Uisge : Water
John Mackechnie

Main Gallery
Exhibition opening:  5pm, Fri 22 May 2026
Exhibition run: 22 May – 4 July 2026

Founded in 1972, John Mackechnie was Director of the Glasgow Print Studio from 1983 to 2023 during which time he invited many of the leading artists of the day to work there. John Byrne, Ken Currie, Peter Howson among them.

Surface and reflection have been a recurring theme in his work for over thirty years, expressed through a passion for printmaking and photography. Light, pattern, the translucence of water and the power of the sea, without shoreline or horizon, sometimes abstract, sometimes as if you could walk right in. The movement frozen in an instant.

While his early work used photographic transfers onto etching plates, since 1999, he has combined photography and photoshopping technology with traditional screen-printing techniques.

In these images he adopts a painterly, as opposed to a graphic approach. Prints might have over thirty layers of transparent, translucent and opaque colour. The finished work, often a long way from the original photograph. When the edition is completed, it cannot be repeated as he keeps no record of how he got there.

Although his interest in the sea goes back a long way, it was 9/11 that was the ‘watershed’. Prior to that his major series had been of reflective contemporary buildings, which included images of the twin towers. He was on the Island of Menorca when their collapse was televised. And, although far away, the reverberations felt as if they were being transmitted by the ripples & reflections of the sea.

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Dreaming Pipes: Ten Years of the Lindsay System
Donald Lindsay

Cafè Bar Gallery
Exhibition run: 19 May – 13 June 2026

Dreaming Pipes: Ten Years of the Lindsay System follows the first decade of public life of the Lindsay System: the open-source, extended-range, keyless Scottish smallpipe chanter design created by musician and instrument designer Donald WG Lindsay.

Through prototypes, diagrams, instruments, text, sound and film, the exhibition traces how an apparently impossible idea in Scottish piping — a substantially extended melodic range without keys — was made musically and physically workable, then opened out into a wider culture of use, adaptation and exchange. It charts not only the development of the instrument itself, but the community that has grown around it: from early uptake by players and makers, to LSC_PRINT&PLAY and new access through digital fabrication, to experiments in new and recycled materials, pedagogical use, and the translation of the design back into wood through traditional craft methods. Rooted in both bellows-piping tradition and contemporary maker culture, the exhibition presents the Lindsay System as not just an instrument, but a living open process.

Don’t Miss Donald Lindsay in concert with Roo Geddes on Fri 22 May, 7.30pm