April 2026

Vivien McDermid
‘Punching Around the Big Balloon’

8th April - 2nd May 2026

Vivien McDermid (b.1981) is a painter based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2005 and began to paint after the birth of her first child in 2007. McDermid describes painting as the language in which she feels she can most fluently communicate and untangle the experiences of being human. For her, the act of painting is a continual strengthening of the bridge which joins the inner and external worlds. Vivien McDermid is represented by Blue Shop Gallery.

Vivien McDermid's new body of work 'Punching Around the Big Balloon' returns repeatedly to the egg as a primary form: a site of origin, containment and transformation. The egg appears as object and symbol, as shell, yolk and membrane, as both protection and rupture. It holds within it a paradox, the beginning and the end existing simultaneously, a suspended moment of “time before time.” Across these paintings, forms emerge as if from primordial waters, dense, mineral and fluid, where matter has not yet settled into fixed meaning.

The works move between the earthly and the cosmic. Baskets of fruit, birds, vessels, shoes and domestic objects sit alongside wild birds clouds and elemental forces. Materials feel bodily and immediate: fleshy fruit, iron, blood, sugar, bone, latex. Surfaces oscillate between the marbled and the washed, the dense and the luminous, suggesting both decay and ascension. Motifs of nesting, laying, holding and hatching recur, positioning creation as both labour and instinct, an act of care as much as emergence.

There is a constant tension between weight and lift. The heaviness of the womb, of stone, of fruit, is countered by balloons, breath, wings and upward motion. Influences from Qigong, particularly the gestures of opening and closing wings, inform a rhythm of expansion and contraction within the work. Energy circulates: rising, retreating, folding back into itself.

View Exhibition

Blue Shop Gallery | 72 Brixton Road, Oval