Bet Low Exhibtion at Glasgow School of Art
Venue: Reid Building, 164 Renfrew St, Glasgow G3 6RQ
The centenary of the birth of the Scottish artist Bet Low (1924-2007) is to be marked in both Glasgow and Orkney through a collaboration between the Reid Gallery, The Glasgow School of Art and the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney. The exhibition, Bet Low - An Island on Your Doorstep, will be one of the most comprehensive displays of Low’s works since The Third Eye Centre’s 1985 exhibition curated by Cordelia Oliver, and includes unseen drawings and rare glimpses of Low’s material practice and process.
The exhibition, which opens on the 11th January will reflect on her working life, from early studies of Glasgow to the late Orkney landscapes - both places that played a crucial role in the artist’s life and work, forming the backdrop to important stages in her long career.
The exhibition opens at Reid Gallery at The Glasgow School of Art, and runs from 11th January until 8th February 2025, and then travels to the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney, from 1st March till 7th June 2025.
Venue: Reid Building, 164 Renfrew St, Glasgow G3 6RQ
The centenary of the birth of the Scottish artist Bet Low (1924-2007) is to be marked in both Glasgow and Orkney through a collaboration between the Reid Gallery, The Glasgow School of Art and the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney. The exhibition, Bet Low - An Island on Your Doorstep, will be one of the most comprehensive displays of Low’s works since The Third Eye Centre’s 1985 exhibition curated by Cordelia Oliver, and includes unseen drawings and rare glimpses of Low’s material practice and process.
The exhibition, which opens on the 11th January will reflect on her working life, from early studies of Glasgow to the late Orkney landscapes - both places that played a crucial role in the artist’s life and work, forming the backdrop to important stages in her long career.
The exhibition opens at Reid Gallery at The Glasgow School of Art, and runs from 11th January until 8th February 2025, and then travels to the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney, from 1st March till 7th June 2025.
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NewsTranscript
00:00My name is Andrew Parkinson, I'm the curator at the Peer Arts Centre in Orkney.
00:04So we're currently in the Reid Gallery at the Glasgow School of Art
00:08to mark the centenary of the birth of the artist Bette Lowe.
00:13The exhibition focuses on two of the places in Scotland that were most important to Bette Lowe,
00:18Glasgow and Orkney.
00:20She travelled around the whole of Scotland and made work in lots of different places
00:25and Orkney became particularly important for her in the late 1960s
00:30when she and her husband Tom MacDonald bought a small cottage in Hoy,
00:36one of the largest islands in the Orkney archipelago.
00:40And from that point on Orkney became an incredibly important subject for her work
00:46and she made many, many paintings of the landscape,
00:49particularly around Hoy but across the Orkney Islands.
00:52The exhibition is really the first major show of Bette Lowe's work since the mid-1980s
00:59and we're really pleased to have been able to arrange loans from many public collections
01:04including the National Galleries of Scotland, the RSA,
01:08other Perth Museum and art galleries and others,
01:11but also many, many private collections.
01:14It's really the first comprehensive retrospective of Bette Lowe's works for nearly 50 years.
01:20We're very excited about the events programme that goes along with the exhibition.
01:24Here in Glasgow there are many really interesting events looking at Bette Lowe's work
01:29in the historical context but also how it is influencing artists working today.
01:36And then in Orkney we're planning to focus on Hoy, the subject of the painting that's behind me,
01:42and to bring people over to Hoy and to have a really close look at the landscapes
01:47that Bette Lowe was inspired by.
01:49My name's Jenny Brownrigg. I'm Exhibitions Director at Glasgow School of Art.
01:53This exhibition's part of Glasgow's 850th anniversary year
01:58and we're excited because in the early parts of Bette Lowe's career
02:03she was very much making ink drawings and sketches of Glasgow and the city in the 1940s.
02:10I think her observations through her ink drawings and her sketches
02:15are very much of the life of the city.
02:17She was very interested as well in town head and cow caddans.
02:22So the small drawings and sketches that we've got in this first part of the show
02:28they're really capturing different events sometimes.
02:32For example, there's a float with women from the Co-op float.
02:36That's one of the sketches.
02:39There's other sketches where she's drawn a former tuberculosis and polio hospital for children.
02:47There's also a wedding. She's drawn a wedding scene.
02:52So she's really making these observations of people and the life of the city.
02:58Some of it becomes really like social history.
03:02For example, there's a sketch of Phoenix Park and that's there no longer.
03:07That was demolished when the motorways came into Glasgow.
03:11So I think people will see certain scenes where that place no longer exists
03:15but might exist in their memory.
03:17Bette Lowe was really consumed with finding her own individual voice as an artist.
03:24I think you can really see her being really driven.
03:29She's making these early figurative sketches of Glasgow.
03:33Then you see in the next section she was far more drawn to abstraction
03:38and this kind of start of her interest in landscape and water.
03:42Then she was really refining it when she was making her amazing formal landscapes.
03:48She was really refining and editing down her style.
03:52Then the last room in the gallery is of these really beautiful pencil drawings.
03:58She was really drawn to light changing in Orkney.
04:02She was really drawn to the changing of the time of day
04:05and the different kinds of light in the landscape.
04:08So you can really see this going through her landscape work.
04:13The last room's got these really beautiful, I suppose almost like spiritual drawings
04:20where she's observing the moon coming through clouds or the sun
04:25and cutting through mist over these trees.
04:29She really wanted to almost capture these atmospheric conditions towards the end of her career.
04:35So there's a real opportunity to see all the different kinds of work she made.
04:40Bette was at Glasgow School of Art from 1942 to 1945 doing drawing and painting.
04:46Her peers were Joan Ardley and Ian Hamilton Finlay.
04:50After her time at art school she went and did the summer school at Arbroath in 1945.
04:58She went on to do teacher training at Jordan Hill but she didn't enjoy it.
05:03So a chance encounter with Stanley Baxter on Sauchiehall Street took her into the Unity Theatre
05:10which was this amalgamation of left-leaning theatres in Glasgow.
05:15The exhibition here at Reid Gallery runs from the 11th of January through to the 8th of February.
05:21We're open from Monday to Saturday, 10 to 4.30.
05:26And then the exhibition moves up to Stromness at the Peer Arts Centre in Orkney
05:31and that runs from the 1st of March to the 7th of June.