My art is an extension of myself. All that I see, think and feel finds its way in my creative output. And, as with everyone else, there are countless things I observe, contemplate and respond to. This is then what my work is about – the unity of multitude, or in other words, reality.

Ever-changing, ever-evolving, the reality is constructed by the mind in a chaotic Universe.

Being a keen observer with a passion for knowledge and a curious mind, I am naturally drawn towards philosophy, which, simply put, is a desire to understand the life and my presence in it. Thus, my practice is driven by philosophical investigations in the nature of reality, existence and the self within it, emphasizing the ‘unrealness of reality’.

It is not a simple task to comprehend nor present the reality in its entirety- its many variations, gradations and dimensions. It can only be analyzed in fragments by focusing one’s individual, conscious attention. Therefore, my process of making consists of working with visual metaphors relating to abstracted aspects of reality through the principle of collage, working between digital, two and three dimensions. Conceptually, I work with a deceptively simple three-fold system, a unity of a lived experience, where the physical texture represents ‘what is’, the structure represents ‘mind’, and the use of string- the ‘chaotic, non-linear nature of the Universe’. However, the concept is only a skeleton, around which the living flesh of making evolves.

An important aspect of my practice is Transformation. It relates to the flux of both the world and the constant that is change. The individual self has the agency to direct its conscious attention to shape and change one’s perception of how we see what already exists around us. In my studio practice, this notion presents itself through the use of overlooked objects and materials, as well as transforming factual to digital and vice versa.

For the Degree Show, I proposed to present my work through installation of a stage-like environment, a mind’s landscape as a walk-through experience, where the built structures represent metaphorical doors, views, frames of mind. The compositions move and change along with the movements of the viewer, reflecting the differences in perceiving reality from individual perspectives and viewpoints.

Due to the technical nature of my installation work and Covid-19 closures, I am not able to present the finished results. Instead, I offer you studio shots, experiments and developments, along with digital alternatives to present my unrealized ideas, carried out during lockdown.

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

My name is Shannon Glover and I am a traditional painter.
My practice tends to explore mediums such as Gouache, acrylic and oil paints, in an illustrative manner. My focus is on the weird and wonderful, looking into Fantastical and surreal art, and creating images that are interesting. My focus has lead em to explore the world of the Deep ocean and taking wonderful features and morphing them to help create a a fantastical world.

This body of work is based on my own introspection of childhood and the transparency of memory. Spending my formative years in Australia and moving to the UK at 8 years old; meant that I grew up in a world I no longer have any physical connection to. Some memories – however faded – still linger.
Through painting and printing I have gone back and explored the places of my childhood looking at family photos, memorabilia and listening to stories relayed to me by my parents. My work focused on depicting ‘Wilson’s Prom’ (Wilsons Promontory National Park) where, as a family, we spent most of our summer holidays camping and jumping off Whale Rock into the deep orange waters of Tidal River. The Wilson’s prom that is etched in my memory has become synonymous with the representation of my youth, a far off carefree place that I can’t return to.

I stumbled upon the method of painting on stretched mesh by accidently spilling glue on some embroidery. The glue blocked out sections and left sections missing like deleted pixels in a picture file, or the slow degradation of a memory over time. Like our memories get mixed up in our day today lives, the wholes in the painting allow you to see through them; so if held up against a window or similar the painting changes as the world behind it alters the image you see.

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.

I am interested in creating situations that generate a rupture in our everyday perception of reality. This is phenomenological at its core and it involves sound, animation, sculpture and painting.

My work processes the tension between inanimate and animate, changing and static, physical and immaterial.

I have found that many of these tensions are expressed in the dialectic between the analogue and the digital.

In a recent body of work, I have used gestural painting in combination with coding, virtual reality and animation. I want to push the idea of a painting away from normal modes of viewing, whilst retaining its essential qualities. At the same time, these works seek to interrogate ontologies embedded in the digital. I use digital processes in a way that foregrounds the body, mess and indeterminacy.

A recent work – ‘Dust’ – has been an open ended project that I worked on during lockdown. It was improvised, except for the basic premise of objects falling and crashing into the ground. It was motivated by an idea of history as rubble and the absurdity of invoking nationalist sentiment at times of crisis – particularly the ‘war-time’ spirit – in recent months.

