Interview with Gayle Chong Kwan: The Great Instauration

Edinburgh Reviews‘ creative director Bronwen (AKA Birdy) leapt at the chance to attend a media call to view artist Gayle Chong Kwan‘s The Great Instauration, and to have a chat with Gayle about her work.

The site-responsive exhibition is currently taking over the Grand Gallery of the National Museum of Scotland, with themes around the rethinking of scientific, exploitative and extractive histories.

It’s been described as “an underground, upside-down world filled with forms hanging from railings and columns. Large-scale sculptures of scientific instruments are transformed into fantastical roots, hanging fabrics of the geological strata of Edinburgh with archival and painted images, and steel plinths inscribed with lesser-known histories fill the space.”

It was thankfully very quiet in the gallery space, as our interview and photo op took place before the museum was officially open for the day.

Gayle: It’s quite nice being here when nobody else is here, isn’t it? 

Bronwen: Yeah, absolutely it is. That’s why I’m a big fan of the Museum Lates, too! So, can you tell me a little bit more about your process for these pieces? 

Gayle: Yeah, so with this, the whole work really started through research in archives and collections, across eight different institutions. So, it was a very intense period of looking and thinking through, because the commission brief was very open. It was about reimagining science or rethinking science. I mean, that’s absolutely huge. So, really the process was sort of thinking through and feeling through and starting to realise that I really needed to go back to the start of science. So, the scientific enlightenment or the scientific revolution. And that’s why I’ve explicitly sort of connected it with Francis Bacon’s 17th century text, The Great Instauration. And in a way, sort of thinking through the way science is a culturally created, the sort of discipline and actually these texts are literary texts as well. So, it’s sort of taking it away from it just being about science as a kind of objective study and thinking about the most sort of partial or particular ways in which science… it’s a kind of scientific gaze and what that does in the world. 

Bronwen: Incredible. Which was the story that inspired you the most when making this work? 

Gayle: I think my starting point was really the theodolite, which was an instrument up there (Gayle points to a spot higher up in the gallery). I started through the research to think about the role of scientific instruments, and I thought that would be a really… sort of succinct and expansive way of thinking through more complex histories. The theodolite was an instrument of measurement – and I thought this was really interesting because it was more about these kind of complex histories. It was used both in sort of colonial land acquisition, so you could measure, or it was how you sort of demarcated ownership. So, it was used in the colonial project, but also used in Scotland by the landowners to start to, during the Highland clearances, to start to accumulate. But also it’s a gaze, you know, it also had the sense of wonder because one of those was taken to Mauritius for the transit of Saturn in 1789 as well. So that was a sort of starting point. But some of the more complex stories really were in relation to the Obia, who were traditional healers or doctors, mainly in the Caribbean, and that was outlawed completely. There was a huge amount of people that were imprisoned, tortured and killed as well, because the colonial sort of administration linked that with anti-colonial protests. So, as well as Scottish doctors, a huge amount of doctors trained in Edinburgh, went out and worked on slave ships and also in slave plantations, then owned slave plantations. But at the same time as that happened, also traditional healers and medicinal practices in those countries were outlawed. So these kind of complex sort of crossovers of histories. 

Bronwen: That’s really fascinating – like falling down a rabbit hole of research! I’m curious, why are the inscriptions on the pieces displayed upside down? What inspired the choice there? 

Gayle: Yeah, so I started thinking about the notion of, so this space here is, the Grand Gallery was built and designed by the architect Frances Fuchs, who’s an architect of the Enlightenment. So, the whole space itself is this idea; it’s almost like a giant greenhouse, or more broadly, the idea of the light of the enlightenment. A bit like the kind of scientific instruments revealing the truth of everything. And actually, I was like: ‘Well, why don’t we turn it on its head?’ And I started thinking about geotropism and the way in which roots sort of attracted a move towards gravity. So, it’s like turning things on its head. And even these strata sort of silk hand-painted hangings, they’re upside down as well. So actually, when you draw, it would be the other way around. I was thinking of them almost like sort of fantastical root growths, the instruments become that. So instead of, as a way of reimagining, I was thinking about shifting spatial or bodily perspectives. 

