Edinburgh Art Festival review: Jupiter Rising
A trip to the woods and green spaces of the sculpture park to see the experimental art festival Jupiter Rising casts an enchanting spell, finds Susan Mansfield
Jupiter Rising 2026
Jupiter Artland
Jupiter Rising is now well a established part of the summer in Edinburgh as an intimate festival focusing on experimental, artist-programmed work. Part of the Edinburgh Art Festival programme since 2022, it’s a welcome trip out of the crowded city into the woods and green spaces of the sculpture park.
The surroundings bestow on it a magic which comes from dancing in the woods as the last light vanishes from the sky, a kind of Midsummer Night’s Dream effect where identity is fluid and transformations feel possible. Many of the performers at this year’s Rising are artists known for their visual art practice, slipping on a different guise.
After a week of mixed weather, the sun shone as the revellers started to gather: an eclectic crowd – jeans and trainers, tutus and backless dresses, flowers and fairy wings. This year, the event was curated by artist Sgàire Wood, whose solo exhibition, In Pride, In Piety, In Vigilance, is currently in the Steading Gallery.
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Now well on the way to establishing a studio practice, Wood has been better known for performance and drag cabaret, the co-founder of Glasgow’s much-missed queer nightclub, Bonjour. She spent most of the evening on stage hosting Sgàiroke, as she has for several years at Jupiter Rising, and had no shortage of volunteers ready to belt out American Pie or a blast of Springsteen.
A key part of Edinburgh Art Festival’s commissioned programme this year is American artist Del LaGrace Volcano, and several of her films exploring trans and queer identity and sexuality, remastered for the festival, were showing on a loop in the dovecot, a space rather too small for the number of people who wanted to see them.
Audiences pressed into Jupiter Artland’s rococo ballroom for a performance by Desert Kingsnake, a project created by Kirstin Halliday and Aniela Piasecka, working with Viktoria Szaboova, though which of the artists was inside the figure-hugging snakeskin-print costume, I can’t say.
When we entered, the snake was draped across a leather sofa. As electronic music began and mounted to a throb, they coiled and shimmied to the floor where they writhed elegantly, essence of reptile. Later, they donned a pair of high heeled black boots and towered over us. The conclusion of the act was a shedding of their skin.
Meanwhile, Irish-born Glasgow-based artist Holly O’Brien shape-shifted into a mermaid in the Glasshouse space, which is itself rather magical, especially at night, with its Florence Peake-painted floor. O’Brien works at the intersection of sculpture, installation and performance and constructs full body costumes from latex.
Here, she luxuriated in an inflatable bath, her beautiful tail flipped nonchalantly over the side. While she gave every indication of ignoring the room full her spectators, the subtly provocative nature of her movements suggested she was well aware she was being watched.
Earlier on in the same space, Princessa Mangione III, the performer alter-ego of the writer Shola Von Reinhold, who won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel LOTE, had been playing her harp and creating soundscapes with a loop machine.
The Woodland Stage is Jupiter Rising at its most magical, glitter balls hanging from the trees, sculptures sparkling behind the stage, the light fading in the sky from pink to green over West Lothian, and the dance-floor lights accentuating the darkness rather than illuminating it.
Artist and photographer Matthew Arthur Williams, as his DJ alter-ego Junglehussi, created mesmerising beats, and artist Jamie Crewe, as their alter-ego poisonous relationship [no caps], performed their blend of house music and R&B with emotionally charged vocals.
Jupiter Rising is about the whole rather than the parts: not so much the individual acts as the spell cast by dancing in the woods on a summer evening, entering that Midsummer Night’s Dream space of possible transformations. As I drove home, over Wilkieston, there was a big, yellow, enchanted half-moon.
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