Anna King

When Anna King graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in 2005 she was considered one of the most promising Scottish artists of her generation. Since that time numerous successful solo exhibitions of her work have been held in the UK.

I love to explore empty, feral places: wastelands, abandoned buildings and barren pieces of scrub-land.

I find myself in a no-mans land. Unclaimed territory, that, for a while anyway, I can have as my own. It’s an adventure playground that nobody meant to build, a desolate, wild expanse of cracking concrete and decaying structures. Once a hive of human activity, these forgotten places have no purpose left –
but no rules either – and nature is slowly and relentlessly taking the land back.

She has won several major art awards including The Royal Scottish Academy Landscape Award and the prestigious Jolomo Lloyds TSB Award. Her inaugural solo exhibition at 108 Fine Art in 2008 attracted praise from Financial Times critic Jackie Wullschlager who wrote:

“This gifted young artist has spent the past two winters working at Joan Eardley’s clifftop studio at Catterline. The results are very different from Eardley’s wild, densely painted seascapes: cooler, more cerebral, with an almost icy range of colours. Yet something of Eardley’s response to nature as an untameable force is echoed in King’s bleakly attractive images of post-industrial landscapes: empty feral places where nature is slowly reclaiming the land.”

FINANCIAL TIMES REVIEW 12th April 2008

Usually based at her studio and home in the Borders, Anna has increasingly been drawn towards remote and abandoned spaces, such as those recorded in her visits to former East Germany, and the Scottish ghost town of Polphail, built to house 500 workers and their families, though never inhabited and now in a state of dereliction.