Bronwen: I love that. So, which artists have influenced you in your practice? 

Gayle: Oh gosh, that’s there’s too, there’s too many. It’s like, maybe in relation to this, let me think through what… It’s difficult because my whole life has been art. It’s like, as an artist at different points, different artists mean different things. But I think one of the earliest ones was actually the Henry Moore bronze sculptures at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh. And I think a lot of that, because I remember as a child climbing onto them and holding onto them and feeling the warmth of the bronze – and actually that kind of tactile, bodily, sort of embodied aspect. I mean, a lot of my work is not necessarily just sculptural and it’s sort of ritual, it’s performance, it’s bodily things. So I think that would be my pivotal work. 

Bronwen: Fabulous. I’m a second year fine art student at the moment, so I was just wondering if you have any advice for artists who are just coming into the world of contemporary art right now? 

Gayle: I think the interesting thing about being an artist is that you can really define that there is no one way of being an artist. There’s so many different ways. So, I think if you sort of look to things that you might not necessarily connect up with art, but actually they’re really important to you, they become integral to your art practice. Because my first degree was actually in post-colonial Sub-Saharan African politics and history. And then I’ve done a masters, I’ve done PhD at the Royal College. So it’s like, your sort of root, and you always come back to these things that are important to you. It’s an interesting way of, I think you have to just be really in the work. That is the only reason you’re doing it. 

Bronwen: Absolutely. I feel that, because I started out in journalism. 

Gayle: Did you? So it’s like, okay. But there might be that a lot of the time things will come out through, I think, anger and sort of… anger about things that – not anger direct towards people, but about social injustice or history. I think it’s a really good starting point. 

Bronwen: Yeah, that’s been a few of my projects so far. 

Gayle: Honestly, I think that sort of sustains us. This was really difficult because it was emotionally very difficult research. And at one point, I felt like everything was just going to be in black and white, and I think I was actually… It just felt so all-encompassing that, you know, some of this… I can’t read about another Scottish doctor and his, I mean, just horrific things that they kind of did. By the by, I’d read about in these very dry texts, they did sort of inventories of ownership by slave owners or doctors on slave ships. Sort of describing the best cures for scurvy or obviously, you know, it was emotionally probably the most difficult research I’ve done. 

Bronwen: It does take a toll, like I’ve done a project on the genocide in Gaza. Women’s reproductive rights in the United States…  

Gayle: It’s not easy, is it? 

Bronwen: I mean, it’s really not easy. 

Gayle: But you have to stay with it. And actually, I remember one of the presentations I even did at the museum here, at one point, I just started crying. Not because I was upset, but because it was like, it’s so emotionally kind of charged. And I thought, and they were absolutely fine about it, and they were like, “Oh, it’s really powerful, you’re talking”. And I thought, actually, one of the things is maybe people should have been more emotional. They knew all this stuff was going on. 

Bronwen: Yeah, but it feels like we should be more emotional now as well, because people DO know what’s going on, maybe more than ever before.

Gayle: Completely, completely. When I do historical and archival research, I look for the emotional content, and that’s what I’m looking for. And some of these are just some of the saddest poignant things. William McDowell at Saint Kitts, a huge slave owner; they named all their slaves whatever they wanted, and he named them all these Scottish names. So, you can see there’s Gordon, there’s Flora, it’s all around on these. I mean, that’s just horrific, isn’t it? It’s poignant and tragic and everything all together. And then Chambers Street here used to be called Jamaica Street; that was the original. So, it’s all sort of connected up.  

Bronwen: Thank you so much for your time, Gayle – you’ve given me so much here! Your work is amazing, so well done!  

Gayle: Okay, fabulous. Lovely to chat to you and good luck with your studies! Let’s stay in touch.

Links

• Edinburgh Science Festival 2026 at the National Museum of Scotland.

Gayle Chong Kwan’s The Great Instauration will run until Sunday 19th April as part of the Edinburgh Science Festival.