Tracing Zeljko Kujundzic in Scotland: Art and Migration in Post-War Edinburgh

By Jelena Sofronijevic, 17.01.2026

Zeljko Kujundzic

The Golden Eagle, Nannie Katharin Wells’ 1960 anthology of poetry to Scottish nationalism, is more closely associated with the colour red than gold. Not in its socialist persuasion, but because of the distinctive woodcut print of Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags on its cover, designed by the artist Zeljko Kujundzic (1920-2003). Its colour palette of orange-red, cut with electric blue, was typical of Kujundzic who, between 1948 and 1958, found place and community in the city of Edinburgh below.

Kujundzic was a multidisciplinary artist and fifth-generation craftsman of Turkish descent. He was born in Subotica, then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, soon-to-be-renamed Yugoslavia and now present-day Serbia. The artist’s autobiography Torn Canvas published by Richard Paterson Ltd in 1957, traces his many migrations in pursuit of education in Dalmatia (now Croatia), then Venice between 1939-40 and onto the Royal College of Art in Budapest between 1941-44.

Kujundzic’s proclaimed Yugoslav identity and language persisted throughout his life, along with his Turkish family name and cultural heritage. A man referred to in his autobiography as ‘Uncle Jeno’, a goldsmith or kujundžija, practiced the family trade which first began ‘in the service of the Sultans’. This legacy endures through generations: Kujundzic’s eldest child, Kate Enewold (Kathleen Kujundzic), continues to work in metal, particularly silver, today.

The distinctive, orange-red shade of Kujundzic’s woodcut on Well’s anthology can be traced throughout the artist’s prints and works on paper. Paprika was particularly popular in the Ottoman Empire which, for much of the 16th and 17th centuries, spanned the countries of Central Europe. The red peppers from which it is made were first referenced in print in Hungary in 1604 by the name Török-bors (Turkish pepper), and were quickly cultivated in the Balkans, and South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), once transported to Europe from South America by Spanish and Portuguese colonialists.

We also see this distinctive ‘paprika’ shade in the textiles of Senta-born Bernat Klein (1922-2014). However, despite the connections between the artists - both were born in the region of Vojvodina, where both Serbian and Hungarian remain official languages, and were active in Edinburgh after the Second World War - there is nothing to suggest they ever crossed paths in Scotland.

Klein, in pursuit of assimilation, distanced himself from the region and its diasporas, whereas Kujundzic actively supported displaced artists from Yugoslavia and Hungary through exhibitions, commissions, and cultural connections from Glasgow to London. Food, however, often arises in the memories and memorials of both artists. In Shelley Klein's The See-Through House: My Father in Full Colour (2020), a biographical account of Klein's life, the author emphasises Klein’s relationship with food.  Paprikás - a potent dish enjoyed across Central Europe - is still prepared today by members of the Lorimer family, who lived with the Kujundzics in Edinburgh in the early 1950s. Robert (R. L. C.) Lorimer (1918-1996), a distinguished publisher, shared a passion for literature not only with Kujundzic, but with a successive lodger of the family, Ian Hamilton Finlay - whose first texts were exclusively illustrated by Kujundzic. The same ‘intense’ blues and reds, and ‘clean’ dove greys, as described by the artist in Torn Canvas about his first toy boat, recur in these works on paper, such as The Sea Bed and Other Stories (1958).

Before establishing more permanent lodgings in Sciennes Gardens, the Kujundzic family had lived on a sailboat in the harbour at Musselburgh. Kujundzic’s partner and frequent collaborator Ann Kujundzic sewed their eldest child a colourful sleeping bag, and she nestled in a cubby hole under the bow.

The friendship between Robert Lorimer and Hamilton Finlay later broke down, and Kujundzic left Scotland for British Columbia. Here, Kujundzic and Ann helped establish the Nelson School of Fine Arts, now known as the Kootenay School of Art. This radical education programme was a departure from his previous pedagogical experience as a Visiting Lecturer for the Arts Council of Great Britain at the Edinburgh College of Art.

During this time in British Columbia Kujundzic developed complex public sculpture, often featuring the thunderbird; a mythological bird-like spirit widespread in indigenous and First Nation cultures, which is deeply rooted in his own migrations and movements across borders and seas.

But despite moving away from Scotland, Kujundzic maintained his connection with the country from afar, and its influence endured in his practice. Letters to the Kujundzic family in British Columbia in the 1970s, were recently displayed in the exhibition SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries with Travelling Gallery (2025). They illustrate how the artist remained active and engaged with Scotland’s cultural communities. From the scrawl, we can explicate the outcomes of unrealised projects, if not assume conversations about seafaring, classical mythology, and contemporary practices.

