Our Crowdfunder for an exhibition and publication is now live! We are seeking funding to put together two exhibitions of this work, starting with an exhibition at Out of the Blue Drill Hall, and later an extended exhibition at The Wee Museum of Memory.
The Crowdfunder is live until 23:59, 28 November!
Rewards include...
- Personal thank you on the website!
- A Yellow Towers pin badge!
- An A3 risograph print!
- A copy of the publication!
- A personal thank you in print!
Out of the Blue Drill Hall 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.
Learn more about our plans at the Crowdfunder!
We are blown away by the enthusiasm you have shown the project, thanks so much for your contributions and your support! We have now updated the website with lots of new things, including our first sculpture (link), poem, lots of new names, lots of new photos, sketches and artworks! Thanks to the Edinburgh Minute for sharing our call for contributions, and to everyone who has got in touch directly, if we owe you an email we’re sorry and we’ll be responding as soon as we can!
We wanted to highlight two contributors who have work on show this weekend:
Malcolm’s cardboard tower is on show at Sculpture Court this weekend at the Technicians’ Exhibition.
And you can see Felicity Inkpen (painter of First of the Turbines) show new work at Colony of Artists and Coburg House Print Room II.
If you would like to make a new piece of art and are applying for funding to support the development, please get in touch with us so we can write you a letter of support (if that would help!)
We’re going on TV, maybe????!!!!! Watch this space.
If you are a contributor and you are exhibiting your work somewhere, get in touch and let us know!
Will be posting with updates again soon. Thanks so much! Love to everyone and love to the yellow towers!
Christina Neuwirth
On this day Maria & I visited exhibitions at Collective on Calton Hill, where we also had a great view of the Firth of Forth. We spotted the Seaway Alfa Lift vessel approaching the Port of Leith. It’s a very distinctive-looking vessel and you may have seen it before in Leith, it’s a big red ship. We tracked it on this website: https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/details/9889980
And we saw it was coming to Leith! We frantically took many many pictures of the towers, thinking this would be the last chance to see all 18 of them together. It took several days for the Seaway Alfa Lift to arrive at Leith, and when she did I walked down to the port to see her. Here are some pictures (pictures).
In the end, she went away again and didn’t appear to take any towers with her BUT we will of course keep you posted. I assume she took some pin piles (brown and yellow long tubes) with her as these will need to be installed into (?) the seabed before the jacket foundation can be popped on top.
Christina Neuwirth
On 26th August 2026 Maria & I visited the Forth Ports marshalling yard at Leith! We’re very grateful to Forth Ports and Inch Cape for allowing us an insight into their work and to get closer to the towers than we’ve ever been before!
Our goal for the visit was to get a better sense of scale (see: scale), as this was the main thing which we found puzzling. We had done some googling so we knew how tall the towers were, but it was still hard to imagine or put into any kind of perspective.
On the day, we visited alongside a group of marine architecture & engineering researchers from University of Strathclyde. It was fascinating to be there with experts in the field, as Maria and I have no knowledge of engineering, just a keen interest in finding out more about what’s happening at the marshalling yard, and with the striking and very visible yellow towers specifically. We brought a SLR camera and sketchpads.
After an interesting presentation from Inch Cape and Forth Ports, we were given PPE and led out to the jackets and pin piles. As we stood under the towers, I asked Maria how she felt, and she said she still couldn’t tell how big they were. And it really still was difficult to take in the height of the jackets. I wasn’t sure how far we could wander, but then Ewan from Forth Ports encouraged us to walk all the way to the retaining wall as we’d have a good view of Inchkeith from there (which, of course, had been the subject of one of Maria’s previous comics projects). So we walked under one of the jackets, and out the other side to where pin piles were propped up.
One of the researchers saw us approach the pin piles and told us that they make a great noise when you shout into them, so we did just that and it really did make a great noise.
Thanks so much to Forth Ports and Inch Cape for letting us visit! It was a wonderful experience.
Christina Neuwirth