This is heavily informed by my background as a jazz musician and improvisor. I have been involved with organising and participating in the Sononama sessions, led by friend and collaborator Lars Schmidt. These are monthly sessions of improvised sound and performance at the CCA Glasgow.

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.

Absalom’s practice is an investigation into the infiltration of Judeo-Christian dogma, mythology and iconography upon Western art, and its fundamental influence on the aesthetics of the grotesque and the horror genre, particularly in 20th century cinema.

/ HYPNAGOGIA / is a collection of artwork spanning the medias of oil painting, short films, woodcuts drawings and collages made in the artists graduating year. The triptych of oil paintings featured present a classical yet surreal interpretation of apocalyptic dystopias within the framework of contemporary social, political and environmental concerns. The paintings within the triptych, / ONLYSALT AND SULPHUR LEFT IN PERGAMUM / , / THE FORCED FRUITS OF TIPHSAH / and /GOD DOESN’T WHISPER HE SCREAMS/, draw on recognisable Biblical imagery, such as the presence of the icon, the loaded symbology of the fruit tree, and gestural religious performativity. However, the paintings also utilise the theory of collective thought, in which particular images are shared across history, geography, culture, and religion, perhaps with varying individual meanings, yet invoking an astounding emotional response across the board. This collective synchronicity often operates in much more subtle, but frequently identifiable forms, such as the symbolism and semantics of body gestures, shapes, colours, abstract words and sounds, which, in their essence are meaningless, yet have been adopted into the shared ritual of human society since ancient times.

When installed, the triptych aims to operate as an altar piece, the recognisable architecture of spaces of worship being reflective of the trinity. The artworks aim to overwhelm the senses; their shared colour palette is over saturated, dense, and confusing to a modern readership due to its Byzantine-inspired use of flat space, in stark contrast to the Flemish Primitive representation of the figure. The characters present within the artworks are without identity, apocalyptic prophets of sort, like Dickensian ghosts, bearing warning upon their audience without the judgement of didacticism often present within religion. The characters are figureheads, icons, representative rather than reflective, anachronistic within every setting you place them in. The void which these figures present, alongside the manipulative form of flatness and surrealism catalyses the Freudian idea of the uncanny in the mind of the viewer. Through Absalom’s artwork and academic writings, the fetishisation of the uncanny, the grotesque and suffering, is found to be fundamental to the Christian faith, and so an enjoyment in the horror of the paintings presented is allowed, if not actively encouraged by the artist.

The writings of Slavoj Zizek have been a central interest to the artist, the following quotation being a particular favourite with reference to the importance of ritual and collective myth within the mind of humanity:

‘the whole secret of mysticism is this: that Man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid…the one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the Sun at noon day, mysticism explains everything else by the place of its own victorious invisibility’.

Robyn Sands is an artist based in Glasgow. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Art from The Glasgow School of Art in June 2020.

Sands explores the relationships between human beings and the natural landscape, often referencing Psychogeography. Immersing herself into the environment (using strategies derived from Walking Art Practices), she deploys multiple mediums to comprehend the symmetries, repetitions and characteristics that are often overlooked in nature.

Sands often begin by visiting a specific natural landscape and making a (partially visual) travel journal to document her physical and mental experience of the space. These journals are evidence of her presence within the natural landscape—and also act as an archive of forms to utilize in the studio, when making her prints, objects and installations.

The artist views her works as unfinished inventories of fragments: drawings, objects, prints and paintings. Working with natural substances and fabric, Sands makes performative gestures that leave a trace: soil, paint and drawing medium delineate the actions she imposes on the material. Each ‘fragment’ is manipulated (through mark-making, casting, folding, and draping), and the collections of fragments are arranged into conceptually layered installations. These immersive objects are intended to invite the viewer to move in and around the space.

Sands regards her work as a conversation, a vocabulary and philosophy of landscape, a way to understand and communicate her experience of the specific world(s) she inhabits.

A patchwork of thoughts, smells, textures; layers of a past that looms on my mind, stitched together as a way of treasuring time.

Using thread Emma Boiston builds stories that are rooted in child-like imaginings of the past as an attempt to memorialise a time that has been lost. Fabric is dyed with vegetables, fruits and stains in an attempt to rebuild a memory of the garden’s of her childhood; whilst stitching, knitting and embroidering establishes a closeness to domesticity and the women of her family. The process of making acts as a coping mechanism for pain, a form of translating identity, rooting the maker in a place and time as a means of documenting a life.

