Press

Who are Scotland’s next big things in art, film, writing, sport, science, food, fashion, business, acting and music? From a German Konditormeister in Edinburgh to a young actress who’s just won two comedy gongs, we find out who’s hot to watch.

Henry Coombes

Henry Coombes’ film commission for Tramway, due to be screened this July, promises to be a strange and possibly troubling piece. The golden retriever of Laddy And The Lady is not just a golden retriever, but an actor dressed up as a golden retriever. It sounds funny and pantomimic, but, says Coombes, it’s not.

‘It’s quite a serious film,’ he says, ‘shot at the Tramway against a grey backdrop. Props are very minimal. There’s a sort of moral ambiguity to it. It’s just a script that I came up with, a story and a relationship between a woman and her dog. It’s not sensationalistic, it’s about a relationship, the love between the animal and the owner. It’s the excitement of the pheasant shoot; the dog can hardly suppress its excitement, but the lady has to keep the dog under control and yet allow it to retrieve the bird. But it’s about the need for Laddy the dog to please, his love for achievement. But when he gets success and gets the final bird, nothing has changed for the Lady, but a lot has changed for the dog. She doesn’t do anything outside the discipline of dog handling, yet when you watch it obviously you come back to realizing the dog is an actor in costume.’

Commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council, with ¬£15,000 funding, Laddy And The Lady is a major project which Coombes spent nine months working on, creating all the props himself. Not all Coombes’ work is on film – this is in fact his first properly funded short film – instead he works across a range of media from written short stories to watercolours, and he has already had exhibitions at Switchspace and Transmission and is represented by Sorcha Dallas.

From Kent originally, now 28 years old, Coombes did his foundation course at St Martin’s College of Art followed by a BA at Glasgow School of Art. His works seem to inhabit an old-fashioned world of plus fours, class-values and landed aristocracies. According to art and cultural critic Neil Mulholland, Coombes ‘emphasizes the entrenched political, cultural and class connotations of the traditional media that he works in. Stiff pragmatic oil painting is harnessed to the exhausted mores of the tweeded aristocracy. The fluid eroticism of Baroque painting is applied to the svelte creases of an urban folk devil’s dog-eared leather jacket.’ His next project, he hopes, will be a film about the animal painter, Edwin Landseer, ‘his final madness and breakdown.’