You do not walk through Jupiter Artland without tripping over history. The 120-acre Wilkieston estate is as much an industrial graveyard as it is a manicured home for contemporary sculpture.
Beneath the permanent installations by Anish Kapoor and Tracey Emin lie the literal foundations of Scotland’s fossil-fuelled past: the nineteenth-century shale bings of our first oil boom, and the landing site for the Forties pipeline dragging crude from the North Sea.
That is to say, it is a terrain built on power, extraction, and eventual decay. For its 2026 season, which opens today, Jupiter is finally pointing a giant, unblinking spotlight directly at those subterranean ghosts.
The Engine Room of Culture
Opening in April, Extraction is an exhibition entirely concerned with the cultural and psychological hangovers of our energy systems. Spanning the Ballroom and Steadings Galleries, it gathers works by Carol Rhodes, John Gerrard, Marguerite Humeau, Siobhan McLaughlin, and the late John Latham.
There is no intention here of delivering a neat, moralising lecture on climate change. Instead, the curation treats energy as a relentless, hubristic cycle. Every era, from coal to shale to the estate’s own modern solar fields, generates massive wealth, technological swagger, and cultural identity. And every era eventually leaves behind nothing but residue, altered earth, and monuments to its own obsolescence. By demanding audiences view these artworks against the backdrop of the park’s physical geography, the exhibition resembles a distinctly sharp autopsy of human progress.
A Feral Heritage
Come August, the focus shifts from the subterranean to the fiercely physical. For the Edinburgh Art Festival, Glasgow-based Irish artist Sgàire Wood takes over the Steadings Gallery.
Anyone familiar with her work—or her vital presence at the much-missed queer bar Bonjour—knows she deals in the brilliant, messy collision of drag, nightlife, and artifice. This new solo show, however, marks a significant pivot into sculpture and immersive installation.
Wood is appropriating the stuffy, inherently violent visual language of traditional heraldry to dissect the modern rise of fascism. She uses mythical beasts—specifically the martlet, a footless bird doomed to live its entire life in flight—as a cypher for the ceaseless struggle and placelessness experienced by minority communities today. It is a smart, inherently subversive premise, leaving just enough room for the humour and fierce solidarity that characterises her best work.
She also returns as co-curator for Jupiter Rising x EAF on Saturday, 22 August. If previous iterations of her ‘Sgàiraoke’ are anything to go by, expect late-night woodland revelry, exceptional tailoring, and a genuinely chaotic artistic energy.
Paying It Forward
What prevents this ambitious programming from feeling like an exercise in pure aesthetics is the financial engine humming beneath the estate. In an era where Scottish arts funding is in a perpetual state of emergency, Jupiter’s philanthropic model is a rare, magnificent thing.
Every single penny of admission revenue goes directly to the Jupiter Learning Foundation. Your ticket explicitly funds free educational workshops, the on-site MAKE Studio, and development for the next generation of creatives. You are not merely a spectator; you are an active participant in keeping the door open for others.
In the end, this is a terrifically rigorous slate of programming from Nicky Wilson and Exhibitions Curator Eloise Bennett. It is a season that refuses to let anyone just enjoy the view, challenging audiences to look at the dirt beneath their feet and consider exactly what it took to put it there.
Featured Image: Sgàire Wood, Tiger (2024). Photo by Spit Turner.
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