I work across sculpture, installation, film, sound, and collaborative projects. My practice is shaped by lived experience, memory, and the emotional atmosphere of places, objects, and everyday interactions. I often begin with a feeling, a conversation, or something half noticed, using making as a way to explore ideas without needing to fully resolve them.

I work with stained glass, ceramics, found materials, inflatables, moving image, and sound. I’m drawn to materials that carry a sense of fragility, familiarity, or tension, and I use them to build immersive environments that feel both personal and unsettled. My work has become increasingly intuitive and site-responsive, with each installation shaped by the architecture, history, and energy of the space it occupies.

Film and sound extend the sculptural work, creating rhythm, atmosphere, and moments of reflection. I’m interested in how people physically experience an artwork — moving through it, hearing it, catching reflections within it, or recognising something of themselves inside it.

My recent body of work, It’s Hard to Be a Lover With TV On, explores distraction, intimacy, overstimulation, and the emotional noise of contemporary life. Using layered materials and fragmented imagery, the work reflects on connection, domestic space, and the difficulty of being present with ourselves and each other.

Alongside my studio practice, I also work as a curator and collaborator. Conversation and audience experience are important to me, and I’m interested in the unexpected exchanges and shared moments that can happen around an artwork.

inbox@georginaporteous.com

The Wyllieum

Royal Scottish Academy 200

14 November 2026 – Spring 2027

Georgina Porteous, Flax Seeds Grow as the Cosmic Humblebum Goes Majestic

Georgina’s practice explores sculpture, place, material and imagination, often working with scale, humour and unexpected transformations.

For this exhibition she will present a new sculptural work developed through ongoing research with the Wyllieum, responding to George Wyllie’s playful, questioning approach to art, and his belief in the power of imagination, curiosity and the unexpected.

Flax seeds grow as the cosmic Humblebum goes majestic is an invitation to look, wonder and perhaps question what you think you are seeing. The work plays with scale, absurdity and transformation, bringing together the playful and the monumental to create something that is both familiar and completely unexpected.

It includes a design, drawing/cutting pattern, that is part of the development of a large-scale inflatable sculpture, bringing together cobalt blue drawing, ideas of porcelain and vessel-making,

transformation and childhood imagination. It is informed by her interest in artists including George Wyllie RSA and Christine Borland RSA and by a wider exploration of material, place and the possibilities of public sculpture.

Georgina is an alumni of RSA New Contemporaries 2009 exhibition following her graduation from Moray School of Art.

https://www.royalscottishacademy.org/partners/21/

past exhibitions

It's Hard to be a Lover with the TV on

I have a new body of work showing at the Moray School of Art Degree show as a guest Alumni artist. OPENING 4th of June 6-----8pm. Open to the public from 5th to 12th of June 2026.

This work is informed by responses to George Wyllie, for his playful yet critical engagement with serious subject matter; Christine Borland, for her forensic and ethically driven research practice; and Timorous Beasties, particularly their inkblot-style designs, which echo the Rorschach test. These references support an ongoing interest in interpretation—how meaning is projected and read differently by each viewer.

The title “It’s hard to be a lover with the TV on.” comes from Damon Albarn’s song The Selfish Giant. Albarn frames the image through his description of a nuclear submarine pilot looking out across the Atlantic, accompanied only by the glow of monitors.

Materials within the work carry their own embedded histories. Disinfectant used to wash porcelain plates introduces a colonial residue through acts of cleaning and domestic maintenance, while cobalt blue points towards longer trajectories of extraction and use—from decorative surface pigment to its role in lithium batteries that underpin contemporary technologies.

https://www.moray.uhi.ac.uk/study-with-us/campus-facilities/moray-school-of-art/

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