This exhibition celebrates the centenary of the extraordinary Scottish artist, poet and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) with a selection of his prints, books and cards. Finlay first found widespread acclaim as a concrete poet in the 1960s and his work soon developed into more visual forms including printmaking, sculpture, architecture and his celebrated ‘art garden’ at Little Sparta. His wide-ranging work, often made in collaboration with other artists, writers and typographers, explores multiple themes including fishing boats, classical Greece and Rome, the French Revolution and the German military in World War Two.

Drawing on the University’s outstanding collection of nearly 300 works by Finlay, the exhibition draws you into an enticing but dangerous world of prints and poems, sails and sundials, gardens and guillotines.

The exhibition is open Monday-Friday 9.30am-7pm (last entry 5pm). Find out more about the University of Dundee Museums.

Special Events:

Friday 7 November, 3.15pm - guided tour with poet and academic Dr Heather H Yeung

Tuesday 18 November, 5.30pm - special screening of a new film about Finlay, The Boat in the Writing Room 

Wednesday 26 November, 5.30pm - Poem/Print creative workshop - book here

Main image: Memory, folded card by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ron Costley, 1987 (copyright the artists' estates)

Header image: Catameringue, print by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Peter Grant, 1970 (copyright the artists' estates) 

Host: Philip Cohen

Location: Sir Kenneth and Lady Noreen Murray Seminar Room, CTIR 2.84

About the speaker:

Rosie is a young Principal Investigator who joined the Department of Neuroscience one year ago, which is located on the Ground Floor of SLS in the MSI building. A US citizen born and brought up in Southern California, Rosie then moved to Scotland, where she obtained a B.Sc in Biochemistry from the University of St Andrews, Scotland and then a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. She returned to the USA to carry out postdoctoral research at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, before accepting the offer of a Lectureship from the Department of Neuroscience at Dundee. The seminar will be of particular interest to all those interested in the molecular causes of neurodegenerative diseases.  Students in SLS may be interested to know that both of Rosie’s parents, Michael Jackson and Clare MacGowan, obtained their PhDs in the Biochemistry Department at Dundee from 184-1987 long before the Departments of Biochemistry, Biological Sciences and Anatomy and Physiology merged to form the School of Life Sciences in 2000. Clare MacGowan was a student in Philip Cohen’s lab and Michael Jackson’s supervisor was Brian Burchell, who later became Dean of the Medical School at Dundee.

Join us for the second event as part of the 70th annual Flaherty Film Seminar, ONWARD! 

This special event presents William Greaves’ iconic work of cinéma vérité ​Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1971) alongside Grace Ndiritu​’s hallucinatory ​Black Beauty (2021). Both films explore the boundaries of the documentary form through various levels of cinematic reality and fictions.

The screening will be followed by an hour long discussion where the audience is invited to consider the films together.

This programme has been devised to coincide with Grace Ndiritu’s exhibition Compassionate Rebels in Action (part of The Ignorant Art School) at Cooper Gallery, Dundee.

Tickets

Book free tickets through LUX Scotland

Programme Schedule

William Greaves, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, (1981), 75 mins
Grace Ndiritu, Black Beauty, (2021), 29 mins
Discussion

About the films

Cinéma vérité reaches a new level of reality in ​‘Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One’ (1971), a film-within-a-film in which director William Greaves dares to break the accepted rules of cinema.

It’s 1968 and Greaves and his crew are in New York’s Central Park ostensibly filming a screen test. The drama involves a bitter break-up between a married couple. But this is just the ​“cover story.” The real story is happening ​“off” camera as the enigmatic director pursues his hidden agenda. The growing conflict and chaos — accompanied by moments of uproarious humor — explodes on screen, producing the energy and the insights that the director is searching for.

Greaves uses multiple cameras, mixes cinéma vérité and conventional shooting styles and experiments with a variety of other cinematic techniques, including the use of simultaneous split-screen images. The result is a film with multiple levels of reality that reveals, and comments upon, the creative process.

‘Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One’ may well be the first self-reflexive feature film to have been produced in cinéma vérité style. Greaves compares the making of ​“Symbio” to jumping off a cliff without a parachute.

Grace Ndiritu’s directorial debut ​‘Black Beauty’ (2021), is a fictionalised meeting between African fashion model Alexandra Cartier and Jorge Luis Borges in a visionary hallucination. What does the famous Argentine modernist writer have to say about our contemporary ecological and pandemic problems?

About Flaherty Seminar

ONWARD! The 70th edition of the Flaherty Film Seminar took place from June 26–29, 2025. This special anniversary edition offered an immersive programme of screenings and carefully moderated conversations. As an internationally recognised forum for collective inquiry into the form and function of non-fiction cinema, the Seminar fostered field-building dialogue, encouraged the exchange of cinematic ideas across generations and cultures, and promoted the expansion of the limits of cinema itself.

In Autumn 2025, LUX Scotland will host three events as part of the 70th annual Flaherty Seminar in partnership with The Hunterian, Cooper Gallery and the Centre for Screen Cultures at the University of St Andrews. Expanding on the Flaherty Seminar’s 70th edition ‘ONWARD!’ held in New York City in June 2025, this series of Gatherings will present and bridge connections from films selected from the Seminar screenings which were programmed by Janaína Oliveira, Carlos Gutiérrez, and Richard Herskowitz, alongside programming partners Christopher Harris, Zaina Bseiso, and Louis Massiah. As unique and discursive events, each Gathering will offer the opportunity for the audience to engage in discussion as we explore the history and current movements in non-fiction filmmaking.

Members of the LUX Scotland team had the opportunity to attend the Seminar in New York City with support from the Art Fund’s Jonathan Ruffer curatorial grants. We would like to thank Samara Chadwick (The Flaherty Executive Director), Juan Pedro Agurcia (The Flaherty Program Director) and Philippa Lovatt (Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews) for their help and support in devising these events.

Host: Gopal Sapkota

Location: MSI Small Lecture Theatre

Abstract:

The dual-specificity MAP kinase phosphatases (MKPs) family plays a critical role in the dephosphorylation and inactivation of various MAP kinases in mammalian cells and tissues. MKPs not only provide a mechanism for spatiotemporal feedback control of these essential signalling pathways but also facilitate crosstalk between distinct MAP kinase pathways and other key signalling modules. The ten mammalian MKPs differ in their substrate specificity and subcellular localization. Several MKPs have been implicated in regulating MAPK signalling in T cells. However, studies utilizing genetic mouse models have yielded conflicting results regarding which MKP members contribute to this regulation. This prompted us to re-examine the role of MKPs in controlling MAPK signalling using a human T cell model. Our findings suggest that DUSP2 regulates early MAPK activation in these cells and may function as a part of a distal regulatory node in T cell signalling.

Bio:

I earned my PhD from the University of Tromsø (UiT), Norway in 1998 and subsequently moved to Dundee for a postdoctoral position in Professor Steve Keyse's lab. Upon returning to Tromsø, I established a small research group with support from a Career Development Grant awarded by the Norwegian Research Council. In 2010, I was promoted to Professor of Pharmacology in the Department of Pharmacy, UiT. My research has primarily focused on MAP kinase signalling, with a particular emphasis on the roles of the atypical MAP kinases ERK3 and ERK4. More recently, I have expanded my investigations to explore the functions of dual-specificity MAP kinase phosphatases. I have now returned to Dundee for a Sabbatical in Professor Gopal Sapkota´s lab.