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.