I, as a graduating student at the Glasgow School of Art, would like to state my support for the Pause or Pay Campaign.
Innocent/Non innocent
Human/Non-Human
Girl/Orca
High/Low
Sky/Earth
Troll/Angel

My practice acts as system of reflections, an ontological mesh of entangled narratives. Oscillating between mediums and categories; violating the inviolate subject.
My work is informed by the concept of the troll Mirror (Hans Christian Anderson) a short story embodying this concept of reflective visions.
The devil makes a mirror that reflects the world back altered, the mirror shatters on its way to heaven, and the pieces are bourne all over the earth on the north wind. Everything is refracted equally upon that altering glass surface.
This most recent work focuses on embodiments of the Human and the Non-Human. Both narratives inform and reflect the construction of the other. Examining the anthropocentric narratives surrounding the Non-human figure of the Orca. Combining working methods and mediums associated with high and low culture, denaturing both categorisations.
I don’t want to be a Troll or an Angel, I want to be a piece of the mirror reflecting the world back altered.

IG : 0_via1even

(Subterranean Swimming is a Art collective between Olivia Leven and Jen Cuthill exploring our mutual interest in ecological entanglements)

My studio practice uses drawing, printmaking and painting to create a series of works that reflects a personal narrative about migration.

Using current global politics on the subject of movement, I have used historical information, drawn upon remembered stories from childhood and family photographs as my sources of research to document one person’s journey from impoverished war torn Italy to 1960’s Glasgow.

Flora Robson is a Painter and Printmaker based in Glasgow/Preston.

‘By apprehending traditional painting media such as oil and watercolour, I attempt to refract the permanent impermanence of the Scottish Landscape through historically romantic notions of of the sublime, and the abstraction of forms rendered in paint in conflict with contemporary concerns over ecological anxiety and our waning ability to combat the effects of climate change. Mark making techniques are explored through etching and monoprinting, establishing a dialogue with the vast timescales of the landscape. Allusions may be drawn between these media and their propensity for claiming space adjacent to the ecological protest of tree planting as a reclamation of space. My work is not a solution to these vast problems, but a perspective, an observation, and a feeling about what if anything can be done.’

Flora’s degree show explores how tree planting can contribute to the mitigation of climate change. Working in partnership with GSA Sustainability and the Woodlands Trust in planting 45 native Scottish saplings at the GSA Innovation school campus (Highlands and Islands School.) This physical action of planting is a way of expressing my drawing through an ecological lens, illustrated also in a series of 30 etchings showing the projected growth. Partly natural performance piece, the trees themselves embody the notion of regeneration and growth, the importance of recognising our exploitative history with the Caledonian Forest, as well as offering an insight into the ways we can work creatively as a community towards a sustainable future.

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.

Born in Bristol and now based in Glasgow, Rose studied Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art. Rose’s practice consists of printmaking, analogue photography and painting. Exploring themes such as intervention of place, the uncanny and disjunctive agency; her practice seeks to create narrative through dream-like sequences. Action and inaction within the work plays an integral role in the investigation of the space between choreographed movement and transcendal chance. Investigating these themes situated in the paradigm of motion, her practice seeks to recreate traces and the physicality of memory.

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 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MwdvZfLTp1udaASJ1EAmRT9XR-OPQIyU/view

My practice is an ongoing exploration of identity, memories and the self, intertwined with cultural symbolisms; a personal branch of cultural anthropology. Considering personal and cultural identity as made up from the subjective applications of memory and experience onto oneself, one can restructure, re-apply, re-place, aspects of self in the process of re-invention, often involving forgetting and remembering. Via my work I seek to understand the oscillation between nature and culture and the inevitable relationship between the two phenomena. In between states, fluid meanings, through my work I strive to highlight simulacra of time, space, nature and culture in coalescence with photography installation and printmaking to serve as a catalyst for self understanding and integration.                                                                                                I, as a graduating student at the Glasgow School of Art, would like to state my support for the Pause or Pay Campaign.

My work revolves around the female body and I study the ways in which I can portray its expression with paint. By slowly stripping away colour and any excessive detail I find unnecessary in a photograph, I am able to explore my subject in terms of placement and presence within its space, the relationship between the layered painting technique and body language, and the confrontational significance of the subject to me personally.

