I am an artist born in Istanbul, Turkey. I began my artistic journey with photography, however, through experimentation with new mediums, techniques, and new forms of art, I discovered an interest in installation art. In my recent works, I have been exploring the connection between the body, water and landscape, investigating how through the manipulation of materials and the introduction of different techniques, I could challenge my practice. I started incorporating metal, sound, and movement into my work and this lead to the reawakening for me that water would be key to my practice. Coming from Istanbul where we are surrounded by water, it has always been an integral part of my life, but when I moved to Scotland this connection became blurred and somehow forgotten. In order to reconnect with this element, I started practicing again a ritual I did as a child. Every night I would speak to a glass of water that I would then drink before going to bed. I believed that my words and intentions had an impact on the water’s structure and energy and that by drinking the water I would transfer the energy into my body. Through this reconnection with my childhood and inner self, I feel I can support the development of my practice with greater integrity.

I am a scientist and an artist.

I am in-between lab and studio.

I work with human stem cells and with sedimentary rocks.

I handle silk and steel.

I create at micro and macro scale.

I capture electrons and photons.

I cycle from Glasgow to Istanbul.

I am curious.

Jess Hay is a multidisciplinary artist working with photography, sound, video, and textiles, her practice reflecting the human experience on Earth in relation to one another, our environments, and the cosmos. The work explores reasons why we communicate not only with each other in profound ways, but with the Universe that we exist in, what we are drawn to and why; to condense the thoughts floating around the conscious and the subconscious into something perceivable. She works with textiles and embroidery to encourage viewers to consider the notion of time and representation; using intensive processes, such as hand embroidery, the finished work contrasts with other processes and technologies that are readily available. She finds herself playing an active role in the creation of the work, hands becoming tools in the process.

The work features writing from periods throughout her life as well as drawings and sketches. Often exhibited work will have been created through experimentation and exploration, with unexpected results providing insight and antecedents inspiring later work. The work is constantly evolving and developing which is significant in the final form – nothing is ever complete, only momentarily paused while it is viewed; bringing the excitement from her research into the world we can all interact with. Upon reflection of these moments, she amasses a huge personal written archive; bringing her closer to the viewer, to let a part of her be understood and to understand others. It is through experimentation that allows for understanding.

In Search of Getting Lost is made in response to long distance solitary walks in the Scottish Highlands. These walks have been a search for terra incognita – unknown land – as a mental experience and a reflection of the idea of lostness and the unknown. Sofie Keller´s work mediates an investigation of the miniature and the gigantic by submerging herself in the wilderness. Tracing relief of terrain and topography of self, the repetitive act of walking is explored through drawing.
The experience of each walk is embodied in the physicality of the printing process, the journey continues into the studio.
Sofie Keller questions women’s position in the landscape and the common masculine narrative of the adventurous explorer, while reclaiming slowness in a world of constant flux.

“We must learn from the past, stay focused in the present and remain hopeful for the future”
Charlotte Elizabeth

Charlotte Elizabeth Roberts is a visual artist and photographer whose work recontextualises historical ideas and beliefs into imagery and interactive experiences.
The works tell stories of love, loss and understanding emotions. Primarily working in print, type and found objects, her style employs a thoughtful response to both personal and wider issues surrounding romanticist and classical philosophies.

The artist considers the idea that culture could replace religious scriptures as a moral compass for achieving self-actualization.The works explore the role of ritual and meditation throughout history which is expressed through the environment in which the work is made.

In a personal battle between the romantic and the classical, Charlotte Elizabeth considers these two polar ideologies and how through her practice she can merge the two to create the post-romantic culutral era that lies ahead of us.

Her most recent work has explored the role of the bartender as a raconteur. In creating a bespoke cocktail menu that provokes intrigue and reminiscence, the aesthetic, taste and smell, gives the bartender the ability to create an atmosphere of their choosing.

Perception of space and the pervasiveness of play go hand in hand within my work, play is my methodology, my navigational tool through spaces, converting them into heterotopic playgrounds. I aim to observe and understand our environment as a player, mapping a playful exploration of it. Changing space into place, creating a familiarity with the surrounding landscapes through motion. And only through these motions can the connection occur. Exploring environments through non-normative actions, following my intuition beyond my instinctual caution. With video being my story-telling device, a method to communicate though sculptural sign language as a creative outlet; devising abstract performances for the camera based on adventurous tendencies, which we all possess within us. My installations aim to create immersive spaces, where viewers are encapsulated and can embark on a ludic journey. In the hope that people leave considering the spaces around them, and ask how can they be re-defined? Playgrounds are all around us, it is only our inhibitions that stop us from noticing them.

