​​​​​​​​Open Call for Artists & Makers: 

Strata | Presented by Visual Arts Scotland in partnership with wasps.

Exhibition Dates: 26 June – 31st August 2026

Exhibition Location: The Assembly Hall, WASPS Inverness Creative Academy, Stephens St, Inverness IV2 3JP

About the Exhibition

Visual Arts Scotland (VAS) presents Strata, a new exhibition of wall-based works exploring landscape through layering, material, and time. Opening this June at Wasps Artists’ Studios Inverness Creative Academy, the exhibition brings together artists whose practices engage with the processes that shape land and matter alike.

Strata, Spanning across painting, print, textile, photography, and mixed media, the works collectively approach our connection to the natural landscape. The exhibition builds on VAS’s recent programme exploring contemporary relationships to landscape and is delivered in partnership with Wasps Artists’ Studios, whose Inverness Creative Academy provides a vital platform for artists working in the Highlands and beyond. The collaboration reflects a shared commitment to supporting artists across Scotland and creating opportunities for engagement outside the Central Belt.

For Visual Arts Scotland, this partnership is an important step in extending its programme geographically, ensuring that its national membership; now over 1,400 artists and makers, can connect with opportunities, audiences, and professional networks across the country. By working with Wasps, VAS continues to develop a more distributed model of exhibition-making, responsive to place and rooted in regional contexts.

Strata brings this approach into focus: a locally situated exhibition with national reach, foregrounding material practice while opening new pathways for artists and audiences in the Highlands.

Concept and Context

Strata begins with landscape as material, surface and form.

Working across painting, print, textile, photography and mixed media, the exhibition focuses on how landscape is held through surface and shaped through form. Layers accumulate, marks settle, materials shift. Whether working through depiction or material process, the artists consider landscape as something formed rather than fixed. Each work holds a relationship between what is seen and what is made.

Presented at Inverness Creative Academy, the exhibition is grounded in a context where land is not distant, but lived and worked. The works reflect this through their attention to material, structure and change.

Strata is an exhibition exploring how ‘landscape’ takes shape; through material, across surface and in form.