"Thank fuck for artists" is a celebration, a toast, a flicker of relief that people keep imagining, keep trying, keep making, not for applause or profit, but because that's how we enlarge the world we share. It’s also a heartfelt thank you to those who keep making. It's for the people who shape our visual and cultural landscape in ways that we often overlook, who give form to feelings and make space for us to reflect and imagine. It's for those who keep working, not because they know the outcome, but because the act itself is how they engage and grapple with the world. In that sense, it's less about who's watching and more about keeping a conversation alive that belongs to all of us.

Here, in a half renovated tenement in Edinburgh, art isn't waiting for perfect conditions. Instead, it finds its way into spare rooms and borrowed spaces of a half-finished building. Creativity doesn't arrive once everything's sorted. It's there while the dust is still in the air.

This exhibition brings together 21 artists from recent graduates to mid and late-career artists who have kept their practise alive for decades. What connects us is less about money or recognition and more about that shared persistence and the choice to keep making and keep exploring. Artists don't work in isolation from the world. Our ideas spill out everywhere, into design, architecture, fashion, the small details of everyday life. But that influence is easy to miss. You walk in, spend time, and leave again, owing nothing at the door. That's not a flaw, it's a kind of openness. This show isn't asking for sympathy or putting artists on a pedestal, it's simply saying that our shared culture relies on people who imagine alternatives and share them generously. Shared culture isn't an idea, it's the texture of daily life, the poster on the street, the type on a ticket, the colours of a cafe interior. All of these small choices are seeded by artists' experiments, years of trying, failing, and trying again. Much of this happens quietly, without a price tag, yet it permeates how we see, gather, and relate to one another. That's the generosity at art's core. A common ground we all stand on, whether we notice it or not.

Over the past 20 years, funding cuts and rising costs have made life for many artists precarious; studio rent increases, materials costs and simply putting food on the have become increasingly difficult and for some, impossible to negotiate. Many European countries tend to invest more steadily, treating cultural infrastructure as long-term public good. However, it's not really about who gets it right, it's about what we want a society to be. If we want vibrant cities and thoughtful public spaces, a culture that feels rich and alive, then we must look after the people who make that possible. A society that invests in artists is really investing in imagination, in identity, and in its own future.

Participating Artists

Lily Ashrowan
Sam Ainsley
Emily Bates
Beagles & Ramsay
John Brown
Sarah Calmus
Mark Haddon
Hannah Dove
Kevin Harman
Paul Keir
Cathy Orton
Sienna Ponting
Mark Purves
Elaine Speirs
Rowan Mace
Billy McCall
Chad McCail
Toby Messenger
Maggie Hills
Iain Irving

#THANKFUCKFORARTISTS

I first met Mark Haddon in 1988 at Edinburgh College of Art. He was a year above me and even then, he was one of those students people talked about. My friends and I admired his work, not because it was flashy, but because it felt quietly sure of itself. Almost 40 years later, listening to Mark talk about his work, I'm struck by how consistent he's been. We live in a culture that demands neat artist statements and clear intentions, but Mark doesn't work that way. He notices things. Crumpled paper, bits of wood, discarded ribbon not as metaphors but as themselves. He said something that has stayed with me. The thing is always the thing. It sounds simple but it feels like the core of his practice. What moved me most in our conversations was when Mark talked about sharing a world with other human beings. That sense that the marks on a page, or the wear on a piece of wood are traces of lives already lived. His work feels generous in that way. Like an acknowledgement of others, rather than a claiming. He once used the phrase "mucking about" It made me smile. It sounds almost dismissive but I think it's profound. Great artists often look like they're playing. They experiment, they follow accidents, they allow things to unfold. What looks like mucking about is often deep attention built over years. Writing this, I realise I'm not trying to explain Mark's work as much as describe the consistency of the person behind it. The Mark I admired as a student, and the artist I listen to now, are recognisably the same. In a world that rewards reinvention, there's something deeply inspiring about someone who has spent decades simply becoming more fully themselves. There's a patience in Mark’s work, a sense that Making is thinking, that work doesn't illustrate an idea, it discovers itself in the doing. That attitude feels at a piece with No31, the gallery he runs, not as a career move, but as a space for attention, for slowing down enough to notice. This essay doesn't try to explain his work better than he does. It tries instead to honour a way of being with the world, insistent, unshowy, and necessary.

Mark Haddon is a Scottish contemporary artist, designer, curator and illustrator based in the Scottish Borders. Working across drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and found objects, his practice explores memory, place, observation and the relationships between natural and human-made environments. He is also the founder and curator of No31, an artist-run gallery and project space in Duns, Scottish Borders (markhaddon.net.)