Throughout my time at GSA I have been trying to experience the outdoors as a non-normative space for play. During the abrupt end to our studies and the journey through this global crisis, I have been focusing on the body and movement, finding new ways to interact with the environment. In this contemplative state, movement within space has now become peoples only exploration, finding new ways of making, connecting and inhabiting it. Now that all spaces are non-normative, play can be found in any space, both digital and natural.

Initiating my work through processes of photography and writing, my practice seeks to develop research material which approaches exchanges of violence, ranging from the extreme to the vernacular, examining instances, systems and objects that deal with ideas of victimhood, entrapment, and erotic revelation. Often intuitively made, these objects are, then, implemented through performance and installation.

Scripts, blueprints, drawings and diagrams – documents which pre-empt or prelude a creation – form the starting point of my work, with the outlined events or items explored through a series of re-enactment procedures: re-creation, re-performance, and re-telling are employed as a means of comprehension and a movement towards inhabitance. Sculptural forms are developed in relationship to tools and instruments, affecting contemplation on their functionality. Equally, photographic media is employed in terms of surfaces or backdrops, emphasising the sense of theatricality and re-enactment inherent to the work, their content pursuing a restless environment in which elements of the land, specifically that of rural agricultural land, hint at a quiet violence.

Marita Pappa (b. 1988) is a Greek interdisciplinary artist. Drawing from critical theory, her research focuses on art and its critical function and how artistic practices can assist in active citizenship and provide spaces for cultural resistance.

Her artistic practice explores the relationship between art, the public sphere, and radical democracy. Primarily working in installations, she interweaves contexts of poetry, politics and place through the use of sculpture, text, intervention, sound and moving image. Pappa uses everyday and ephemeral materials in order to create temporary environments where she seeks to find the intimate in the political and the ambiguous terrain between private and public, aesthetics and politics.

Her sculptural installations often refer to historical events with a particular interest in Greek culture and history. Through the process of collecting references and imagery from popular media and philosophy, Pappa aims to re-activate the archives and offer new narratives in an effort to address themes such as civil disobedience, state power and memory.

Harvey Dimond (b.1997) is a British-Barbadian visual artist, writer and researcher based between the UK and South Africa. Working primarily with video and print, their practice works with queer(ed) pre and post-colonial histories in the Caribbean and Southern Africa to imagine alternative realities for queer people of African descent.

Their research focuses on queer histories and realities in the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa, in relation to the geopolitics of natural disasters and the ongoing implications of neo-colonialism in the global south.

A storm, progress, a body of work taking the form of video, research and publications, considers the relationship between meteorological and political conditions in the Caribbean and South Africa.

Using photography and moving image I examine my environment, reflecting on its ability to appear otherworldly when seen through a gaze that is attracted to the absurd.  I am interested in the landscape and its connection to the human condition, the missteps that are reflected in these spaces that we traverse and navigate without thinking. By moving through the landscape, I can pause and recognise the slightly off, the fantastical and the objects that were simply meant to be there. So that, if only for a second, we are exposed to a magnitude of curiosities wanting to be discovered.

By operating primarily within photography’s power to elevate the everyday, Alex Rogers’ preoccupation in the discarded and often overlooked is preserved through a celebration of colour, composition and form. His work often acts as a window, lifting seemingly un-interesting processes and subjects that contain more value than we may originally care to think. Modern life is thrown under the lens – and in this process Alex aims to separate our relationship with these seemingly familiar regions, exposing perhaps the true strangeness or down right absurd. In an increasingly filtered world of digital profiles and internet sensationalism, we often strive to find the most incredible thing. But often we will miss what goes right under our feet.

My work has always centred around themes of time, memory and isolation, typically reflecting and referencing a melancholic state; neither hopeful or hopeless, bright or dull, passive or active. This space in-between interests me most, as the indeterminacy and liminality of this state offers endless possibilities for transformation.

