Visual Arts

The Gallery

Rooted in our island culture and deeply engaged with international contemporary dialogue, An Tobar Gallery aims to be a vibrant focal point for diverse visual, material, and cultural practices.

Hosting three or four curated exhibitions each year, with work from a broad spectrum of practices.
Our programming spans from internationally recognised names to emerging artists embarking on their first solo exhibitions. Featured works vary widely, celebrating technical installations like the Society of Scottish Artist's Life With Water (aligned with UN Sustainable Development Goal 14), the rich diversity of Glasgow Print Studio's The Love of Print, and the depth of Jemima Hall’s Seaweed Shelter.

The artistic theme for 2026 is UN Sustainabilty Goal 15, Life on Land. We have begun the year with Calum Wallis The Ground Shakes which traces a geological journey across Scotland, Wallis follows the Highland Boundary and Great Glen fault lines as markers through a landscape in perpetual flux. In the summer we have Eve Campbell with Transit, a study of the West Coast of Scotland with questions of transience and sustainability, and lastly to come we have The World We Live In from a group of artists and scientists who travelled together, on a North Atlantic Island Residency.

We regularly host Work In Progress exhibitions by local artists, and we offer advice on how to apply, create, and install exhibitions, get in touch if this is of interest to you.

We also have a fully equiped Production Suite for artists to use free of charge. The suite includes equipment to create film, animation, sound, digital work, and digital photography,

Workshops

An Tobar runs an ongoing programme of workshops and commissions. We have many art and craft and cross-discipline workshop projects that run throughout the year with our Creative Learning team. In the past two years we have run Seaweed Foraging Walks, an artist’s residency and print workshop with Bryan Angus, and this year we have Pottery, Life Drawing, and Drawing with Calum Wallis, Photography with Ben Douglas and Textile and Sustainability with Rhona Jack workshops.

Commissions

We regularly commission new work and you will find various commissioned pieces around the buildings, including work by Erlend Tait above the entrance to An Tobar and Pinky Maclure’s stained galss window by the Snug. We have also commissioned a spectacular mural by Glasgow based artist Ellie Mills for our Charlotte Aitken Trust Writer’s Studio. Our commissions have also extended into the landscape to include Emma Herman-Smith’s FANK on Loch Frisa and sculpture on the Ross of Mull, Andrea Geile’s The Chlorophylls at Lettermore and Calum Wallis’ Framed Photography project in the entrance to An Tobar, as part of our artist’s led workshops in summer 2026.

Community

Our spaces around the buildings and An Tobar Café provide a further opportunity for local artists to exhibit and sell their work. Each year we host the Highland Art Prize showcasing local artwork and the Tobermory High School Creative and Technical Learning exhibitions.

Projects and collaborations

RSA200: Celebrating Together

An Tobar presents a programme of screenings and a life drawing class hosted by George Donald RSA, as part of RSA200: Celebrating Together — a programme exploring how artists trace life in motion through film, drawing, and the enduring power of observation. See our Join In section for details.

Running RSA200: Celebrating Together at An Tobar and Mull Theatre has demonstrated the real value of bringing Scotland’s national cultural heritage and contemporary artistic practice directly into rural and island communities. For audiences in Tobermory, access to work by Royal Scottish Academicians and RSA award winners - often encountered in major cultural centres elsewhere in Scotland - was brought directly to their doorstep. Across several months, the programme presented a substantial moving-image series spanning themes including landscape, memory, ecology, identity and place, alongside a life-drawing workshop led by George Donald RSA. The programme was particularly resonant on Mull because much of the work itself engages with Scotland’s landscapes, histories and cultural inheritance, creating meaningful connections between internationally recognised artistic practice and the lived experience of an island community. A selection of the artists in the programme have direct links with Mull and An Tobar Gallery, artists such as Rachel Maclean, Dalziel + Scullion, Graham Fagen and Calum Wallis.

Perhaps most importantly, RSA200: Celebrating Together reinforced why cultural opportunities in rural Scotland should not be considered an optional extra, but an essential part of a healthy Scottish arts ecology. Geographic isolation can make it considerably more difficult for island communities to experience the breadth of Scotland’s visual arts landscape. By working in partnership with the RSA, An Tobar and Mull Theatre helped challenge that sense of cultural distance, creating opportunities for local audiences to encounter, discuss and participate in Scottish art without having to leave the island. The programme also strengthened the idea that cultural exchange should work in both directions: rural audiences are not simply recipients of culture delivered from Scotland’s cities, but active participants in Scotland’s contemporary cultural conversation. For a place like Tobermory, programmes such as RSA200 bring national cultural life into the community while recognising that rural Scotland has an equally important contribution to make to the story of Scottish art.

Calum Hall

Visual Arts Curator

An Tobar Art Room

An Tobar Art Room is availabe for use by artists, we are hosting drawing, textile, photography, pottery workshops, life-drawing classes and artists residencies in 2026 and 2027, see our what’s on page for details.

Society of Scottish Artists - Satellites programme

An Tobar and Mull Theatre’s visual arts curator is the Society of Scottish Artists Satellite Coordinator for 2026, a programme devised in April 2020 as a way of connecting the SSA with all the diverse regions of Scotland. Each area has its own ‘satellite’ acting locally as ears and eyes. They inform the Society about art events and opportunities in their areas, potential exhibition spaces and anything else that they feel may be of interest to SSA members. 

An Fenten | An Tobar (The well) Artist’s Exchange 2026. Mull + Cornwall

This artist’s exchange connects artists working in two geographically and culturally distinct, yet closely related, regions—both shaped by their landscapes, communities, seasonality, and relationship to tourism. The project offers space for artists to share ideas, develop new work, and build relationships across distance. In partnership with CAMP (Contemporary Art Membership Portal) and Creative Kernow.

An Tobar Gallery is a member of the Scottish Contemporary Art Network

Own Art

Own Art is a national initiative that makes buying contemporary art and craft affordable by providing interest-free credit for the purchase of original work. You can find more information here