Hawick Museum’s art exhibition Past, Present, Future: The Royal Scottish Academy in the Borders is part of a programme of events to mark the Royal Scottish Academy’s (RSA) 200th year. The wide-ranging exhibition takes in artists from the 19th century, well-known contemporary artists, for instance Victoria Crowe, and younger artists such as David Cass. All have connections with the Borders; it may be their birthplace or some live and work in the Borders. But the exhibition also reveals a commonality of interest in other countries, memory and ancient cultures.
Depictions of the Borders landscape
Horatio McCulloch’s 19th century painting Smailholm Tower (undated) depicts a Borders landmark. The tower was built as a protection from English raids in the early 16th century.
Before the arrival of photography, paintings often acted as a visual record or a way of fixing a memory. The widespread adoption of the camera later reduced the need for ‘realistic’ art works. Smailholm Tower seems like a straightforward depiction. But the tower, at one with the surrounding rocks, fits a Victorian notion of Scotland as wild, unpopulated and romantic. This vision of Scotland, which has a hold to this day, was not politically neutral, especially in the Highlands. The Highland Clearances had decimated communities, with crofters being brutally ejected to make way for profitable sheep farming.
By contrast, modern Scottish artists such as William Johnstone, move away from figurative representation to an evocation of mood and less tangible concerns. Johnstone was brought up on a farm in Denholm.
At first, his large oil painting Ploughed Field (1963) looks like clumsy clods of black earth. But from a distance, you can just see the horizon line, light and stubby growths. It’s painted from a low viewpoint as if beneath the earth: in an unprettified, desolate depiction of winter farming.
His contemporary William Gillies’s watercolour Autumn Landscape near Stow (c1940-1973) is a more harmonious work, with an overview of converging hill contours and river lines. This piece of landscape is recognisable from the Borders Rail Service.
Approaches to memory and ancient lands
Memory and past cultures are an explicit focus of many of the artists. A respect for the past may imply personal memories, a refuge or a repudiation of the dehumanised prospect of artificial intelligence, digitalisation and climate change.
The sculptor Jake Harvey explores deep time, geological formations and evidence of human activity in the land from ancient times (for instance cup rings). He arrives at simple forms, often in stone, such as Fallen Moon (undated). They bring the past and present together, through an interest in the continuity of landscape and of human activity. It’s a vision of permanence rather than change.
Victoria Crowe’s Into an Older Land (2000) shows a winter hill, probably the Pentland Hills, with a mass of flowers to the foreground and separate paintings above the hill. One is a classical sculpture of a head, another a young long-haired woman. She too signals to a connection between the present and the ancient past; but this painting seems less about continuity than mystery and mortality. Stylistically, I find the heads slightly at variance to the whole painting, but the hill and flowers are both crisp and ethereal.
George Donald lives in the Borders but has travelled extensively. In common with Victoria Crowe, he often uses collage style images. An acrylic painting Still Life with Memories (1990) shows a still life set up next to small rectangular pictures of people. Some are in traditional Japanese dress and some European. These suggest scattered photos, but they are actually small paintings. The resulting ambiguity heightens a hazy sense of intimate memories.
Other Countries
Nearly all the 21 artists exhibited have travelled beyond Scotland, not only for pleasure, but for their artistic development. Elizabeth Blackadder visited Japan many times. The influence of Japanese iconography is apparent in Japanese Still Life with Flowers (1976), a watercolour on Japanese paper. The speckled paper is part of the composition, and the flowers, with a minimalist box structure, function as graphic signs.
David Cass gained a scholarship to Florence and produced a body of work relating to the 1966 Florence flood. Much of his work is concerned with water and its effect on communities. In September – April (undated) wavy shapes are shown on an 18th century oak door, suggesting flood waters rising up a door – a marker of the damage caused by water through climate change.
David Cass’s work particularly looks to the future and the most pressing issue of our times.
A few words on Hawick Museum
Like many of the galleries beyond Edinburgh and Glasgow, Hawick Museum has a good-sized gallery and houses some significant pieces of art. As the RSA exhibition shows, the artworks may have both local relevance and much broader concerns. This applies both to temporary exhibitions and the permanent collections. So, whatever the viewer’s artistic interests, it is well worth exploring the galleries outside the larger cities.
The Exhibition at Hawick Museum, 4 Wilton Park Rd, Hawick, TD9 7LJ runs from 27th June to 5th October 2026.