Kujundzic’s time on the western isles of Scotland reveals itself particularly important. He is widely considered to have developed one of the world’s first experimental solar kilns, experimenting with solar heat following close study of sun-baked bricks produced by Anasazi Indians near Montezuma’s Castle in Arizona between the 7th and 13th centuries. This interest in ceramics as a medium can certainly be traced in Edinburgh and his relation to artists including Bernard Leach and Joan Faithfull, who established a pottery on the Isle of Mull.

The shores of Mull appear again in an experimental film recently salvaged from the depths of the family archives, ‘Quest under Sea’ (c1950s). This eight-minute film follows the artist and his family across land, along beaches, and into the waters of the western coast. There is no clear narrative, blurring the boundaries between experimental film, documentary, and holiday footage - as well as concrete poetry, with the artist’s hand-drawn intertitles or interventions. It reveals Kujundzic’s deep relation to water and natural environments, as prominent in the passages of Torn Canvas recounting his natural ability for swimming and fishing, and wonder and affinity for the Dalmatian coast. Likewise, archive editions of The Scotsman - to which Kujundzic was a regular contributor - provide further details about the artist’s wider ecologically and environmentally-engaged practice, such as his efforts to cultivate seaweed.

Kujundzic’s paintings currently held in private collections and family homes across the UK reinforce an apparent interest in geology, evident in the scenes of showing the extraction of granite from Tormore and stone quarrying depicted at the opening of the film. Negated by the black-and-white footage of ‘Quest Under the Sea’ are the deep red colours of the rocks, present in Faithfull’s pots comprised of local clay, and her comprehensive text, The Ross of Mull Granite Quarries (1995), which relates the ecological and economic decline of the island.

‘Quest Under the Sea’ also prompts consideration of what more conventional verbal and written histories miss from an individual’s lived experience. Can we ever enter Kujundzic’s currents and circles, by remaining firmly on land? Was there something of the western shores of Scotland and Canada - and their relative safety - that enabled his warm recollections of the western shores of Yugoslavia, if not the dirtied, industrial rivers of the Danube and the Tisa?

Kujundzic need not be ‘excavated’ as such; in Canada he is well-known, exhibited and remembered. Yet his foundational role in Edinburgh’s growing artistic community on the precipice of the Festivals, and formative early work with artists and writers, has been overlooked in more conventional histories of Scottish art. His contributions remain hidden in plain sight, publicly visible only to the faithful of St Mahew’s in Cardross and Edinburgh Jesuit Church, and in libraries, to those who read beneath the by-lines of the poets Hugh MacDiarmid and Joseph Chiari, as with Hamilton Finlay and Wells.

Beneath the Salisbury Crags, John Knox House, the oldest original medieval building surviving on the Royal Mile, carries one reminder of the artist’s many identities. Six medals of Scottish kings and queens, commissioned and cast in metal in the 1990s, speak not only of the artist’s many heritages - Scottish history crafted from metalwork of his family trade – but also Kujundzic’s early exhibitions in the adjoining building, once known as the Netherbow Arts Centre, and at present, the Scottish Storytelling Centre. Photographs from these early exhibitions - and reproduced posters, of later exhibitions including Ancestral Images: Batiks, Ceramics, Prints (c.1998-2000) - are also rare documents of the exhibition space in the basement, which otherwise has not been preserved. Deeper knowledge and understanding of individuals can often reveal more about the cultural ecologies and infrastructures within which they worked; vice versa, acquiescing the fall of one artist into posthumous obscurity risks the loss of cultural histories more widely.

The palimpsestic nature of this single building on the Mile - much like the many institutions, and nation-states, of Kujundzic’s life - is a poetic reminder of the artist’s complex practice. His patriotic public commission is a prompt to reconsider his own works in print, which deserve to be removed from the shelves.

 

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Jelena Sofronijevic (@empirelinespodcast) is a producer, curator, writer, and researcher, working at the intersections of cultural history, politics, and the arts. Their independent curatorial projects include Invasion Ecology (2024), SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries (2025), and Can We Stop Killing Each Other? at the Sainsbury Centre (2025), and they produce EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art. They are also pursuing a practice-based PhD with Gray’s School of Art, curating exhibitions with Balkan and Yugoslavian/diasporic artists in British art collections.