Pittenweem Arts Festival review: 'a Story Boat and sci-fi sculptures'
There’s a huge range of work on display across 92 venues at this year’s Pittenweem Arts Festival, writes Susan Mansfield
Pittenweem Arts Festival 2025, various venues, Pittenweem ★★★★
Every year, while a bigger, louder festival gets underway across the Firth of Forth, Pittenweem in the East Neuk of Fife stages an arts festival of its own. This year, there’s something of a community focus, with a circus tent on the West Shore offering a wide range of activities for children and an expanded programme of concerts, events and workshops.
At its heart, though, Pittenweem is a visual art festival, and all the available spaces in the village - 92 in total, including the primary school, the bowling club, people’s front rooms, garages and gazebos - are turned into galleries.
This year’s invited artist is boatbuilder and storyteller Gail McGarva, whose Story Boat (venue 35) parked by the harbour houses an immersive installation, Disappearing Lines, about the loss of traditional boats and the communities who made and used them.
Aimie Harding (venue 49) is the winner of the festival’s Henderson’s Inglis Bursary Award for an emerging artist. A graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee in 2024, she makes sculptural pieces from ceramics and wood inspired by a fusion of nature and science fiction.
Her large, impressively crafted works are part seed pod, part alien spaceship, and she has developed a range of smaller ceramic works which are for sale. The work has an important relationship to the natural world and she has created a soundtrack from field recordings playing through a pair of spiky ceramic speakers which look like alien eyes.
The other candidates for the award so impressed the selection panel that they have been given their own show at the festival’s permanent space, The Art Rooms on High Street (Venue 22). This show includes large expressive abstract paintings by Anney White, tiny mountains captured in glass by Wang Ziyan, jewellery by Honour Dodd inspired by church architecture and contemplative still life photography by Fiona Young.
A wander round town can take in only a few of the other exhibiting artists. Lynn McGregor, at St John’s Episcopal Church (Venue 76), is celebrating her 25th festival. She grew up in Pittenweem, but her landscape paintings are informed by the lochs and mountains of Argyll where she now lives. There is a fruitful tension in her paintings between abstraction and geometrical form and a softer handling of paint which captures light and mood.
Linda Jackson, from nearby Cellardyke, is one of several artists sharing the space at the Old Town Hall (venue 32). She works intuitively, combining drawing, painting, printmaking and collage. The results are abstract, but suggest form, atmosphere and even landscape. She has recently started working with ceramics too.
Other artists showing within the same complex of buildings include Linda Pettie, who paints bewitching landscapes from memory, award-winning wildlife artist Derek Robertson and abstract painter Chris Brook, who creates mosaics from reclaimed wood, painting and scraping back to create aged surfaces, combining his marks with the natural qualities of the wood itself.
Nearby, Morag Muir’s still lifes (venue 28) are like stage sets, often set within the frame of a window. Her objects - birds, ornamental figures, Russian dolls - are more like performers than simply things. Sometimes a stylised cityscape of Dundee is the backdrop.
Pittenweem-based artist Georgie Young (venue 84) paints expressive landscapes which draw increasingly on the fields and hills of Fife. 2023’s Henderson Bursary winner Siobhan McLaughlin, who paints with natural pigments, is back with a show of her own (venue 65) and there is a show of wood and linocuts by the late Willie Rodger (venue 69).
Meanwhile in the West end of the village, Aimée Henderson and Mat Fowler (venue 1) present contrasting but complementary practices. Henderson’s large abstract paintings are made by pouring water and heavily diluted acrylic paint and letting them settle on the canvas, using chance and serendipity with an occasional “nudge” from the artist. They are delicate and tranquil and have considerable presence, inviting the viewer to pause and contemplate.
In the next room, Fowler’s immersive sound installation is mesmerising both to listen to and to watch, as various instruments and objects - a guitar string struck by a picker on a turntable, a key of an electric keyboard pinned down with a feather, a microphone attached to a fan - create layers of continuous soundscape.
Until 9 August
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