Over the past few months, children’s and craft groups across Edinburgh Libraries have been busy colouring, crafting, sparkling and decorating to create a large herd of unicorns ready for a mass gathering at Central Library.
And now, the blessing of unicorns has arrived!
Our unicorns were inspired by the Living Knowledge Network and British Library’s current theme and are displayed alongside the Fantasy: Realms of Imagination exhibition. A huge thank you to everyone who took part and contributed their unicorn to the display.
The blessing of unicorns will be on display on the mezzanine at Central Library until 29 February.
Catch them while you can!
WENCH, an exhibition of paintings by Mira Knoche opens on 2nd July in the
The March exhibition in the 
The Edinburgh LoFi group was started nine years ago at the 
Our exhibition Dispossession, developed from our interest in the Highland Clearances, the mass eviction of tenants, by their Lairds, to make way for large scale sheep farming. We stay for much of the year at our house near Edderton in Easter Ross at the foot of Struie Hill, overlooking the Sutherland Hills and the Dornoch Firth. It is a beautiful setting and yet to remark on all that is striking and lovely around us seems sometimes almost a violation of the lives of those dispossessed of their homes and livelihoods by the Duke of Sutherland. His controversial statue, rising spike-like from the summit of Ben Bragghie, reinforces the tension between the beauty of the land and its history. The evictions in Sutherland were particularly brutal, the tenants often violently evicted, their homes burnt down or pulled apart while they looked on. Their remains are all around us: the outline of foundations in the cropped fields, tumbled stones, broken walls. Melancholy reminders of a people who, to use the haunting words of a resident of the Strath of Kildonan, were “set adrift upon the world”.
The more we researched the Clearances, both in the Highlands and elsewhere, it was inevitable our thoughts should turn to the victims of violent displacement and indifferent abandonment in our own time. Consequently, some of the work in our exhibition explores ideas of dispossession arising from contemporary issues and events including Brexit and Trump’s presidency; homelessness, the displacement of indigenous peoples, especially in Amazonia, the refugee crisis and the consequences of our abject failure to deal with global warming: a failure that may yet lead to humanity dispossessing themselves of the Earth itself.
The exhibition features art works by members of several artist groups including Hillside Visually Impaired Art Group, and VIEW (Visually Impaired Experimental Works). Hillside Visually Impaired Art Group is a group of blind and partially sighted people from all over Edinburgh and as far as North Berwick. They meet at the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) headquarters in Edinburgh once a week to pursue their love of creating artworks of all forms, shapes and sizes. VIEW is a small art group of three visually impaired artists who wanted to have more opportunities to go out and about and experience a wider range of art techniques and to take part in more specialised workshops. Both groups rely on the support of their dedicated volunteers and tutors in creating their work.
Tales of One City 