Pleasure Scene

The inaugural exhibition at Trafalgar Avenue marks the culmination of an 18-month project bringing together nine artists from across the UK to respond to the iconic modernist ruin, St Peter’s Seminary.

Acknowledging the longstanding fascination with St Peter’s, the project draws from and builds upon the interest of artists, architects, and anarchists alike.

In February 2020, weeks prior to the first national lockdown, the group travelled to the west coast of Scotland to visit the seminary, to experience first-hand the skeletal remains of the vast concrete structure and document the significant monument in flux.

As we now tentatively emerge from and begin to make sense of this surreal and unsettling chapter, the exhibition seeks to engage viewers with the seminary at a time when its future remains uncertain, through the lens of artists whose work embraces a range of approaches to image-making, including painting, printmaking, photography, and film.

Reflecting both a moment in time pre-COVID and the artists’ personal and collective experiences over the last year, the exhibition touches upon several intersecting themes, with temporality, isolation, and loss considered alongside the ephemeral, renewal, and potentiality for other worlds.

The title Pleasure Scene borrows directly from the graffiti that adorns the seminary walls while referencing Rose Macaulay’s seminal text Pleasure of Ruins.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, made possible with the generous support of the Hope Scott Trust.