Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 1 August – 2 September 2026

Joyce W Cairns is a powerful storyteller with an unflinching eye on the human condition. Her epic memory paintings are among the most significant works in contemporary art, borne in the intimate study of objects and hidden histories. Her commitment to the human subject and to the discipline of painting transcend the autobiographical. Exhibiting since 1969, Cairns has walked her own path, choosing to situate herself for much of her career in the Northeast of Scotland. This unique vantage point, the village of Footdee, Aberdeen, has shaped the intense focus and characteristic edginess of her practice. The contemporary relevance and timeless significance of Cairns’ work is immediately striking, unlocking family history and illuminating multigenerational experiences of love, loss and trauma. Tackling difficult subject matter and addressing war on the home front, Cairns’ critical and empathic grasp of history could not be more pertinent. She brings the crafting of a painting and the visceral qualities of paint to the fore, tacit reminders of what human beings need to make sense of the world. In a ‘Post Truth’ age where we increasingly experience reality through screens, Cairns’ work is a reminder to dig deep where you stand.

Born in Edinburgh in 1947, Cairns studied at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen (1966-71), the Royal College of Art, London (1971-74), Gloucester College of Art and Design (1974-75) and Goldsmith’s College, University of London (1975-76). In 1976 she returned to Gray’s School of Art as a lecturer in drawing and painting. Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s her mature style in large scale figurative composition emerged, with bodies of work inspired by her childhood in Edinburgh, the village of Footdee, the underbelly of life around Aberdeen harbour, WWI, the Gulf war and Bosnian war. The decade long research and development of her monumental War Tourist exhibition, held at Aberdeen Art Gallery in 2006, was a remarkable achievement. The discovery of a suitcase of her father’s wartime memorabilia in 1995 prompted Cairns to retrace her father’s journey through WWII in Normandy and Tunisia. She then visited Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland in wider exploration of WWII and in response to human suffering during the Holocaust. As she stated in a 2006 interview, ‘I’m not doing war paintings, its memory paintings.’ (1)  As she searched for her father, she became the ‘War Tourist’, combining past and present, and bringing female perspective to world conflicts. The War Tourist exhibition brought together Cairns’ paintings, drawings and prints from the 1980’s to the 2000’s, together with artefacts spanning her exploration of different theatres of war. Some of these paintings are included in A Personal Odyssey. After a long association with the RSA including awards, exhibiting and as a Royal Scottish Academician, in 2018 Cairns became the first female president in the Royal Scottish Academy’s history.

Cairns’ achievements are many and her influence on generations of Scottish artists profound. However, standing in front of her work it is the emotional connection to her subject, her intellect, humour and mastery of large-scale composition that consistently shines through decades of dedicated practice. Cairns’ work is confrontational and compassionate in equal measure, able to assimilate ‘memory, history and lived experience’ like nobody else. Although significant large-scale museum works such as Shadows of the Past, Liberation Ceremony, Rennes (1984), TV Dinners (1991) The Deadly Wars (1993) and other works from the War Tourist cycle are regretfully missing, A Personal Odyssey is an important survey of the artist’s work. The exhibition gives valuable insights into Cairns evolution from the late 1960’s to the present day and is a welcome opportunity for visitors to experience her work first hand.  

Cairns has always possessed the vision and indomitable spirit that enables an artist to transcend themselves, evidenced here in her earliest work. Pastel Self Portrait (1969/70, pastel on paper, 31 x 20cm) brings a sense of self possession and enquiry as the artist resolutely meets the viewer’s gaze. The powerful lyricism and extraordinary range of mark in Cairn’s early works is impressive. Disintegration of Mankind (1970, oil on panel) encompasses our false sense of human progression in a series of five increasingly abstract figures, with the final head baring its teeth. Right from the start there is much in her handling of paint that is incredibly beautiful and assured, combined with a commitment to seeking truth, within and without.  ‘Disintegration of Mankind’, ‘Pursued, Conquered and Assimilated’ (1971), ‘Requiem for a Soul (1971-2) and Man may come, man may go (1972) are fine examples from this period, characterised by dreamlike fluidity and exceptional skill. In ‘Pursued, Conquered and Assimilated,’ there is a feeling of what memories are held in the body and in threshold spaces, houses, doorways, fragments of collage, ancient art and mythology. Awarded an RSA Carnegie Travelling Scholarship in 1971, Cairns travelled to Italy, fuelling her interest in medieval and pre-Renaissance Art. Her multi-panelled approach has a kinship with devotional art practice as she develops her own symbolism. Falling Woman (1969 /70, gouache on paper, 48 x 29cm) gives a taste of what is to come in the female figure or portrait merged with domestic architecture and communal spaces of comfort or reckoning. The perfect counterfoil in confronting difficult subject matter is the inherent care in crafting the image, which becomes progressively honed throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s as the scale and ambition of Cairns’ work increases.

