Drouth Weekly
6th August 2025
Scotland's greatest living Irish Historian on an Irish publication of Scottish writers on the state of Scotland. Owen Dudley Edwards casts a critical eye over the recently published Irish Pages Scotland issue.
18th July 2025
An exploration of the entanglement of art, ecology, and geopolitical violence through the translocation of a Palestinian olive tree sapling to a Scottish gallery space. Drawing on many sources including Aristophanes’ Peace, Michael Mersinis positions the olive tree sapling not as an object of aesthetic contemplation, but as a living, contested agent that disrupts dominant narratives of peace and belonging.
18th July 2025
The American founding fathers took classical Rome as the model for their new Republic. Huddled McMasses examines the development of that story in a tale of two films with classical, particularly Roman, avatars - Gladiator I and II. He sees American popular culture as a mirror held up to the current drift to greater authoritarianism and more rigid patriarchical political structures.
11th May 2025
The recent opening of the exhibition of drawings 'Tracing Rossi' at the Stallan Brand studio gallery in Glasgow offered an opportunity to examine author Cameron McEwan's in-depth published study of the influential architect Aldo Rossi. Via discussion of a relatively obscure and neglected project by Rossi, the book 'Analogical City' makes weighty claims for architecture as a poetic, political and above all, critical practice. Johnny Rodger reviews.
19th April 2025
I am a walker – I love walking. I love the freedom of roaming around, being curious, looking for often-missed details. I walk on mycommute to work; I walk to get my steps
in; I walk to take photographs for content for my Twitter and Instagram pages; I walk out of necessity because inner-city parking is too costly and too stressful and public transport is increasingly getting more expensive. I am a proud pedestrian.
12th January 2025
It sometimes seems that never enough has been made of Scotland's presence - the Scottish Pavilion - at the Venice Biennale. The 2023 architecture exhibition (- hopefully not the last Scottish one ever, as 2024 was cancelled) was an exploration of the connection between architecture and language on a traumatised land. A Fragile Correspondence was curated by Architecture Fringe, -ism Magazine and /other, and is now showing at the V&A in Dundee. Johnny Rodger reviews.
21st December 2024
As an historian of American politics, who followed John F Kennedy round the USA on his election campaign in the 60s, is there a writer with a longer view of the Presidency than Irishman Owen Dudley Edwards? - It takes a bit of wit too, to be wider than the current President-Elect. Here is the perennial Edwards, as always, delivering more - as Marx said of Lincoln - than he promised.
13th December 2024
Scottish artist Maud Sulter (1960-2008) worked in multi-media as a photographer, filmmaker, poet, playwright and visual artist. Born of Scottish and Ghanaian parentage, she was raised in the Gorbals in Glasgow by her Scottish mother, and much of her work - including that now on show at the Tramway - is an exploration of of her sexuality, gender and identity as a black woman. Federica Giardino reviews the show and ponders on the cultural richness and the 'poignant questions' her work highlights.
UNSUNG at the British Art Fair by Jessica Wood