Staff Spotlight: Ginny Elston

We’re really excited for your brand-new course starting next term, Pastels in the Park. You’ll be taking students out around local parks and green spaces across Edinburgh, giving them the confidence to draw on location. How does drawing outside affect the work you make?

Drawing outside is a core component to the work I make. It’s a way of being present and alive to what I sense, feel and see out in the world. Drawing outside is where I understand space, form, and tonality through different compositions. It is also a means of understanding how light and colour can speak about one another in painting, and greatly informs my awareness of colour relationships.
 

You often use pastels in your own work, even working with Unison to create your own set of soft pastels. How did you decide which colours to include, and what is it that you love about using pastels?

I began by noticing which colours I used most often in other pastel sets. The final selection of colours came together in the end quite naturally, with a range of slightly muted primaries, and with the majority of warms leaning more towards more earthy, cool browns. Strong accents of a yellow ochre, deep violet, and orange played important parts in a selection otherwise connected through their gentleness in hue.

Pastels make are a wonderful tool for working outside – their immediacy as little blocks of saturated colour enable a drawing to take shape relatively quickly. They have a velvety softness which is really appealing, they layer and mix easily. Also the way that they are organised into sets means that people can make exciting visual discoveries by moving between the local colour of the things they see out in the world, and relative colour, a more subjective, intuitive, and relational sense of colour within their drawings or paintings. 

Your work also addresses the physical qualities of paint, with geometric patterns and shapes often appearing. How has the work you make influenced your upcoming Summer School, Between Dimensions: Painting in 2D and 3D?

During my PhD, I was working between two and three dimensions, and loved the way that working three-dimensionally expanded, enriched and informed my two-dimensional work. The expanded field of painting gives us a wider and more imaginative understanding of applying colour to a surface. I want to investigate this moving between dimensions more with workshop participants, to see how others move between the dimensions. We can find exciting moments when making, by transgressing perceived boundaries between painting and sculpture. Working three-dimensionally gives us a different material sense in making structures, and enlivens our experience of colour. I’m really excited about this Summer School!  

As you mentioned, you recently attained a PhD in Fine Art and Philosophy from Glasgow School of Art (congratulations!). Did you find that your understanding of your own creative practice changed as you developed more written work?

Whilst I found the writing process a difficult one, and still do, I also found it a great companion to physically making. Writing can be a wonderfully creative and reflective tool to help frame an arts practice, and can help us understand what we’re doing more fully. I came to enjoy how writing need not illustrate a practice, but work alongside it creatively, with a life of its own. It’s what I’d like to explore with participants in a two-day workshop Doing Words over Easter. We’ll be generating some writing that is connected to our arts practice, and exploring different ways that writing can reflect and feed back to us new things about our practice. We’ll also be looking at contemporary art writing in more formal settings for professional practice, such as writing artist statements, applications, exhibition statements or further study.

As well as teaching our Contemporary Leith Landscapes and Saturday Afternoon Beginners courses, you’re also a tutor on the One Day Painting Year-long course. What advice would you give to a Short Course student looking to apply to a Year-long course?

Commit to a project, and get obsessed with it. The best way of developing as an artist, and to make the most of being on Year-long courses, is to find a meaningful project that engages you and committing to it. The more time you spend on diving fully into what excites you as a maker, the more confident you will become in pursuing your own path and finding your own voice. Tutors will recognise your inner drive and motivation too, and will enjoy helping you develop this.