Open Eye Gallery Abercromby Place

Sheila McInnes: Simple Pleasures
Ffiona Lewis: Harris Machair
2-24 June

Sheila McInnes’s new paintings have a common thread running through all the individual works of finding beauty in everyday things: walking the dog, the Scottish coastline, the sea, the company of loved ones, trees, the Scottish landscape and our connection with the natural world. McInnes’ paintings are intensely personal, capturing her everyday life, her response to things that she has experienced, either yesterday, in her childhood, or even events that she imagines might have been. These paintings are glimpses, things noticed in passing. Encounters with owls. Ordinary everyday pleasures.

Also on display are a body of oil paintings and works on paper from Ffiona Lewis; this exhibition is the culmination of 4 years of repeated wanderings to the Outer Hebrides while renovating a small farm in coastal Suffolk. Lewis is keenly engrossed in the slow uncertain rebuilding of detailed ecosystems at her farm – major new tree and hedge planting, revitalising old ponds and digging new, and knitting glorious wildernesses all around. While travelling to Barra, the Uists, Harris and Lewis in her summer months, she sees resonances in observing their native collectives: the intricacies of machair, rockpools, bird life, and their weaving workshops and mills. Each has its harmony of detail.