Collection: Keith Salmon

Based in Scotland since 1998, Keith Salmon is a professional artist who has also been visually impaired for the last 30 years. Born in Essex in 1959, he studied Fine Art at Shrewsbury and Falmouth Schools of Art as well as Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic. He and his partner Anita moved to Ayrshire in 1998 where he works from his studio at Courtyard Studios in Irvine.

In 2009 he won the prestigious Jolomo Award for Scottish landscape painting. Since then, his work has taken him to Germany, Brazil and the USA, as well as working on a large scale drawing project in his home town of Irvine. Some of his latest artworks are now starting to incorporate sound. In 2016 he worked in collaboration with Microsoft researcher Neel Joshi, Ayrshire sound engineer Graham Byron and filmmaker Dan Thornton to create The Oregon Project, a large scale audio visual work that premiered at the “9e2 Art, Science and Technology Exhibition” in Seattle (October 2016) and at the Tent Gallery in Edinburgh in April 2017.

Since then Keith has been developing new audio-visual work with Graham Byron and they have now completed 20 ‘audio paintings’. The development of this new audio-visual work was kindly supported by one of their local art venues, the Barony Centre in West Kilbride and between 2017 and 2022, they held three exhibitions showing the gradual progression of the work and ideas. In Autumn 2023 they exhibited their first full exhibition of ‘Painting with Sound’ at the Scottish Maritime Museum. This show comprised 17 ‘audio paintings’, each one with an individual video-soundscape accessible via QR codes or available to hear live in the gallery space.