Following last year’s exhibition Nesting, Gail Turpin returns to Edinburgh’s Upright Gallery with her new show Between. The work in the exhibition began after Gail revisited a place she had used to visit with her much-loved dog – now sadly no longer by her side – prompting her to address our responses to dislocation and pain, and drawing for two days almost without stopping.

Gail said, ‘When I took these drawings, which had almost drawn themselves, back to my studio, I found that many seemed to sit together as part of a bigger whole whilst retaining their individual resonance. There was a relaxed tension between them and I liked the contradiction.’

The ‘Between’ she assesses is the liminal spaces prompted by deep human experience: ‘…above and below ground, life and death, asleep and awake, dark and light, being at a threshold, positive and negative (shapes and mood)… were all there for me to see.’

The resultant works are in paper and wood, worked-into with pieced-together sections of drawing, recycled wood pieces left at the size they were found, with light interventions such as a sanding of the surfaces, painting and sitting them together, drawing over some boundaries and stopping at others.

Gail adds that ‘…what emerged was an intuitive, unpredictable, only partly conscious process that, on reflection, seemed to mirror something of the complexity of our dark and light times.’