I am attracted to ruined spaces; to me ruins are a place of solitude, havens I admire, in a world I do not, away from all distractions and irritations. For years I have frequented the ruins around my small town where I am guaranteed complete seclusion. A transmutation occurs when a building begins its process of deterioration, not only in the space itself but in the societal view of the structure. My work explores these changes; the change in people’s behaviour when they enter a space which holds no consequence, the change in nature as the balance shifts between life and decay and the change in societal views when a structure becomes too ruined or not ruined enough.

Light plays an important role within my work as its relationship with time is so intertwined. In a way light is time, but it is also the antitheses, as particles of light do not experience time at all. I seek out light from the dark within these spaces in a moth like state, and attempt to do the same within the presentation of my work, creating an atmospheric experience which draws people towards the light and (perhaps unknowingly) further into the dark.

A fascination with science-fiction, dystopia and political film has directed my way of thinking, in that the eerie feelings of disorientation and unease are conditions that appear often in my work. I aim to reimagine these ‘moods’ as systems quietly working underneath the surface, systems that lead to a falling away of familiarity and a feeling of absorption into the world, flipping the view of unease and disorientation as not going into oneself but rather expanding out into the world.

For me, a sense of defamiliarisation has patterns to it. Through photography, writing and programming I experiment with these collective and individual moods in different forms so as to make it tangible and give myself a better understanding of them.

Maria Soroniati is a Greece born visual artist currently residing in Scotland. While her medium of preference is photography, her practice extends in the fields of sculpture, installation and participatory art.

Using as a starting point, her experience and observations (both on a personal and a collective level), she distinguishes the world in two facets: what is “seen” and what lies “unseen” beneath its surface. Using the notion of “apparition” she attempts to bring to the forefront those hidden and fragmented realities that reside within the self or the societies that inform and construct the self.

To achieve this she uses psychology, philosophy, poetry, literature and politics as a contextual basis for her work and creates uncanny imagery and vacant signs that urge the audience to fill in the gaps with their own readings derived from their own stories and experiences.

Artist/maker Alex Warner also known as koolkatwarner, works within a range of different mediums but works specifically using and exploring the uses of primary colours within day to day life.

My surroundings effect and inspire the things i make, which reflects on: British consumerism, fast food/chicken shops, sport, the mundane and everyday, the urban landscape and the use of bold primary colours.

Primary colours are a key aspect of my work and my general life. My practice and mediums change from time to time to what i want to make and explore including photography, drawing, zine and book making, painting, poetry and writing, sculpture, music and also fashion.

I believe the virtual has found its home in us, and us within it.
A paradoxical environment seemingly stuck in hyperspeed, constant motion, yet also locked in an injected stagnation, stasis.
An omnipotent agent controls us with unprecedented power, yet never rears its head.
Standstill.

My practice investigates the effects of the technological systems on our society and how this interacts with the sense of the self. My work embodies various forms, in an aim to avoid being disloyal to the constant motion and mutation that we live in – this current state of flux. I aim to question the autonomy of virtual systems, doing so through the exploration of the barrier between the reality of our physical lived-experience and the hyper-reality of the signal-based information we digest: the internet, video games, television and cinema.

In osmosis molecules of a solvent pass through a semipermeable membrane from a less concentrated solution into a more concentrated one. I believe that information passes between the virtual and the physical in a similar way; both affect and are affected by each other constantly. It is this permeation between contrasting states that fascinates me.

I am interested in the ethics and psychological and societal impacts of virtual systems. Virtual systems are defined by their paradoxes, being both a utopian tool for positive change and, as often, a hidden tool for enacting the opposite. Does the maker of a system embed their moral position onto the technology that they create or can a system remain neutral? Can a system itself ever be held accountable?

The boundaries between the real and virtual worlds have crumbled down: my work explores the challenges that lie in these grey areas of doubt, definition and decision.

Past exhibitions include A Lurch in the Dark (CCA, Glasgow, 2020), Random Access Memory Extending Realities (Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athens, 2019) and Animate Experiment (ISO Design, Glasgow, 2019). Commissions include work for Iris Luz, founder of PC Erotic, Nike X Basement and Postal Brand, Dundee

I am an artist working with photography, video and prose attempting to make sense of our world. The absurd arises from the difficulty of finding meaning in a seemingly meaningless world.

