Graham Fagen RSA, The Kilmarnock Edition
To mark the 240th anniversary of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, East Ayrshire Leisure and the Dick Institute present a solo exhibition by RSA Academician Graham Fagen, one of the UK’s foremost contemporary artists.
The exhibition brings together works which explore personal and shared experience and identity, with reference to links between Scotland and Jamaica now and at the time of the poet Robert Burns, a theme recurrent in Fagen’s practise.
Amongst the works are Nancy, Bell and Roselle (2006), prints of the artist’s own drawings of the three ships on which Burns booked passage to Jamaica to work as a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation, before the unexpected success of the first edition of his poetry caused him to alter his plans. Fagen revisits these earlier works in a new commission: a set of unique works and print edition in collaboration with writer Andrew O’Hagan, utilising the replica of the John Wilson printing press in the Dick Institute museum.
Also on display, five channel audio video installation The Slave’s Lament (2015) is a contemporary interpretation of Burns’s poem of the same name and connects Scottish and Caribbean history through seemingly disparate musical cultures – Burns’s verse and Jamaican reggae. A Portrait of Sir Geoff Palmer (2023), is a film portrait of the world-renowned Jamaican-British academic (1940-2025), scientist and human rights activist and the first Black university professor in Scotland.
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