Biography

Louise Todd is an artist and academic based in Edinburgh (Scotland). Her artwork reflects how we gaze upon, experience, and perform leisure and tourism. Louise is particularly interested in narratives of visual culture, and the tourist gaze. She works primarily in painting and drawing, with oil paint, pigment, and mediums, alongside charcoal and graphite.

Louise studied a BA (Hons) Fine Art: Sculpture, then an MPhil Art and Design in Organisational Contexts at Glasgow School of Art in the 1990s. Following this, she then worked in the arts, culture, media, and higher education sectors. Louise undertook a PhD in tourism and festival studies, using semiotics and visual methods, at Edinburgh Napier University (2007-2010). She continues to work there as a Professor of cultural Tourism and Festivlas, leading the Tourism Research Centre, as well as being a lead on public engagement and visual methods and ethnography in interdisciplinary research.

Louise’s art and research are complementary practices. Louise has exhibited her paintings in group exhibitions, and her work has been purchased by private collectors and a local gallery. She is a member of Visual Art Scotland (VAS) and Paradigms, a collective of women artists based in Edinburgh. Louise has also written about her paintings and presented her artwork at academic research seminars and conferences, in line with her academic role.

Artist Statement

I am an artist and academic based in Edinburgh. My work is influenced by material artefacts, public discourses, memories, and lived experiences. Framed by mythologies, imaginaries, and the tourist gaze, my paintings invite the viewer to engage with narratives around the visual cultures of leisure and tourism. My work evolves through gradual layers of transparent oil paint and mediums, in series, over time, and across scales.

Photography, sightseeing, memories, experiences, and performances are core to my practice. These mirror mutual gazing and othering, alongside non-contextualised spaces and places of. Visual imaginaries emerge through historical and contemporary lenses that reflect key discourses around tourism. Reflexive dialogues amongst the artist, subject, and viewer question how we gaze, with curiosity.

My recent series of paintings is concerned with leisure hauntologies and mythologies. In this work, past, present, and future, interplay with a cast of characters performing leisure in non-spaces. Here, concrete and intangible imaginaries, memories, artefacts, and experiences evoke the ‘not yet’, and ‘never was’ through the viewer’s associations and memories as ocular phenomena. Spectral figures emerge and fade within uncertain places. They appear to play and perform for of the viewer, while returning a curious gaze.