The meaning which I photographically search for exists through human connections. The images of singular figures are self reflective of my solitude. They embody the lack of connection which my heart yearns for. At times I am content to be alone with my thoughts, conveyed visually through people walking across a street or perhaps taking a break from work. My affinity for light, quietness and reclusion is expressed through the innate beauty of solitary spaces. This solitude gives myself time to think and truly appreciate the beauty life holds, even when it pushes against me. My heart throbs towards twilight when I see shadows casted from trees under a lilac sunset. The beauty in life reminds me that happiness is in reach even amid sorrows and when life seems to make no sense. The photographs of couples strengthen the longing for human connections when feeling lonely. Now more than ever do these intimate moments show the importance of human connection.

My personal struggles of loneliness are expressed through both written work and the spoken components of the videos. The verge between land and water becomes important spaces in exploring our contemplative nature. This is particularly valuable for the meditative spoken word videos expressing loneliness. Loneliness can be piercingly painful at times, but the greatest way to overcome it is through compassion.

An important process within my work is the translation from digital to physical: text found in online forums transformed into scripts, and 3D models printed and sewn together into soft-toy-like sculptures. This process of transformation and distortion reflects not only how content online is constantly being remixed and re-appropriated, but also the idea of misinterpretation and untruth online.

I use found texts from Reddit relationship advice forums written by people dealing with specific problems and build upon these situations through scripts and monologues. This is a similar process to the growing trend of writing Fan Fiction online, a trend that allows people to project their own experiences or fantasies onto established fictional characters.

A key influence on my writing is the melodrama found in Young Adult Fiction. By combining the desperation and longing expressed in this genre with the situations I find on Reddit, I mould the existing scenarios into my own new narratives. The combination of real life scenarios and melodramatic fiction blurs the lines of reality and fantasy, a distinction that is further blurred by the Reddit posts themselves, as there is no way to know if they are ‘real’ to begin with.

In my work there is no separation between humans and cartoons, with animal-like characters acting as vessels to explore complicated human relationships. These characters are disarmingly cute on the surface, with the childish aesthetic providing a thin veil to mask the sinister and melancholy subtext.

The parameters of personal narratives being used to critique broader socio-political issues is a continuing motivation within my practice. Sculptural, performative and sonic forms are utilised to manifest language, each of which reflects facets of a multiplicity contained within a singular lived experience. Past experiences and perspectives surrounding underlying trauma, desire and the mundane of the everyday are depicted to analyse systems of oppression and power relations. The singular body examined throughout the work thereby becomes a placeholder for wider, collective experiences of inequality in the contemporary social climate.
Each work is created through durational methods of writing and physical making which embody the process of healing, often reflecting on the embedded history of the materials and methods used. A plurality of experiences is further explored through collaborative projects, bringing together new perspectives and a collective agency.
The construct of performative language informs the work, including a consideration of feminist ideology, art, and political action. The folkloric and mythological representation of female figures, alongside the work of contemporary female creative writers is reflected throughout, demonstrating the history and future potential in alternative narratives.
Demonstrating how wider systems impact individual experiences and with consideration towards the relationship between the artist and the viewer, the work becomes simultaneously a personal form of catharsis and a provocation for social change, proposing questions as to how both previous individual and wider narratives can be used to inform and incite political progress.

Artist’s Statement
May 1. The sound of rain, like true love, falling faster

In my video work I script dialogues between characters who seem to be observing us from the other side of the screen and who believe they have something important to tell us. These voices tend to disagree with one another and often make unlikely and misguided connections between public figures and historical events.

Collage is an important element of my practice: I mix my own footage with footage I find on YouTube, which I often refilm to allow for more control over movement, focus and depth. My writing combines elements of poetry and science fiction, and the voices of the characters often veer into didacticism; this bridging of modes and genres is mirrored by a mixture of digitally altered voices and sound. My videos consider depictions of race and gender – particularly depictions of Black women – in popular and digital culture. I am also interested in the idea of the video screen itself as a partition between realities.

In ‘This Is the Trick’, two voices argue about what they believe to be important. Both characters think they know something the other doesn’t. One is preoccupied with trying to understand and categorise qualities like charisma, intelligence and beauty, using examples from popular culture and academia to construct flawed arguments. The other longs for something solid and honest, although this might be just as much of a fantasy. The characters use the space of the video screen to make their case, piecing together found footage, YouTube comments, natural landscapes and home furnishings.

