland. Born the same year that the volcano first erupted, Ilana has celebrated successive birthdays alongside it, mapping lived time alongside geological time.
This volcano is also the subject of Fergus Carmichael’s film Island, Island (2017), part of our group exhibition Where we meet land: environment and ecology in artists’ moving image, a new programme of artists’ film and moving image that is concerned with where humans meet the natural environment. Fergus’s film is joined by work by Olivia Priya Foster, Onyeka Igwe, Rachel McBrinn & Alison Scott, Helen McCrorie, Kadeem Oak & Jonn Gale, and Hanna Tuulikki. Their films reflect upon the ways in which we interact with land, through inheritance, management, mapping, collective organising and play. Whilst they tell stories of the troubling ways we have coerced the natural world to fit our shape, they also contain promises of hope for the future, ways in which we might move forward.
On the last night they were here, Jaune's family gifted several of us a pencil. A humble pencil, ready for drawing, for writing, for making our mark. And made of wood and graphite – the plant and the mineral – a reminder that all things are connected.
Jaune Quick-to See Smith: Wilding is at the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, until 1 February. Deep Time: I See Red is at the Fruitmarket from 27–29 November. Ilana Halperin: What is Earth and What is Us runs from 28 February to 17 May 2026; Where we meet land: environment and ecology in artists’ moving image runs from 7– 22 March 2026
Fiona Bradley is director of the Fruitmarket Gallery.
The Scotsman’s arts newsletter is now sent twice a week - subscribe today
Want the latest Scottish headlines sent directly to your phone? Sign up to our new WhatsApp channel here.
Comments
Want to join the conversation? Please or to comment on this article.