In They Said the War Was Partly to Blame (1986, oil on panel, 213 x 244cm) figures are orientated around the emotional core of the painting, Cairns’ mother, who stands at the apex of the composition over a vortex-like sink hole. The vantage point is the family bathroom at Dovecot Grove, Edinburgh, and Footdee, with its familiar harbour shapes in the background, moving back and forward through time, unlocking what is hidden and exploring painful family history. The painting feels drenched in sea green, as though drowning or being pitched on internal waves of awareness. There is another hue in play here too, like the green guiding light of a harbour buoy, that doesn’t allow us to run aground. As in many of her large-scale compositions, interlocking pyramids and tilted, angular horizons give a feeling of acute instability and unease. However emotionally off balance we may feel, the artist’s highly structured approach to composition is what enables us to stop, look closely and contemplate a scene we may not want to witness.  It is fascinating to see the accompanying study for this painting and the decisions made in terms of design and foreground. The psychological compression of figures echoes the dynamism of German Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit artists of the Weimar period. Painting humanity in terminal decline with brutal honesty, artists George Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann are a potent influence on Cairns’ work. However, her distinctive potency emerges through empathy, a passionate need not to just make sense of her own family history, but intergenerational trauma and collective memory.

Emotional connection is paramount in Cairns’ work, in her rendering of the human figure and her painstaking research. The importance of getting the details of artefacts, uniforms and memorabilia just right and bearing witness to what is hidden, acknowledges and honours civilian casualties of war. Many of her paintings are memorials in that respect. Although They Said the War Was Partly to Blame is a deeply personal exploration, as Cairns’ practice progresses frames of reference in her work continue to expand. The ‘personal odyssey’ carries within it a concern beyond the self. It is the artist as witness, looking inwards certainly, but outwards too, with a critical awareness of world events.

Irma (1994-95, oil on panels, 213 x 244cm) is a beautiful example focused on a terrible subject, merging Cairns’ symbolic carousel of war with the story of Irma Hadzimuratovic, a young girl airlifted to the UK for treatment and sadly, a casualty of the Bosnian war. The image of the child clinging to the tiger haunts the background centre of the composition. As in many of Cairns’ paintings the artist’s face is present, although this is not always self-portraiture. In Irma, the gaze of the artist/ witness meets our own, reaching across time. Cairns confronts the cruelty and absurdity of war, often bringing to light the experiences of women and children.

Cairns’ experience as a child growing up in the post WWII era is reflected in the intimacy of objects as triggers of personal memory and collective remembrance. Often these are arranged in the foreground, like a shelf or windowsill of memorabilia we might collect in our own domestic space. In Ratho, 1951 (1990, oil on panel 213 x 244cm) this extends into the viewer’s space. A ration book, the monopoly game, the front page of The Scotsman (Friday 26 January 1951) with its headline ‘North Korean Offensive Halted by UN’ and a floral plate of morsels are offered up, together with a clutched copy of the rules of the game- monopoly and life. A myriad of narratives present themselves in the heightened opposites of red and green, and complex family dynamics. Ratho, 1951 is a psychological study of family life and memory with the unmentionable pushed to the margins, but ever-present in Cairns’ art. In an interview with the artist at her home in Footdee, in 2006 she reflected; ‘After the war people just didn’t want to know. When I was growing up, they wanted to put that aside. The early fifties when I was young was a pretty grim time in Britain, rationing and stuff like that…There were all kinds of shortages. Of course, as a child you didn’t realise it could be any different.’(2)