I am an artist who has always worked with various mediums but rarely strayed far from photography and Film. For me, it has always been a natural meeting point, a place from which the artistic and commercial worlds appear to meet. Its appeal, in this sense, are its lack of reservations. How it can remain flexible yet, in the right hands, sit unjudgementally outside of class, education and nationality.
As for my work I have tried many times to describe it but I have often lacked the ability to correctly word it. What I have been left with is often not a concise description but a series of small fragments, moments where the words appear true to the project. Much of my work, somewhat ironically, is about finding ways to communicate that lack of transparency. How one takes an idea that is close to them and how it is then chosen to be displayed can often come at a personal cost to the idea. As though the innocence from which the idea came from were to turn cold. On show to the world it can begin to lack something of the joy it came to you in. So as to never have anything to lose I choose to let the idea, thought or sensation take over.
It is with the intent that my work serves the indescribable parts of life, the joys and troubles of growing older in a rapidly accelerating world, an honest account on what it means to live in an absurd environment.

Jenny McVeigh is an artist specializing in photography. In recent years her work has been focused on investigating the everyday objects that surround us, the unseen and the clutter.
As an artist McVeigh is interested in our relationship with food as individuals and the way we consume food as a society. To investigate these themes, she has created “street food (food I’ve found on the street)” through the practice of walking, finding and collecting. Walking through the city of Glasgow has been a core aspect in McVeigh’s work; throughout the year she has been making photographs of abandoned food found on the street. The traces of a meal or discarded leftovers litter the ground with gross beauty.

As McVeigh’s practice continued, she leaned more towards her interest in the rituals of food; conversations over dinner, quick lunches, the difficulties and trials that can come with eating. She began printing the collected photographs of found food onto adhesive vinyl to a precise, true-to-life scale, using these prints to create plates of food with the background of the street cut away. Exhibited in the group show “MUNDAY”, the plates were hung as decorations; the performative nature of displaying food taken from the pavement on a ceramic canvas celebrating the food and reinstating its former purpose.

McVeigh’s envisioned plan for the degree show was to create a landscape of food exhibited on the floor. The audience, travelling around the space, would share a collective experience of walking and discovering. The act of walking is made immersive through looking down as much as looking up. By doing this, we question food’s journey onto the pavement.

Jina Song is a multi-disciplinary artist, originally from South Korea, currently living in the UK. Her work merges the art of storytelling with media ranging from theatrical performance to film and painting to sculpture. Song’s current focus is the complex fictional narrative of the lives of grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter ‘Sinja’, ‘Agnes’, and ‘Nawoon’, whose stories she refers to collectively as ‘hsjnwagnes’. Within it, she explores themes of shared memory and trauma, relationships, and personal identity as it relates to nationality and shared experiences.

I’m motivated to investigate difficult subjects in order to push boundaries. I believe art can prompt innovation and ideological breakthroughs via the use of radical honesty, raw life material, and humour. My interests are often risky and emotionally difficult. I’m a firm believer in the importance of facing discomfort, of asking difficult questions in order to challenge our normatively accepted social and cultural beliefs.

My last projects have examined assumptions around sexuality, intimacy, and objectification. My final year research revolved around a couple I befriended online: a married man and his silicone companion, a ‘sex doll’. Though documenting their life together, I started to expand my understandings of gender, kinship and identity, drawing parallels between drag and queer culture through their creative expressions of femininity, and the extension of selfhood through their gendered online performance.

I, as a graduating student at the Glasgow School of Art, would like to state my support for the Pause or Pay Campaign. To read the full manifesto click here.

I am a Glasgow-based artist, filmmaker, animator, creative computer and writer. I frame my practice as contra-content creation, falling on a spectrum between passive complicity and subversive resistance. I work with the language of commercial computational images, making immersive time-based experiences, usually buttressed by full-CG or AR digital film. These films incorporate 3D and 2D animation, motion capture, physics simulation and compositing to create and modulate layered works. I disperse these works among multiple and diverse surfaces of information; combining CGI with live footage, OLED monitors with ePaper. Multiple channels and sculptural interceptions combine with lighting, projection and holography techniques.

My work is about the figure in space and the materiality of oil paint itself as a medium. Often
leaving areas of gestural marks of oil paint contradictions with choicely figurative detail. It is about
contradictions, identity. Drawing on concerns with social media and the relationship between the digital and the screen. with ideas of body image, heightened
social media presence juxtaposed with the fluid and gestural marks of oil paint

In my paintings, I collage together an array of different thoughts and ideas that often don’t relate, with the aim of producing elaborate compositions. I often use a range of contrasting colours, patterns and painting techniques to combine visuals inspired by certain books, lyrics, album covers, films, artworks. My ideas are portrayed as tangential thoughts that attempt to dart the viewers attention all around the painting. I am interested in creating strange and symbolic imagery and I’m especially inspired by elements of psychedelia, surrealism, visionary art and a wide range of music genres from country, to funk, rock, jazz and experimental.

