Self as Plot

Group Exhibition: Self-Portrayed & Micro-Commissions

Art Gallery, Schoolhill, Aberdeen AB10 1FQ, UK

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June 4, 2025 – Ongoing

Gallery 1 – Collecting Art
Aberdeen Art Gallery
Aberdeen, Scotland

Commissioned by Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums
Supported by the Friends of Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums

Contemporary Portraiture and Collective Reflection

As part of Aberdeen Art Gallery’s dual commissioning strands—Self Portrayed and Micro-Commissions—ten new works by local and international artists are now on view in Gallery 1, a space that tells the evolving story of the gallery’s collection and its commitment to living artists.

Self as Plot (2025), a self-portrait by Barbados-based artist Annalee Davis, is grounded in the topography of Walkers Dairy. Created through appliqué, embroidery, and the inclusion of 18th–19th-century ceramic shards, the work maps the artist’s silhouette of the land.

Ritual, memory, and land converge through the stitchwork, as faint lines echo dawn and dusk walks and botanicals—motherwort and cerasee—symbolise healing, resistance, and ancestral knowledge. A parasite threads through the contour lines, alluding to the plantation’s legacy of extraction. Yet embedded within the cloth are also gestures of care: soil as archive, plant as healer, stitch as remembrance.

Aberdeen-based artist Richard Maguire also presents Made in England: A View from This Side, an intergenerational portrait woven from personal and colonial histories. Together, these works respond to the 19th-century Alexander Macdonald portrait collection, expanding who gets to be seen—and how.

Also on display are the outcomes of the Gallery’s fifth round of Micro-Commissions, supporting artists working in AB postcode areas to create new work in response to the Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums collections. These include Daisy Williamson’s Penelope’s Web(b), C(U)SP’s Studio Spaces, Aberdeen 2024, and Flying Lion’s Unisus – Totem of a Change.

At a time when institutions are re-examining their collections and the histories they uphold, this exhibition opens space for new ways of seeing—through self, through land, and through the eyes of artists reshaping the present.

For more information and enquiries, please contact: galleries@aberdeencity.gov.uk

Contributing Artists:
Self Portrayed
Annalee Davis, Richard Maguire

Micro-Commissions
Daisy Williamson, C(U)SP (Collection of (Unfinished) Shared Projects), Flying Lion