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.

www.pauseorpayuk.org

I’m interested in the experience of language, image and metaphor. How are they used and how do they form our understanding of the world?
In my eyes under my skin on my knees
Letters are alive as we use them. We relate to them with our bodies.
I work with language as a physical thing; a form in a painting, a stencil or a paper-cut out. Language and images are not such separate things in my work and the body is always there.
It takes the form of books, fabric hangings, paintings and digital images.

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.

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.

I want to create a world, a landscape, a place. Using metaphors and unprecise images as facades, in my drawings I  can be honest, petty, romantic, and spiteful. Starting from drawings and playing with the medias, I designate colors and textures which I have tied with the temperature of different moment; from a dream, a travel or the everyday. I am drawn to the quietness of the water which comes as we submerge under. I want my body of works to be the portal which can drown the noises of the mundane and constrictions. Temporarily, I want to take the visitors of my world to a faraway place, untouched by reality.

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.

My practice focuses on printmaking and oil painting as means of communicating my ideas. I have an inherently romantic view of the artist being a conduit for communicating thought around what it means to be human in our interaction with other people, beliefs and the landscape around us.
in my fourth year i focused on the work of Arthur Miller and his play, The Crucible. Scottish ballet performed a version of this in 2019 in Glasgow which i took my sketchbook along to. These preliminary sketches formed the basis of my work for the year along with an examination of the transcripts from the McCarthy trials in America in the 1950s which were locked up for 50 years.
The issues examined in the original play around religious and political beliefs struck a cord with me and using the structure of ballet to bring these to life added a dramatic feel to allegory.
The debate around capitalism versus socialism is still one that has not run its course. The level of support for socialism in the UK and the USA in the younger generations in striking. The debate around a universal basic income is an example of this.
My series of prints seek to engender some of this underlying anxiety that is so evident in society as we battle through the implications of this pandemic.
I intend to focus further on belief structures in my future studies

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.

My practice is based upon an exploration of the landscape and the emotion it evokes. Drawing inspiration from folklore, notions of the sublime and traditional landscape painting of the nineteenth century, I meticulously paint oil paintings predominantly on a large scale.

When tackling any project, I mindfully work through each process and organically add more details to the natural landscape – almost as if the subjects are growing symbiotically. Oil paint is my medium of choice, as it allows me time to go back to the landscapes that I love and to spend time exploring the details of what I originally experienced in one single fleeting moment.

Trees were once worshipped as gods. They were sometimes considered embodiments of the dark and fearful powers of nature, of lightning and thunder and storm. I perceive the forest as a surreal place, a breeding ground for something magical and powerful. By placing unexpected light sources in the forest, I explore themes such as loneliness and belonging by letting these little lights take full dominion of the landscape.

Greta Martyniuk is a Polish contemporary painter whose works are characterised by their unsettling and surreal imagery depicting the dehumanising aspect of the recovery process. Martyniuk’s interest in Old Master landscape paintings is clearly visible in her works. Working primarily in oil paint, she produces works which show figures in distressing situations, surrounded by odd objects in strange settings to awaken the curiosity of the viewer. Through the process of collage, she is able to create surrealist scenarios, which explore the relationship between the medical, the body and the mind.
Martyniuk’s recent works explore the effect of trauma on one’s mental and physical well-being. On one hand the artist has a deeply personal approach to the works she produces, on the other hand, she continues to distance herself from the narrative. She uses her experience of living through a traumatic event and recovering in a hospital environment as a basis for her works, which explore issues surrounding modern medicine. She produces collages, which she then transforms into large scale oil paintings that challenge the viewers perception of the recovery process and the world we live in.

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.

Tabitha Hall is an English artist based in Glasgow graduating from GSA’s Painting&Printmaking. Tabitha advocates for drawing as a finalised art form, not just a means to an end. Embracing the method of drawing to convey minimal and gestural qualities. Within the act of making a mark, she explores the body and its relationship to the constructed space it inhabits, letting the forms not be constricted to conventional representations of the body. It is rather the process of drawing that leads the works in an attempt to let the inhabited figures create their environments. In this vein, her work tends to embrace a limited colour palette adhering to a black and white monochrome, the contrast allows the body to remain the nucleus.
These drawings and ink works investigate the presence of the figure throughout art and mythological history, whilst embracing a more inclusive approach to the idea of femininity in contemporary society. The content of the work can range from the day to day, pure fantasy to literary, its source isn’t crucial to its reading merely a step in the work’s creation. By including the figure so prominently in her work she questions what an observers relationship to them is, do they seeing a representation of themselves or are they a passive observer, watching from just outside the frame.

