Gabriella Boyd
In October and November 2024, we invited Gabriella Boyd to the Roberts Institute of Art Residency in Scotland.
During her residency, Gabriella created new work inspired by her research into the internal body in a medical context, and a visit to The Hunterian’s anatomical collections as well as the surrounding landscape of Cortachy Castle.
Gabriella Boyd is a UK-based painter whose work translates psychic sensations and spaces into depictions of physical experiences and memories, blurring the lines between representation and abstraction.
She returned to Scotland following her exhibition Presser at CAMPLE LINE in the summer of 2024, which was her first solo show in a public gallery, and her first in Scotland. The title work from the exhibition is in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection.
While in residence, Gabriella used her time to think about the representation of the body within her work. More specifically, our relationships with the vulnerable body and the meeting point between the scientific realities and the imaginary impression of the internal body.
Gabriella began her time in residence with a research trip to Glasgow, where she visited The Hunterian’s anatomical collection and the Special Collections library at Glasgow University, researching old medical books and papers.
“It was nice to have the opportunity to look, in an almost meditative way at these forms and organs, and look at them as a way of detaching the physical matter of the specimens and organs from their original context of the body.”
At The Hunterian, Gabriella made preparatory sketches and watercolours of the specimens on-site and had the rare opportunity to photograph the objects.
Bringing these experiences back to the residency studio, Gabriella continued thinking about ways of depicting these usually hidden parts of the body that are so often only imagined. She was able to focus on the simplicity of observation and purely exploring form as she was working on new and ongoing paintings.
The surrounding rural landscape of Cortachy Castle and the early November sunsets also gave Gabriella the space to consider a different perspective, rhythm and pace in her work.
Some of the work she created will feature in an exhibition in Amsterdam in late 2025.
On the occasion of Gabriella’s residency, we commissioned writer Xanthi Barker to write a collection study of Presser (2024), which you can read here. The work will also be included in our exhibition In Attendance: Paying Attention in a Fragile World (8 January–9 February) at the Fitzrovia Chapel.
Following her residency, Gabriella shared her reflections on observation and process, weaving together her experiences from Scotland with a broader exploration of how the body — both seen and unseen — shapes her practice. You can read her text here.
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