From Where I Stand: An exhibition curated by Future Flow

In Nishi Chodimella's prints, the Himalayan Balsam plant, considered an invasive species, is used to explore capitalise attitudes towards ecosystems. It is compared with the jute plant, seen as worthy and 'good' due to its economic value - also alluding to the relationship between Scotland and India through the jute industry. Extracts from books from the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh highlight language used to describe invasive species, and Nishi likens this to populist rhetoric towards migrants and refugees.

Nishi has also designed three trays of rangoli. Rangoli in India is usually placed at the entrance of a house as a symbol of prosperity. This artwork is site-specific and has been reinterpreted for each iteration of the exhibition. 

Anupa Gardner has used paai – Tamil for mat – as a symbol. The paai is an everyday household item familiar in South Indian homes. The functionality of the paai evokes a grounding quality – though this is challenged by the way the mats are exhibited hanging and floating from the ceiling. The unfixed figures are surrounded by familiar objects, but aren't tethered to anything, which emphasise the feeling of home being out of grasp, partial belonging, and displacement that Anupa feels. 

The mats are all woven in different ways, which demonstrate Anupa's physicality in the process of creating these works literally weave together strands of memories of the past into a present object. 

Anupa's other prints in the gallery capture memories of Edinburgh and India. You can see how the colour paletter switches between the two - though both use greens and blues they are treated in very different ways. Her works face each other, like two memories present at once – with the paais in between, hung almost like animation frames. 

As part of Sonia Mehra Chawla's wider research about the ecological impact of techno fossils, the series 'The Afterlives: Ruins in Reverse' documents decommissioned maritime infrastructures, obsolete objects and derelict ghost landscapes from the oil and gas extraction industry around Aberdeen and Fraserburgh.

These ruined resources of a bygone era are used by Sonia to reimagine future scenarios and environments. Sonia believes sites of ruin establish a framework for dialogues about our built environment, decay, regeneration, and notions of progress. 

Sonia also documents the invisible, mysterious, and enigmatic worlds of marine microorganisms. Using archival slides of ‘living’ material from the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the film is shot through microscopes. This considers an oceanic worldview – with hidden realms beyond scope of the human eye revealed. Sonia is considering here the natural and social systems of dependence, support, and exploitation by humans. 

For this series, produced at Edinburgh Printmakers, Claire Barclay uses the print workshop environment, the medium of printmaking, and the printing process as inspiration. The prints appear to represent functional objects or their isolated parts – almost like cogs coming together. In the series  pieces that are evidently incompatible move towards an almost perfect match. 

Claire’s experimentation with different textures underscores that even when cohesion is found, the two halves of the abstract gear maintain their independence and unique nature through their distinctive patterns. Claire’s relief prints are made using cut plywood shapes, playing with the direction and aesthetic of the wood grain.