Louise Gibson: Beachheads

Louise Gibson: Beachheads

7 – 31 August 2025

Exhibition Open Wednesday – Sunday 11am – 5 pm.

Opening Event: 9 August 2025, 7 – 9pm

Courtyard and North Lab

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop is delighted to present Beachheads, a new body of work by Louise Gibson for our summer commission 2025. This ambitious exhibition unveils a series of monumental sculptures crafted from the detritus of late capitalism, transforming industrial remnants into striking, thought provoking, sculptural forms.

Formed from discarded industrial and domestic goods, these sculptures speak eloquently to the excesses and wastefulness of contemporary consumer culture, drawing attention to our complicity in capitalism’s relentless cycles of production and disposal—and the environmental and social consequences they entail.

Each work appears as a series of dualities—waste and renewal, domestic and industrial, hard and soft, interior and exterior. Yet, rather than simply contrasting these elements, the sculptures move fluidly between states, embodying both energies at once. Soft materials are hardened, while rigid objects reveal their fragility in crushed and distorted forms. Gibson challenges binary thinking, prompting viewers to reconsider their assumptions about materiality and transformation.

The visual and material contradictions in her work create an interplay between durability and vulnerability, reflecting broader existential and societal themes. Rather than positioning strength and fragility as opposites, Gibson dissolves the boundary between them, revealing their coexistence within the same form. Each quality emerges through and because of the other. Her work also complicates ideas of permanence and impermanence—preservation through resin or lacquer both stabilises and alters. Rather than freezing an object in time, this process acknowledges transformation as an ongoing state. What is fixed still carries the history of its movement, just as what appears fragile may hold hidden resilience.

More broadly, Gibson’s sculptures invite us to move beyond rigid categorisations. Instead of reinforcing binaries—waste or renewal, strength or weakness, decay or preservation—her work suggests that these forces are always interwoven, shaping and reshaping each other in continuous flux. She challenges the notion of fixed boundaries, urging viewers to reconsider assumptions about stability, permanence, and classification.

There will be a publication produced to accompany the exhibition.

Louise Gibson graduated from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2009 and relocated her studio to Berlin in 2012, where she worked until the end of 2017. She is currently based at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and splits her time between Edinburgh and Glasgow, focusing on large-scale public and private commissions, as well as independent exhibitions. Gibson’s practice primarily involves creating sculptural and architectural works that combine resins, recycled fabrics, found objects and scavenged materials. Utilising industrial processes such as casting, metal recycling machinery, car body lacquering and resin she transforms collected or found objects, and discarded materials to create works that monumentalise these often humble elements. Gibson’s practice has been and continues to be supported by production pioneers such as DURA, BASF, and NOURYON. For 11 years, Gibson was sponsored by global resin manufacturers Polynt Composites and has been represented by The Albemarle Gallery in London and Beans Gallery in Berlin. Her work over the past seven years has focused on an innovative research project exploring the colour spectrums created through acceleration in industrial resins, applying these findings in her art. She is now collaborating with ASCUS Art and Science at Summerhall in Edinburgh to develop new bio-based, sustainable resins that are yet to be released commercially.

The exhibition will be on view at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop from 7 August to 31 August with an opening reception 9 August 7-9pm (open to all). Exhibition Open Wednesday – Sunday 11am – 5 pm.

Free, no booking required.

This project is presented by ESW as part of Edinburgh Art Festival which runs from 7 – 24 August 2025.