The latest exhibition in the Tower Foyer Gallery showcases some of the most recent additions to the University of Dundee Museum Collections, all made over the last two years.
From acquiring brand new pieces fresh out of the Degree Show at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD) to receiving donations relating to the teaching of medicine and nursing, the museum has obtained a fascinating range of artworks and artefacts that we hope will not only inspire our visitors but also improve the educational potential of the collections.
Raymond Honeyman (born 1950), studied Printed Textiles at the Art College and has gone on to a highly successful career, designing textiles for Liberty, Ehrman and others. This is one of 19 pieces kindly donated to the DJCAD Collections by the artist. Daffodils was created during his postgraduate year and was published in Design magazine. Honeyman has always preferred to create intricately patterned artworks as the basis for textile designs. This is a great example, using Indian ink to created art nouveau-inspired repeated patterns of pink daffodils in tandem with other flowers to create a unique octagonal artwork.
One of the recent highlights of our exhibition programme was Nell Baxter and Dundee’s Celtic Revival in the Lamb Gallery (2024-25), which showcased a major donation over drawings and designs from the artist’s family. Although these included numerous pencil designs for embroidery, we have any completed textile pieces, so we were delighted to receive this further piece from her family which they had only recently located. Nell Baxter, later Helen Kippen (1874-1952) was a Dundee-born artist and designer who took inspiration from Celtic art and literature to create a wide variety of decorative art pieces. Her love of complex entwined forms and geometric patterns can be seen in this cushion cover, for which we also have an original pencil design (in different colours).
For more information on Nell Baxter and Dundee’s Celtic Revival check out our previous article on the Culture Blog: Nell Baxter and Dundee’s Celtic Revival – University culture
Poppy Gannon was one of our most recent graduates from DJCAD, studying Art & Philosophy. This intricate piece was one of the works she displayed during the 2025 Degree Show, with won her a Generator Projects Art Prize and an invitation to show in the RSA New Contemporaries 2026 exhibition. Her work involved collecting, caring for and creatively engaging with natural materials. In this piece she has altered and grafted leaves together with delicate stitching, seeking to remind viewers of the link between our own actions and the future of the planet.
This leather doctor’s bag full of medical instruments was given to the Tayside Medical History Museum by the widow of Duthie Douglas, a building contractor who had helped to dig some of the foundations for Ninewells Hospital in 1965-66. This led him to develop an interest in medical history, and it’s thought that he acquired this bag from a saleroom in Angus. In cataloguing the instruments, we discovered that some of them are engraved LTP and some MF. These are the initials of Lloyd Turton Price and Margaret Fairlie, two significant figures in Dundee’s medical history. Price was Professor of Surgery in Dundee from 1919 until his early death in 1933. Margaret Fairlie was engaged to Price at the time of his death and presumably inherited his instruments. She went on become Professor of Obstetrics & Gynaecology in the Medical School, Scotland’s first female University professor. Only a selection of the instruments is included in the exhibition – as you can see here there are many more!
This badge is part of a large collection of nursing material recently given to us following a clear-out at the Kirkcaldy campus of the School of Health Sciences. The collection shows the changing development of nurses’ training over the years. From the late 19th century, this training was based in individual hospitals, with trainee nurses living on the premises. In Dundee this started at the Royal Infirmary in the 1870s, while in Kirkcaldy, Victoria Hospital opened in 1890. A fever hospital was added to it in 1899 which took on fifteen probationer nurses. A more formal Nurses Training School opened in 1961 in the same building, later named the East Fife School of Nursing. In 1973, it merged with two others in the region to become Fife College of Nursing. Dundee had opened its College of Nursing in 1969 and there were similar colleges in Perth and Angus. Further mergers in the 1980s led to the creation of Tayside College of Nursing & Midwifery, based at Ninewells, and a new campus opening for Fife College of Nursing & Midwifery in Kirkcaldy. In 1996, the two colleges were merged to form the University of Dundee’s School of Nursing & Midwifery, now part of the Faculty of Health.
We hope you get the chance to visit the Tower Foyer Gallery to see these and over 50 other artworks and artefacts featured in the exhibition, which runs until 27 March 2025.
https://www.dundee.ac.uk/events/recent-acquisitions-2026
