2025 in Review: Exhibitions
We take a look back at what's filled DCA galleries this year
The exhibition schedule for 2025 looked slightly different as we took a break over the summer months so some vital upgrades to the lighting and windows in the galleries could take place. Upgrades aside, 2025 still saw our galleries filled with beautiful contemporary art throughout the year: it started with Soft Impressions, featuring the work of Helen Cammock, Ingrid Pollard and Camara Taylor, then followed by Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood curated by Hettie Judah with Hayward Gallery Touring. After the closure period, we see 2025 out with Lauren Gault: bone stone voice alone, a major new exhibition from a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone Collage of Art and Design.
Published
Soft Impressions
The year kicked off with Soft Impressions which was in DCA Galleries until Sun 23 March 2025. Featuring the work of Helen Cammock, Ingrid Pollard and Camara Taylor, the exhibition focused on the artists work in print, with significant works created in DCA Print Studio set alongside installation, moving image, textiles and a painted mural. We have recently launched two new editions, by Helen Cammock and Ingrid Pollard, that were made when the artists were undertaking their residencies in Print Studio.
Great variety of works on display that convey a consistent and interesting narrative across artists and mediums. I found the arrangement of many exhibits really engaging - I felt encouraged to interrogate and consider the worksAudience feedback
The artwork made me reflect on different perspectives, and I enjoyed how engaging the displays were. I felt really engaged with the artwork and space - it encouraged me to think and explore. The atmosphere was joyful and inspiring. It was a fantastic experience!ÂAudience feedback
Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood
Then, in April 2025, Acts of Creation opened: a major group exhibition, curated by Hettie Judah with Hayward Gallery Touring, that brought together the joys, heartaches, myths, mess and mishaps of motherhood through over 100 artworks, from the feminist avant-garde to the present day.  
Featuring the work of more than 60 modern and contemporary artists, the exhibition approached motherhood as a creative enterprise, albeit one at times tempered by ambivalence, exhaustion or grief. Acts of Creation  explored lived experience of motherhood, offering a complex account that engages with contemporary concerns about gender, caregiving and reproductive rights.
I am a Parent Artist. Today I feel seen. I feel like I belong as an Artist.
Really wonderful collection of work. Everyone should see it if they get the chance! Joyful in parts but also quite painful.Very moving
This exhibit was really really !great!
I love DCA! Another juicy, exciting, thought provoking exhibition :) <3
Our galleries then closed for the summer months
There was then an extended closure period over the summer as our galleries shut their doors to receive some vital upgrades to the windows and lighting system. We caught up with Exhibition Manager, Adrian Murray, about what the upgrades mean for exhibitions at DCA.
Watch now | Gallery Upgrade
bone stone voice alone
bone stone voice alone, a major new exhibition then opened in October 2025 - the first exhibition since the extended gallery closure. Curated by May Rosenthal Sloan, the exhibition marks Gault’s first major solo exhibition in a Scottish gallery for over a decade. Gault studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, spending her first, formative years as an artist in the city of Dundee.
Working across sculpture, print, sound and moving image, Gault uses the mythological figure of Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to investigate the land of Tayside and beyond. As a being who was punished for talking too much and ultimately subjected to an existence in which her voice could only repeat the last words spoken to her, Echo becomes a metaphor for censorship of speech. Collaborating with people across a range of disciplines and experience, from specialist stonemasons and manufacturers of scientific glassware to quilting experts and suppliers of industrial machinery, Gault creates a series of works that draw on multilayered histories of Scotland's land and the unheard, undervalued or silenced voices of those who work on it and the humans, and non-humans, whose existence is deeply connected with it.
The exhibition runs until Sun 18 January
Artist Interview | Lauren Gault
Gault is determined, assured: she wants us to understand land injustice and the urgency within it – the sheer bulk of these issues, and the forgotten voices in this struggle. Research ruptures through each object, every placement. 'bone stone voice alone' suggests that through the land, and through sharing its stories, we can push back against enforced hierarchies of knowledge. Crucially, Gault does all this in a way that is so cleverly elegant that it is impossible not to become immersed in the delicacy of her world.Lisette May Monroe, Frieze Magazine
Exhibitions at DCA
The galleries at DCA are always free to enter and drop-in - there is no need to book. Open Tue - Sun, 11:00-18:00 (open late Thu until 19:00). We have a very exciting year of exhibitions planned for 2026 and beyond, with a full programme of events - from film screenings to guest talks and family art activities - for each show.