As films heavily influence my work, I tend to imagine all of the pictures in my head as moving images on screen. I work using various mediums, such as painting, storyboarding, sculpture and film. I usually start off on a project when I imagine a single image for a film scene and I work around that, using all of these various mediums to build the world in my head. A large part of my practice is creating the sets for the film, I do this mostly by making miniatures of these sets to photograph or film inside. I also make film props and create paintings which help me to understand which colours to use in scenes, and I often take photographs for potential locations for filming.
I am mostly inspired by films in the horror, surreal or fantasy genre. This year I have also been looking at illustrations from manuscripts which depict strange creatures, whilst also being fascinated by caves which started at a young age.
For my degree show, I had planned to make a film and display some drawings and sculptural pieces alongside it which depict a world. I imagined this world to be parallel to ours, and only parts of it get through. In this world there are mythical creatures, talking rocks and a kind of hotel which is run by humanoid horses. I began writing, storyboarding, painting and making props and models for this film which some have been left unfinished. As a lot of my work was also left in my studio in the Stow building, I decided to start on some new paintings in lockdown.
These works are part of the same world, just a different character. I wrote a story about a vampire who travels through portals and uses a magical object which lets her see where these hidden portals are, often being inside caves or next to rocks. I am continuing to make works and plan this film that I would like to make.

Harry Jones-Martin is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and curator. His practice facilitates through display strategies that stimulate critique and self-reflexivity. in numerous ways, including screen-printing

Harry works with multiple partners on various projects, recently designing the B!D auction, the Emergency Art Workers Support Fund and collaboratively producing the VAS SSA OPEN show at the Royal Scottish Academy.

Eat Your Top Marks

A collection of dogs gather, two adults and one pup. Forgetting their pack, they articulate themselves through the nuclear family unit that domesticated them. Cast charcoal paws frantically draw self portraits while quiet rubber tongues erase them. Wooden armatures, that signal dog bodies, are hijacked and repurposed as drawing machines. Traces of Crufts apparatus, playground equipment and bones fight for attention as the drawings go through a violent additive and reductive process.

Current work thinks through normativity and traditional family values through the figure of the pet. In the past, my work has expanded the borders of the pet subject position to include children finding similarities to the dog such as awards, training, treats and trauma. Rooted in classical disciplines of sculpture, drawing and printmaking my work situates itself in the familiar while reaching towards the bizarre. Drawings generate new sculptural ideas with entropic momentum.

Neonates

I started making the series ‘Neonates’ as a response to feminist and queer critiques of the nuclear family, normativity and child commodification. I was particularly drawn to the work of theorist Jack Halberstam, and their book ‘The Queer Art of Failure.’ Where failure opens up possibilities of radical negation. I was interested in the ways in which children were trained into normativity. As theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton, notes in her book ‘The Queer Child, or Growing sideways in the twentieth century’ children often ‘grow sideways as well as up.’ I collected an assortment of children’s onesies, garments littered with signs of gender, commodity and branding. I make these soft garments cold by turning them inside out and filling them with plaster. After the fabric is cut away and removed, the inside space is captured, a kind of surrogate or stand in for a child is left. These works are made in small groups, I think of them as sort of like siblings. The plaster picks up the colour, staining the casts. Stitching, zips and remnants of branding, are mirrored in the plaster body, acting as a reflection or double.

Ailish MacDonald is a Glasgow based multi-media artist whose practise has moved in the direction of photography and mixed media based work. A big interest of MacDonald’s lies in the use of film photography, specifically in relation to capturing the body and the idea of identity in an unusual, and sometimes abstract, way – the body being something more than the biological shell in which we inhabit. Exploring the idea of the properties of humanity and person-hood, MacDonald’s work takes on a conceptual form marrying different elements such as printmaking, photography and wax sculpture to enable her to create ‘collections’ of work in curated spaces as well as stand alone ‘pieces’. Drawing influence from philosophers such as Carl Jung and his idea of ‘individuation’, and artists such as John Coplans and Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘combine’ works, MacDonald doesn’t aim to provide answers to the question of what it means to be human but rather create an open dialogue to allow the viewer to come to their own conclusions. Through re-purposing found objects and materials such as leather, metals and plastics MacDonald explores the properties of these materials and their symbolism in the ever moving digital based world.

