Alison Watt

Still

1 January – 31 December 2013

Still is a monumental painting by Alison Watt, at once arresting and absorbing, which hangs in the Memorial Chapel of Old Saint Paul’s Scottish Episcopal Church where it was installed for the 2004 Edinburgh Art Festival.

Edinburgh is a city full of secrets. For years the artist had harboured the idea of making a piece of work for a non-secular space. It was only upon entering Old Saint Paul’s, whose unassuming door she admits to have passed innumerable times before that particular day, that she found a space that evoked a profound and personal artistic response.  

Through her research, Watt discovered particular resonances contained within the building and its history which informed the development of the painting we see today. Jacobite women attending the chapel wore the white rose in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie, whilst in the church’s beautiful Memorial Chapel, built to honour the dead from the Great War, is a small iron cross that originally hung in the Grassmarket. It was the last object seen by the condemned before execution, past members of the congregation among them. As Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, once said “No building as far as I am concerned so powerfully contains its past in the living present”. 

The artist’s immediate experience of the space had a powerful and unexpected effect on her: “From the moment I stepped into the chapel, I knew that I was going to make work to describe how I felt, which was a feeling of overwhelming sadness”.

Commissioned by Ingleby Gallery for Edinburgh Art Festival 2004.

Mon–Sun, 8am–6pm

Free admission