Rachel Maclean

"My work slips inside and outside of history and into imagined futures, creating hyper-glowing, artificially saturated visions that are both nauseatingly positive and cheerfully grotesque." Rachel Maclean

I saw Rachel Maclean's film at the Cupar Art Festival and was struck by it's 70's children's TV and psychedelic style.
Rachel's work is a toxic shock, neon-nightmare of culture, unstable and disturbing. A mixture of the clown and cartoon, colliding the extremes of adult and child  fantasy. In the era of the selfie, the selfie in Rachel Maclean has mutated into an incredible multi-faceted garish technicolour vision of childhood that blends pop culture from 'The wizard of Oz' to the manga /anime street culture of Japan

Mike Inglis

Mike Inglis's sun dome has landed in Cupar it looks surreal, something like an alien dwelling in an old episode of Dr Who. This installation brings lots of calm and joy with it. I particularly loved watching children take their time to contemplate the space and get lost in the details of the panels.

 "Utilising structural theory born out of the eco movement of the 1960’s and Lloyd Kahn’s geodesic dome designs Mike Inglis project creates an architectural mix media assemblage. The installation combines traditional materials with new print making technologies, laser engraving acrylic panels and spray painting complete this three dimensional “print”. 
This site specific environmental intervention is situated in the green space of Cupar’s riverside park within a ring of sentinel trees. The construction explores ideas based around visual perception, codes of abstraction and versions of reality seeking links with diverse theories surrounding epileptic visual auras, bioenergetics and sacred geometries. 
Cupar Arts festival has been growing and growing as has its reputation as a serious organization which has such a positive approach to taking art out of traditional gallery spaces and into the heart of the community. It’s a real pleasure to be invited to show at the festival but even more importantly at a time of crisis in arts funding to actually be supported in making new work and developing my practice. It should also be mentioned that the dome would never have been fabricated on budget or with the level of precision it displays without the gracious assistance of my friend and fellow creative Douglas Kelso who gave amazing help and support." Mike Inglis

Kate Downie

Kate Downie is an artist who I have long admired and she is a wonderful person. I was surprised by her work at Cupar but I enjoyed it immensely and even more so now that I realise how much the reality had been tampered with.
I had noticed the tilt of the floor propelling me towards the window, but I didn't know the whole floor had been reconstructed, as well as 'drawn', with every floor board and feature of the room delineated.

'Gaps, Distortions and Downright Lies: a complete re-configuration of space, in drawing.Kate Downie’s transformation of the former ‘judge’s chambers’, which was attached to Cupar’s recently closed court, seeks to activate the survival instincts of the audience, taking them to the threshold between what is often seen but seldom observed, and what is imagined but rarely confronted.'

David Faithfull

I was working in St Andrews yesterday and on my way back down through Fife stopped at Cupar to get a glimpse of the annual arts festival. Above are two of David Faithfull's paste ups found in the town and below some of his work from Cuper county buildings where there were further large scale paste up images and a beautiful book. David Faithfull is an Edinburgh based printmaker, bookbinder and currator.

'In response to the festival’s theme of ‘liminal’, a tipping point or transitional stage, David Faithfull’s paste-up drawings at various outdoor sites across the town reflect the perilous future of a number of endangered birds. Those include the dotterel, native to the Cairngorms and one of several birds on the UK’s endangered species list. The effects of global warming have altered its mountain habitat and forced it to move higher up the slopes, prompting David to reflect that eventually it may leave for the final time, never to visit Scottish slopes again. Employing various alchemical symbols and references to historical and mythical birds, David’s work considers this contemporary ecological transformation.' CAF

Many of David's images for this festival have drips pouring from them, like they are being washed away, dissolving, melting before our eyes .