My work is connected to the concepts of the digital avatar, intimacy, and eroticism. The work takes on a multitude of mediums specific to each project, all with the aim to create a constellation of different works intersecting and speaking to one another. I am also interested in cuteness, anime, and the commodification of the self.

Chloe Duncan is a Scottish mixed media artist who marries digital processes such as Photoshop and Photomontage as well as Traditional Media within her Printmaking practice. This combination of techniques allows for diverse aesthetic quality within her work, with each piece presenting an amalgamation between the digital and the physical.

As an Autistic artist with sensory sensitivity; emphasising light, colour, sound and touch as part of her aesthetic language inspires a saturated colour palate and complex, clustering motifs.

Her practice is an enquiry regarding the natural world, depicting themes of Creole folklore as an element of revisiting her heritage from Reunion Island; a small volcanic island in the Indian Ocean. Her memories of Reunion’s lush and vibrant organic landscape is developed through the use of motifs throughout her work, which celebrates the interplay between horticultural representations of life and the concept of Memento-Mori.

Chloe’s use of these themes allows for exploration of aesthetic polarities and a resulting interplay between the visually attractive and the Grotesque; referencing anthropomorphism as design within decorative Baroque and Rococo periods. This interplay translates through a series of mixed media landscape prints and interior illustrations that explore the boundaries between the familiar and intimate as well as the elusive or exotic.

Chloe’s subject matter and themes often materialise through imagery found within her extensive collection of encyclopaedias which she uses as a resource in her attempt to understand the world around her, many depicting anatomical studies and fuelling her lifelong fascination with plants, both ornamental and medicinal.

I, as a graduating student at the Glasgow School of Art, would like to state my support for the Pause or Pay Campaign. Here are 10 works I’ve created through my final year between 2019-2020. This page will be updated throughout the year.

Jimson Weed is a scarecrow born and raised in the fields of Scotland. They are interested in exploring the mysterious, psychoactive and contemporary realms of nature, that which is healing yet poisonous, or alluring yet repulsive. J.W creates art using many different materials, in the hope of concocting a solution that will awaken the senses and bring the viewer and artist closer to nature. Being heavily enthralled by the psychological effects of nature on the mind, the myths and ideas it has birthed, nature as an entity of its own and as an entity that exists within us, J.W’s purpose is to help reconnect people of the digital age with the living world around them. The artworks featured here are about 2 plants in particular, foxgloves and yew trees. Jimson is a mixed media artist, creating images with screen printing, textiles, painting, photography and more.

Rachy McEwan is an artist based in Glasgow, Scotland.

She studied her Bachelor of Fine Art: Painting and Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art, graduating in 2020.

Working with painting, textiles, sculpture and digital media (as well as a considerable dose of black humour), McEwan exposes the dissonance between the aesthetic value we attach to what we buy and the ugly damage that the materials we use to attain these values have upon the world today.

Investigating over-consumption, the work is motivated by a deep concern about the way that capitalist culture shapes the consumer’s everyday life, damaging our understanding of the effects we have on the planet.

The work presents fashion as a construction of aesthetic expression but also considers whether or not consumers really understand the environmental impact and sustainability of the products they buy. Exploiting the materiality of the products the consumer desires, McEwan reveals to the audience the implications or consequences they obtain once bought and disposed of.

Bearing in mind the human species’ ongoing complicity with the very system of capitalism that creates these damaged landscapes, McEwan depicts a world in which humans (and other organisms) co-exist with environmental disturbance.

Christian was born in 1998 in the Scottish town of Kilmarnock. Through his practice, he seeks to understand the totality of the human experience through a traditional process of making such as drawing and printmaking. His approach is philosophical – concerned with interpreting the fundamental laws of reality and existence. In his work, he questions the typical notions of our physical reality by subjecting the viewer to imagery and visual narrative that is reflective of a pseudo-scientific or metaphysical nature. This can often result in imagery that is heavily associated with theories surrounding time, consciousness, processes and the persona. He works instinctively at a large scale in order to create expressive and gestured compositions that he is later able to render into refined pieces. Often one state of the work ceases to exist, transforming into another through change and time. Christian’s drawings are created as a meditation on his present understanding of the human experience – which is inevitably in a constant state of metamorphosis.