Absolution in the Thunderdome: A Report on the Banality of Innocence.

            L’Etat, c’est moi.

            L’Etat, c’est nous.

            All within the state; nothing outside the state; nothing without the state.

This series of works manifests a range of possibilities to transcend the ‘violence of definition’: through proxy bodies removed of identity, virtual animated environments, and a commingling of the abject and the sublime.

Beginning with the proposal that there is no innate state of being – no garden from which humanity fell – these works situate gabber as an interval removed from narrative. Beyond that of the non-place: towards an undefined nothing. Through unbuilding andwilding attributes fixed in coherence are laboriously smeared with a thick grease. Attention is directed to the mites/particles suspended in wrested binaries.

Pushing through a dislocation of narrative from the body, gabber bypasses the Futurist fixation with speed, and instead pursues incoherent absolution, immersed in (often homosocial) homogeneity. By this method perhaps not all difference is erased, but all definition.

Arising from an obsession with collective mesmerism through iconography, these works engage with the misrecognition of ‘uncorrupted’ juvenile platitudes, as secure absolutes, veering into regressive totalitarian milieus. The drive towards absolution and engulfing reassurance wills existence to take form through voyeuristic corpses: unembodied essence.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
 

Lisa Fabian is a Glasgow based audio, video and performance artist.
 

Interested in the processes by which we define and position ourselves as social beings and historical bodies in relation to the world, the focus of the work lies in the unfolding of the everyday life.
 

My practice is based upon an investigation of the human relationship with the natural landscape. Through oil painting and sculptures often combined in installations I am investigating the relationship between humans and nature, and the impact they have got on each other. Working with landscape painting is for me a way of looking back in time through an ongoing conversation with art history and an insight into the way humans have experienced nature over the history of time.

My paintings are built up by thin layers of oil paint. By using this technique the underlying layers are still visible and illustrate the process and the time spent making the painting. I have been experimenting by printing the surface of wood straight on to the painting, as a way of letting the wood itself leave a trace on the painted landscapes. The sculptures are made by natural processed materials which in combination with the painted natural environments aims to shed a light on the temporary state of the landscape, today’s climate change, and ongoing cycles and processes.

Working with installation allows me to handle the sense of loss I feel when it comes to the impact humanity has got on nature today. The feeling of loss has many layers, which can be seen in the paintings, and within the combination of paintings and sculpture. Working with paintings in installations allows for spatiality to be in the work, a space in which one can move and get surrounded by. It’s a way of letting the paintings embrace you, in the same way that grief does.

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.

Morven Douglas is a painter illustrator from Scotland, graduating from Glasgow School of Art where she studied painting and printmaking BA Hons. By taking inspiration from many features of storytelling, folklore and mythology, Douglas incorporates imagery and happenings from dreams as a generative source to create paintings and illustrated stories. Philosophy, Ancient History, Classical mythology and fictitious tales are core interests in Douglas’ practice. Combining and recontextualising a range of historical symbolism and personal symbolism, Douglas seeks to neutralise the impending social political origins of classical narratives by referencing pre-existing polysemic vessels and placing them in compositions detached from their original environments establishing a space for new narratives to take place. The somehow significant symbols of dreams and their strange narratives become pseudo myths in which we become attached to in search for a greater hidden meaning. Sequencing imagery, symbolic figures and gestural mark making in painted works and illustrated stories represent an ambiguous and curious form of the dreamscape; the space upon the borders of reality.

I see myself first and foremost as a painter. Although my practice extends across a range of mediums from digitally printed textiles to sculptural works, I aim to maintain painting’s sensibility throughout.

In recent works, I hope to bring about the slow from the fast and the weird from the ordinary. Imagery such as found advertising posters and printed photographs of shopfronts become points of departure in my work as I utilise painting strategies to intervene and dismantle their immediacy. I hope to wage in on the imagery’s affect within an attention economy, allowing reference to bleed into medium and information into gesture. Similar modes of appropriation have been extended into recent and ongoing sculptural works, such as ‘flat lays’, which can be seen on my website.

(As a graduating student at the Glasgow School of Art, I would like to state my support for the Pause or Pay Campaign.)