Yellow Towers Community Exhibition

Aim

Yellow Towers is a community art project about Leith's wind turbine jacket foundations, seeking funding for an exhibition and publication.

Yellow Towers is a multidisciplinary community art project reflecting on the 18 wind turbine jacket foundations in the Port of Leith. The project exists now as a website and we seek to expand it into a physical exhibition and publication.

THE PROJECT SO FAR

Since September 2026, we have been collecting responses to the Yellow Towers to host on our project website, ranging from visual art to sculpture to sound to written works. The yellow jacket foundations have inspired emotional reactions from Edinburgh residents and beyond, being that at their height (up to 91 metres) they are highly visible from around Edinburgh, the surrounding areas, and even from across the Firth of Forth in Fife. The yellow jacket foundations are only in Leith temporarily, and will begin to be installed at their final site Inch Cape outside of Dundee in late 2026/early 2027. We want to record people’s artistic responses and personal reflections on them while they are still here.

Many locals have had a strong response to the towers, whether they have been interested in the facts and logistics about them, or whether they are simply interested in them as beautiful objects. The project is open to the public to submit their responses and ideas to the website through a form, and is growing by the day. At the time of writing, we have had over 70 responses across various artforms.

Yellow Towers has already been featured on local news and on the Inch Cape website, and we anticipate more attention in the coming months, as the jacket foundations start making their way out of the Port of Leith, changing the skyline once again.

THE EXHIBITIONS

We are seeking funding to put together two exhibitions of this work, starting with an exhibition at Out of the Blue Drill Hall. The location is perfect for what we envision – a large, accessible space in Leith with plenty of space for our exhibition as well as workshops. It was important to us to find a place that would be able to host the vast array of creative responses to the towers, including a 4m-tall sculpture and a proposed dance performance! The Drill Hall has excellent foot traffic, and regularly hosts exhibitions and events. The exhibition would run for 2 weeks in February 2027. 

Following this initial exhibition, Yellow Towers intends to move to The Wee Museum of Memory at Ocean Terminal for an extended exhibition later in the year. The jacket foundations are immediate neighbours of Ocean Terminal, making this a fitting spot to remember them from. The Wee Museum of Memory has a history of recording and remembering Leith’s industrial history, and the extended Yellow Towers exhibition in spring 2027 would add to this legacy. The Living Memory Association, which operates the Wee Museum of Memory, has been bringing people together through reminiscence since 1986. They believe that sharing memories helps us connect, revealing what makes each life unique, and what we all have in common. With the organisation’s vast experience of running workshops for the general public, an extended Yellow Towers exhibition at this location would encourage and facilitate public engagement with artwork and the jacket foundations beyond the jacket foundations’ time in the Port of Leith.

THE WORKSHOP

An additional £250 will allow us to have a free workshop as part of the exhibition at Out of the Blue Drill Hall in February 2027. In this workshop we would invite the public to create their own responses to the towers through a guided session. This workshop will be led by one of the participants on the project. 

THE PUBLICATION

A further £1,900 would allow us to prepare and print a minimum of 200 copies of a 40-page A4 risograph publication as a companion to this project. This publication would explore the process of this project, feature selected works from the exhibition and information about the towers, printed locally at Out of the Blueprint and published by Onion Press, who specialise in risograph. The publication will be a keepsake to remember the towers and this project, for both those locally and those further afield who may be unable to experience the work in person.

In comparison to other forms of printing, riso is more environmentally conscious, using soy-based inks. The “masters” that the machine uses to create stencils for each print are made from rice paper and are biodegradable and we would primarily use recycled paper. Our cost estimates are based on a 40-page publication printed in two colours, plus labour costs of design, artworking and editing. Additional funds will allow us to order a larger print run.

The budget includes a £50 honorarium for up to 20 contributors whose work, written or visual, is reproduced in the publication.

This publication will begin development after the exhibition, for release in April 2027. Backers who choose the publication as a reward will receive it as soon as it’s off the press, and it will also be available for purchase online. The publication will be priced at around £15. Profit from selling the publication will be paid to Maria and Christina, who will design and write the publication (these costs are not included in the crowdfunding budget).

BUDGET BREAKDOWN

Venue Fee for Out of the Blue Drill Hall: £1000

Exhibition display (printing, framing/mounting, signage, etc): £1000

Exhibition preparation: £500 (set up time, design and print of guide booklet, etc)

Project management: £2000 (approx. 2.5 days* each)

Marketing: £750 (approx. 0.5 day* each and ads/posters, distribution)

Workshop delivery fee and materials: £250 

Publication honorarium (for any artwork which is reproduced): £1000 (20 x £50)

Print costs for 200 copies: £900

5% Contingency

Total: £7770 overall

* day rates calculated using Scottish Artists Union recommended rates of pay for artists with 5+ years experience

Any funds over our target will allow us to print additional copies of the publication and pay another participant to deliver an additional workshop either at the Drill Hall or The Wee Museum of Memory.

WHO WE ARE

We are Christina Neuwirth and Maria Stoian, local creatives who love the towers and are leading this project. We are developing this project under Onion Press, an Edinburgh-based risograph small press.

Christina is a writer, researcher and bookseller. An experienced project manager, they have worked with Scottish PEN, Literature Alliance Scotland, Scottish Book Trust, and as the festival director of First Date Romance Fiction Festival. Christina’s novella Amphibian was published in 2018 by Speculative Books and was shortlisted for several awards, including Scotland’s National Book Awards. Christina is also the author of The Quine Report: Quantifying Inequality in Scottish Literature. Christina works at Lighthouse Bookshop and as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University.

Maria is an illustrator and comic artist and one-half of Onion Press. She has made several publications under Onion Press and beyond, and will produce the publication for Yellow Towers. Maria and Onion Press have a proven track record of delivering exhibitions and publications. Their first exhibition, I Am A Rock, debuted six publications in an exhibition at Out of the Blue Drill Hall. In 2026, Onion held an exhibition for The Prize Onion, an award to support a publication from new Scottish talent. Outside of Onion Press, Maria works as a freelance illustrator/designer, and as a Teaching Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art. 

Funding method

All or nothing – this project will only receive pledges if it reaches its target of £7,770 by 28th November 2026 at 11:59pm