Louise Reynolds is a fine artist from Hamilton, Scotland. Habitually reading the news informs the large scale figurative oil paintings she composes, by recontextualising prevailing and fad narratives into dystopic visions of the present and future. By riffing directly from current events whilst refusing photographic reference from the issues themselves, she rejects an ease of understanding which aligns with the confusion we experience in digesting the news in the internet age. In this she aims for her paintings to skim the surface of the recognisable, where the titles provide clues to their inspiration, but without full disclosure. Conceptually her work relates directly to the masculinist tropes of history painting since, like her, the painters who constructed the grand narrative works which are presented as fact were never physically present for the events they were paid by a biased commissioner to illustrate. In this she sees her own work as a revised and self-aware edition of history painting, poignantly in the era of fake news, but without an actual commissioner this is substituted with the news items which proliferate her online existence.
In her degree works she has referred to news items such as, the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, the Australian wildfires, the prorogation of Parliament, the ban of ‘detox tea’ on Instagram, criticisms of activist Greta Thunberg, and the outbreak of COVID-19.

I, as a graduating student at the Glasgow School of Art, would like to state my support for the Pause or Pay Campaign.
To read the full manifesto click here: 

Jackie’s practice explores spatial experiences and aesthetics within the context of the domestic and local. How do we, as human occupiers, feel or claim ownership and privacy in spaces? How do the routines we build up affect our relation to our spatial locality, and how does our locality in turn feed into the routines we build?

Her work superimposes analogue and digital media to conflate a double of the same image into a singular work, in order to set up an uncanny monologue from a dialogue between the two media of a single piece. Working primarily between javaScript code sketches and the painting these are projected on to, Jackie’s work investigates a cyclical feed between mediums and place and non-places. This theme of recovery and replay of the linear acts as mirror of interest in the vacuum created in the overlap and boundary of both spatial and temporal elements of a locality.

My work has investigated the theme of leisure and how people sometimes reveal a sense of disconnection or discontent when they are meant to be free from everyday pressures.

The act of painting and layering an image with colour still gives me unbeatable excitement and a feeling that there will always be more to explore. Lately I have also been painting with plasticine.

These paintings explore the tension between escapism and feelings of alienation – they have perhaps taken on more poignancy in view of the loneliness and isolation of our current crisis.

Harley’s practice explores ideas of everyday aesthetics with a focus on mundane throwaway objects. Our everyday lives are so repetitive that we often overlook the simple things in life and do not give attention to these objects. Through Harley’s mark-making and clever combination of the 2-D with 3-D, defamiliarisation occurs with the work. The objects Harley uses are found on the streets and have been rejected by the original owner. She re-purposes the neglected by defuncting the intention of the product. Harley up-cycles the objects to create a tension between high art and the disused.

Harley’s practice also considers the traditions of painting. Areas of thick impasto oil paint contrast with watery thin washes of acrylic as well as the matte interior house paint. By not stretching canvas correctly, painting onto the walls behind the work, displaying work on readymades and purposefully letting oil seep out, consider the conventions of painting. Marks in the works are closely related to abstract expressionism, minimalism and cobra art movements.

I am an artist from the North East of England currently based in Glasgow. For me, my art does not intend to communicate or carry finished thoughts, rather, it is a process for thought. My practice often begins with writing, a mix of poetry and experimental prose which helps me continue and develop my imagination. To illustrate my poetry I use crude combinations of media and disciplines to create ‘sculptural sketches’ both physical and digital. The resulting image appears after a process of arranging and rearranging until a composition is found and my chosen fragments, some made, some found, are fixed to the wall or screen. I am interested in the relationship between knowledge that is taught and experiences that trigger phenomenological realisations in our everyday for example I explore this in the kitchen and the washing machine. My compositions are inspired largely by the religious imagery of Stanley Spencer and the sculptural work of pop artist Marisol Escobar. My work also uses unconventional puppets, both figurative and non-figurative, in order to explore difficult and painful periods within my own life wherein I have found humour and pain work hand in hand. With the use of the seemingly nonsensical I hope to interrupt the romantic and intimidating nature with which art often explores pain and tragedy. I hope to protect selfhood and encourage space for nuance rather than making the work easy to consume.