Mike Nelson in conversation with Fruitmarket Director Fiona Bradley about his exhibition Humpty Dumpty, a transient history of Mardin earthworks, low rise.

The show uses Fruitmarket’s Warehouse as the machine room, or driving force, for a major new installation that extends across all three spaces of the gallery. Built around two sets of photographs taken in London and a city in Eastern Turkey between 2010 and 2014, the work captures cities in flux, guided by their politics and leaders of the time.

Mike’s show is running at Fruitmarket until Sunday October 5th. Find out more at fruitmarket.co.uk (once the show closes, images and video will still be available, via our online archive).

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

A conversation between artist Emma artist and novelist Ali Smith from 2018, including a reading by Ali Smith of a short story inspired by visits to Emma Hart's studio.

Emma Hart is a British artist who makes sculpture, photography, film and installation. Her work is often badly-behaved and messy, challenging assumptions and stereotypes in her quest to make art to which everyone can relate.

Her first exhibition in Scotland was BANGER at Fruitmarket in 2018. The show highlighted Hart’s work with ceramics, a material she turned to in order to find the ‘real’ in art, alongside Mamma Mia (2017), the beguiling immersive installation she made as a result of winning the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2016.

Details of BANGER, including images and video, can be found at Fruitmarket’s online archive. There are also details of Poor Things, the 2023 group show Emma co-curated with Dean Kenning.

The book produced to accompany BANGER, titled Emma Hart: A Long Hard Look, is still available from our bookshop. It features Ali Smith’s short story, along with writing by Fruitmarket director Fiona Bradley, Helen Legg, Director of Tate Liverpool, and artist and filmmaker Sarah Wood.

Ali Smith is an acclaimed Scottish writer. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women’s Prize.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

Mike Nelson in conversation with Fruitmarket Director Fiona Bradley about his exhibition Humpty Dumpty, a transient history of Mardin earthworks, low rise.

The show uses Fruitmarket’s Warehouse as the machine room, or driving force, for a major new installation that extends across all three spaces of the gallery. Built around two sets of photographs taken in London and a city in Eastern Turkey between 2010 and 2014, the work captures cities in flux, guided by their politics and leaders of the time.

Mike’s show is running at Fruitmarket until Sunday October 5th. Find out more at fruitmarket.co.uk (once the show closes, images and video will still be available, via our online archive).

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

Andrew O’Hagan and Fruitmarket Director Fiona Bradley discuss the links between Lee Lozano and Dame Muriel Spark.

Their conversation, titled ‘Self-Sabotage’, explored the parallels  between the self destructive tendencies of one of the protagonists of Spark’s 1970 novella  The Driver’s Seat and Lozano’s rejection of the art world in the early 1970s, which threw her into semi-obscurity.

Lee Lozano was a major figure in the New York art scene of the 1960s and early 1970s. Her radical approach to art and life, in particular her systematic refusal to engage with the institutions and support structures of the art world, led to her work being neglected and becoming much less well known over time. A reassessment of Lozano’s work over recent years has included the 2018 Fruitmarket exhibition which led to this talk.

There are more details about the 2018 exhibition Lee Lozano: Slip Slide Splice, including images and video, at the Fruitmarket’s online archive.

Along with the exhibition catalogue, Fruitmarket produced a book of Lozano’s language pieces, which is still available from our online bookshop. These hand written and sometimes typed notes , many of which had never been published before, read like a working instruction book of her work.

Andrew O’Hagan is a Scottish writer. His recent novels include Mayflies and Caledonian Road. Our Fathers, his first novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. He has also published several non-fiction books and had essays and stories in London Review of Books, The Guardian and The New Yorker. In 2018 O’Hagan wrote the introduction to a new edition of The Driver’s Seat, published by Polygon on the 100th anniversary of Spark’s birth.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

A panel conversation between Voices of Experience (Suzanne Ewing, Jude Barber and Nicola McLachlan) and architect Kirsty Maguire.

Voices of Experience is a collaborative project that recognises and supports the achievements of women working in architecture.

This conversation was recorded as part of Assembling, a day of events focused on women and the built environment, hosted in August 2023 by Fruitmarket in partnership with Edinburgh Art Festival.

Taking its lead from Leonor Antunes’ exhibition the apparent length of a floor area (which at that point was showing across Fruitmarket’s galleries), the events of Assembling examined and recognised women’s contribution to, and experience of design and architecture.

The recording of Voices of Experience is preceded in this episode by a brief discussion between Fruitmarket’s Iain Morrison reviewing the day’s events with Jude Barber and architect Akiko Kobayashi – who led a workshop Imagining the first day at a humanist architecture school led by women.

For more on Leonor Antunes: the apparent length of a floor area, including images and video, go to Fruitmarket’s online archive.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

On Mike Nelson: David Grinly and David Moore in conversation 

David Grinly (Stills) and David Moore (Edinburgh College of Art) discuss Mike Nelson’s new work for Fruitmarket: a transient history of Mardin earthworks and low rise, and think about its intersections with both sculpture and photography.

The conversation explores the sophisticated lie of Mike’s practice, and the way in which his spaces tap into a material collective imagination. The speakers talk about the unusual amount of photography in this exhibition and its relationship to ‘stuff’ in the way it is made and displayed.