The seemingly bright painting of childhood Tiny Tots Annual 1954 (c. 2016, oil on canvas, 203 x 145cm) in dominant cadmium red and yellow is a highly visceral arrangement of figures and objects. Foreground bottles of rosehip syrup, cod liver oil and Haliborange (halibut liver oil, vitamin D and orange juice) provide a powerful sensory trigger for the post war generation of what was deemed good for the child. The question of what we are weaned on is inferred by a 12 HOW.IV missile which reads like a baby’s bottle. The central figure of the female child in school uniform clasps a hen, often a symbol of vulnerability in Cairns’ art. Her face is weary with age, giving a heightened sense of adult perspective to the whole scene. The figures and toys that surround her are part nursery rhyme, part comic book. A sibling-like figure with her hand around the missile reaches for the sleeve of the central protagonist / artist/ caregiver, while in the background a doll-like figure clasps her hands in prayer or delight. Emotional shifts encircle the painting, never allowing the viewer to get too cosy with nostalgia. A worried female child stands with a bowl in her hands to the lower right of the composition. Goldilocks with a full bowl of porridge hearing bears or an empty bowl and anticipation of gnawing hunger like Oliver Twist?  A recurrent rabbit jug family heirloom with spent lilies brings a sickly air to the scene. Like the nick of blood drops at the centre, there is a kind of reckoning within the fairytale façade, of coming to terms with the forces that shape us and make us who we are. The expression of the central female figure is knowing and complex, a sideways glance into a space beyond the picture plane, pensive, red eyed and perfectly still, as wave upon wave of associations hit the spectator.

There are many highlights in the show where facets of self, womanhood and femininity are explored by the mature artist. The Drying Green (1990 Oil on panel, 213 x 244cm), Sailing Through Polluted Seas (1988 oil on panel, 83 x 244cm) and On Board the Schleswig- Holstein (1989 oil on panel 220x 160cm) are as beautiful as they are challenging. Making connections within Cairns’ imagery is one of the great pleasures of the show. While the origins of enquiry might be personal or historically specific, Cairns creates spaces of imagination and confrontation that are satisfyingly multilayered. There is also a sense of being in the presence of a master of the craft, a nurturing, insistent force of life, absent in the work of many of her male contemporaries. In the 1980s and 90’s when the ‘New Glasgow Boys’ Peter Howson, Ken Currie, Adrian Wiszniewski and Steven Campbell were emerging with much acclaim in a resurgence of figurative art in Scotland, Cairns’ work during the same period is arguably more commanding in its emotional intelligence.  As Bill Hare’s excellent commentary on Cairns’ work over many years has suggested, there is a kinship with the work of Paula Rego. The power of visual storytelling, expression of female lived experience, uncompromising honesty and exploration of collective memory are distinctive qualities in each artist’s work. There is too, a ‘spirit tempered to endure’(3) that emerges from their timeless paintings. Critically, Cairns’ work reminds us that how we remember is how we endure.

Under the banner of this year’s Royal Scottish Academy 200^th anniversary celebrations, A Personal Odyssey understandably frames Cairns’ work within RSA history and in the context of Scottish Art education. However, now is the time to acknowledge and celebrate the international stature of Joyce W Cairns’ work, which extends far beyond Scotland or any institution. Although there is a missed opportunity here for a full-scale public retrospective occupying the entire RSA galleries, A Personal Odyssey reveals the evolution, resilience and spirit of one of the UK’s finest artists. Joyce W Cairns’ powerful, monumental works assert the importance of painting in contemporary life, the multifaceted role of the artist as witness and our essential need for storytelling. At this point in history with war and destruction raging all over the planet, Cairns’ spirit of confrontation, compassion and insight is a shining light.

Joyce W Cairns- A Personal Odyssey – Royal Scottish Academy exhibition page: https://www.royalscottishacademy.org/exhibitions/315-joyce-w.-cairns-a-personal-odyssey/overview

Georgina Coburn Review of War Tourist in Northings 24 March 2006: https://northings.com/2006/03/24/joyce-cairns-war-tourist

 Notes

1. Joyce W Cairns interview with Georgina Coburn Footdee, Aberdeen, 18 March 2006.
2. Joyce W Cairns interview with Georgina Coburn Footdee, Aberdeen, 18 March 2006.
3. Quotation on the wall of the A Personal Odyssey exhibition space; ‘And if a god will wreck me yet again on the wine dark sea, I can bear that too, with a spirit tempered to endure.’ Homer, The Odyssey (trans Robert Fagles)