Elizabeth Ogilvie – founder of Lateral Lab & RCIRYA – is an environmental artist creating immersive experiences for her public. Her aim is to open perception and understanding of how our environment functions. The work she does seeks to point to issues right at the top of the global agenda and involves highlighting the world’s most challenging problems – the impact of climate change and threat to our most precious natural resource: water/ice.

What Robert Callender had to say, over his 60 year career, about the making of art and representational sculptural form as a conceptual journey, as well as the changing environment and our cultural identity was, and is still, important for educators, curators, learners, students and the general public.

As schools and colleges re-focus on making and engineering skills and re-prioritise hand/eye and crafting, the artist’s death has reminded many within Scotland’s colleges, galleries and arts community of the startling originality and prescience of his work.

Robert Callender’s substantial output of work was always about looking, and these keenest of lookings translated neither into individually coloured representation nor artfully cloaked proselytising but the looked at objects themselves, in all of their visible splendour. As Douglas Dunn observes, “the objects do not appear replicated but renewed.”

Whether engaged in independent individual life long learning or studying in school, college or university, these works are generous in their intention to place the viewer/receiver/learner fully at the heart of their own artistic experience by making the work discoverable (and therefore personal) without any previous knowledge of art, art history, technology or isms of any kind.

It is direct and accessible art which stands alone and for itself, the considerable intellect applied to the work residing in being faithful, accurate and therefore plain for all (including children) to see. Viewers experience the how it is, not the how it should be, with a veracity and force that isn’t painful or regretful, but simply real, and full of joy.

The educational value of the work lies in being presented with something that re-kindles in adults (and kindles in children and young people) the belief that we can create something ourselves without recourse to money, greener grass, praise, societal mediation or approval.