Hosted by Ruth Bretherick, Fruitmarket’s Research and Public Engagement Curator

Mike Nelson’s exhibition runs until October 2025. For more go to https://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/mike-nelson/

Mike Nelson will be live in conversation with Fruitmarket director Fiona Bradley on Weds 17th September 2025. For details and to book your ticket go to https://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/event/mike-nelson-artists-talk/

This episode was recorded at University of Edinburgh’s uCreate Makerspace. Thanks to Simeon and the team there for all their help.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

A 2010 lecture by curator and art historian Briony Fer on ‘oneness’ and ‘noneness’ in the work of Martin Creed.

Martin Creed is one of Britain’s most highly-regarded and popular artists. His work captures the public imagination, while also attracting critical acclaim for its generous, accessible approach. In 2001 he won the Turner Prize with Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, and in 2008 responded to the prestigious Duveen Commission at Tate Britain with the phenomenally popular Work No. 850, in which runners sprinted through the gallery at 30-second intervals.

Briony Fer gave this talk at Fruitmarket in 2010, accompanying Down Over Up, an exhibition of recent and newly-commissioned work by Creed.

This exhibition focused on stacking and progression in size, height and tone – stacks of planks, chairs, tables, boxes, pieces of Lego; series of paintings; and works making use of the musical scale. Creed installed a recorded choir in the gallery’s lift, singing up and down the scale as the lift rose and fell. You can still hear it today if you visit us.

Another legacy of this show is Work No. 1059 – The Scotsman Steps, opposite Fruitmarket on Market Street. Creed resurfaced the Steps with different and contrasting marbles from all over the world, creating a visually spectacular, beautiful and thoughtful response to this historic artery of the city.

Go to Fruitmarket’s online archive for more detail on Down Over Up, The Scotsman Steps, and our singing lift.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.ukwhere you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

A conversation between Canadian artist Stan Douglas and Fruitmarket director Fiona Bradley.

Stan Douglas is known for films, photographs and installations which use new and outdated technologies, the tropes of cinema, TV and photography, the conventions of various Hollywood genres, and classic literary texts to examine the intersection of history and memory in evocative, mesmerising artworks.

In 2014, when this conversation was recorded, Fruitmarket presented a selection of Douglas’s films and photographs in a new exhibition. That same year, his innovative play/film hybrid, Helen Lawrence, was performed for the first time in the UK at the Edinburgh International Festival.

You can find out more about Stan Douglas’ Fruitmarket exhibition at the gallery’s online archive, where you can also listen to a lecture on his work by Amsterdam based cultural analyst Mieke Bal.

The book produced to accompany the show, featuring essays by Fiona Bradley and Mieke Bal, is available from Fruitmarket’s online bookshop.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

A panel discussion from 2013, between artist Gabriel Orozco, curator Briony Fer and art historian Benjamin Buchloh, chaired by Fruitmarket’s director Fiona Bradley.

Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican artist who lives and works mainly in Tokyo and Mexico City. His work blurs the boundaries of art with everyday realities and often balances complex geometry with organic materials and elements of chance.

In 2013 Fruitmarket showed Gabriel Orozco's exhibition Thinking in Circles, which was curated by Briony Fer. The exhibition took Orozco’s 2005 painting The Eye of Go as its starting point, and looked at how the circular geometric motif of this painting – part of a way of thinking for Orozco, a way to organise ideas – migrates onto other work, recurring in other paintings, sculptures and photographs.

Through the exhibition and in her accompanying essay, Fer asked how far it is possible to think with the work rather than about it.

You can find out more about the Thinking in Circles show at Fruitmarket’s online archive, and the book produced to accompany the exhibition is still available from our online bookshop.

A free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, Fruitmarket provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences. We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

To find out more about our current exhibition programme and upcoming events visit fruitmarket.co.uk where you can sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.

A mix of speech, music and song from Karine Polwart, introducing the plans for her 2025/26 writing residency with Fruitmarket.

Karine Polwart is a writer, musician, and storyteller whose work evokes a richness of place, hidden histories, scientific enquiry and folklore.

She has been selected as the recipient of the 2025/25 Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship, for which Fruitmarket is the host organisation.

The Dr Gavin Wallace Fellowship, supported by Creative Scotland, offers the opportunity for a mid-career writer to spend a year dedicated to producing their own new writing, with the support and inspiration of a host organisation.

Ticket details for Karine’s August 2025 show, Windblown, at Queen’s Hall, are here: https://www.thequeenshall.net/whats-on/karine-polwart-windblown 

Archive televised film of Dick Gaughan performing Now Westlin Winds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ7oYCx6tBw

Karine refers to Robbie Nichol in this podcast. Robbie is now Professor of Place-Based Education at Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh. 

Fruitmarket is a free, public space for culture in the heart of Edinburgh, which provides inspiration and opportunity for artists and audiences.  We programme, develop and present world-class exhibitions, commissions, publications, performances, events and engagement activities, opening up the artistic process.

Creativity makes space for meaning, and we create a welcoming space for people to think with contemporary art and culture in ways that are helpful to them – for free. Further information at fruitmarket.co.uk. Follow us on Bluesky,  Facebook,  Instagram, TikTok.