Own Art @ Peacock Visual Arts

A creative hub located in a region of austere landscape and weather, Peacock Visual Arts is many things to many people – and prioritises community participation. With state-of-the-art printmaking and darkroom facilities, it offers a range of courses led by expert printmakers and visiting artists, but also shows an interesting programme of contemporary art. Recent exhibitions have included Toby Paterson’s exploration of the urban built environment in a series of prints, and The Obsidian Isle, Gayle Chong Kwan’s photographic documentation of a fictional island off the west coast of Scotland. The pre-degree show of BA Hons Printmaking students from Gray’s School of Art is an annual fixture on PVA’s programme.

Far from limiting itself to printmaking, though - or to Scottish art - the gallery programs shows as diverse as This is Performance Art, a four-day event which featured world renowned collective Black Market International; Katri Walker’s video exploring Scotland’s historical fascination with Wild West culture; and an offsite project where Jacques Coetzer pitched a small tent on the edge of a cliff in the Highlands to use as a one-man cathedral.

Shoring up its claim of providing the widest range of media anywhere in Scotland, the gallery is now making forays into animation. This month it will stage Aberdeen’s first animation festival, In Motion, presenting shorts and feature films from around the world at the Belmont cinema.

The festival includes films by the graphic artist and animation maestro Thomas Hicks, who creates music videos for bands such as Gravenhurst. Hicks will also present a collection of drawings, paintings and sketchbooks at PVA’s gallery, giving a rare peek into his working methods and techniques.

Hicks begins by making quirky illustrations in response to a record, then turns them into linocut prints and sculptures, and finally into animations. Typically, he combines high-tech and traditional techniques, as in Unicycle Film (2009), which used plaster-of-paris sculptures, handmade zoetropes, puppets on strings and a time lapse camera. The film tells the tale of two unicyclists who meet in a forest and fall in love, whereupon their unicycles join and work together as a bicycle.

Hicks will give a talk at Gray’s School of Art as part of the Guests @ Gray’s series, and a masterclass and workshop at PVA, sharing his skills with participants to produce an exciting collaborative outcome. For those who are novices in the field, the gallery will run drop-in intro workshops as well as weekend workshops designed for young people.

If you prefer to work with images that stay still, you’ll be among friends at many of PVA’s classes. With facilities for screenprinting, monoprinting, etching, lithography and relief printing, the diverse programme of classes changes throughout the year. So you could try your hand at stop-motion animation during the festival, join the Thursday Print Club if you’re craving a regular hit, or create something really unique at a one-off masterclass on Relief Printing. The oldest form of printmaking, Relief Printing is in its most primitive form the humble potato print, and one of the few techniques that doesn’t require the use of a press. Though this class makes use of a beautiful ornate Columbian Press, entirely without vegetables.

Those who already know their brayer from their matrix can roll on by booking to use the facilities independently, but if you’re less experienced, you’re in the perfect place – with two in-house expert printmakers, one-to-one tuition, supervised sessions and training, this is surely the best place in the North East to learn. [Jac Mantle]