Yelena Taylor is an english-armenian artist traversing the parallel between personal and public abjection. She aims to create taboo works that speak to the intimate alienation of diasporic narratives. Her ritualistic actions conveyed via the sculptural and performed, reveal the connection between bodily disgust and political derision. Handled plainly, high-minded ideologies are boiled down into low-brow symbology, resulting in crude confrontational works, that sometimes shock, sometimes laugh.

She currently utilizes tropes of kink and fetish to capture this dichotomy; enjoying the juxtaposition it provides of baser, domestic bodily function against demarcated contexts of extremified power dynamic – as well as the implied tender intimacy of such acts.

The world can be a dizzying, confusing, uncertain and overwhelming place. Architecture and design attempt to offer order and control through reassuring visions of how life could be. Within my practice, I explore the ambiguity of buildings and objects which do not quite meet their intended aspirations, are deemed unfit for purpose, outdated or are left to ruin.

Spanning sculpture, photography and drawing, I appropriate these architectural, domestic and design failures, reworking them as a metaphor of the disparity between preconceived expectations and their shortcomings. Using everyday building processes, I often submerge and disguise found objects and materials, examining the fine line between the ideal and the uncanny.

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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 the link below:

Pause or Pay Manifesto

Sojourner Mayer is a sculptor and performance artist. Recently focusing on sex work, specifically stripping and lap dancing, she seeks to further understand and explore her relationship with sex work, performance and feminism. Working often with textiles and using age old craft techniques such as knitting, looming, weaving, rug tufting, embroidery and bead looming, Mayer creates sometimes wearable, symbolic works. Through performance she attempts to portray the contrast between her need to make almost masochistically time intensive pieces and her fascination in selling an intimate experience. She shows the realities of working in a strip club through drawings and sketches that highlight the bizarre, unexpected and sometimes humorous things that can be experienced as a stripper. It is with this understanding that she attempts to bridge that gap within herself and come to her own understanding of sex work. She hopes to create a dialogue with an audience in order to raise more awareness of the realities of working as a stripper and what that entails compared to the glamorous or devious way it is presented in the media. Her work is intimate and extremely personal; she does not want to speak for an entire industry or seek to represent all sex workers, only to attempt to portray the overall experience she has had.

I, as a graduating student at the Glasgow School of Art, would like to express that I won’t be using this platform to present and promote my practice as an act of solidarity with the Pause or Pay Campaign. If you would like to see my work please follow this link to my website: https://louietyssen.wixsite.com/mysite and contact me on louietyssen@hotmail.co.uk

My current practice interrelates the progression of human traditions with symbiotic relationships and animal social structures. I often refer to objects in museum collections as a way to generate imagery and materiality of my work. The ritual-like behaviour shown in symbiotic relationships is something I find reflective of the structures in traditions formed by humans. I am particularly interested in how traditions are established and how these can exist amongst the vast content on the internet.

Although I have uploaded images onto this showcase, my work is rooted in the importance of craft and in order for it to be experienced, GSA should commit to a physical degree show to fulfil my needs, and the needs of every student graduating in the class of 2020.

Aki Hassan is a transdisciplinary artist who thinks and works through text, drawing, printed matter and sculpture. They are invested in how forms, materialities and objects encounter one another in both concrete and metaphorical terms, and how personalities are revealed, surfacing paradoxes and unexpected detail. This feeds into their interest in carefully arranged installations, exploring interrelations and resonance. They see this process as a tool to reflect on their support systems; to locate strength, shifts and imbalances in the exchange.

Aki Hassan graduated from Glasgow School of Art. They have taken part in both local and international exhibitions, such as An Exercise of Meaning in A Glitch Season (National Gallery Singapore, 2020), Pig Rock Bothy Residency & Exhibition (Scottish Gallery of Modern Art, 2019) and SCOUT: Emerging Art Practice, Singapore (Gillman Barracks, 2015). They are a co-founder of a small distro-press, known as Power Couple Press, which primarily works with comic, zine and illustration artists based in Glasgow and Singapore (powercouple.press). Through this, they have been platformed at various book & art festivals across the UK, such as Glasgow Zine Fair (GZF), East London Comic Art Festival (ELCAF) and Edinburgh Comic Art Festival (ECAF).

Clay is a notoriously stubborn, labour-intensive and unforgiving material. Embracing these properties, I create ceramic vessels and sculptures marked by my tactile experience of sculpting the clay with my hands. The audience encounters the physical as well as visual: Finger imprints, throwing rings, join lines and scoring, emphasising the artist’s hand in the creation of each piece. I avoid placing a narrative on the work. Instead, the markings narrate the self-contained personal histories in the clay body of each vessel. Inspired by the installations of Edmund de Waal, I work intuitively to place and assemble groupings of objects; some clustered together, others decidedly separate. Inhabiting the space in this way, the work questions the autonomy of the unique handcrafted object and the aesthetic force within a series of related forms.

My creative process is very experimental, driven by my aesthetic preferences and knowledge of the material language of clay. My primary instinct is to hand-build, creating a mixture of functional and sculptural ceramics, sometimes a blend of the two. I try to create a sense of balance in my work, at times manipulating the clay into intricate 3D forms while, at others, working freely and spontaneously guided by the material tendencies of the clay. This back-and-forth relationship between maker and material is central to my creative process. I’m particularly interested in the struggle between the desires of the two and my work seeks to create a balance between them.

I, as a graduating student at the Glasgow School of Art, would like to express that I won’t be using this platform to present and promote my practice as an act of solidarity with the Pause or Pay Campaign.

To read the full manifesto follow this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MwdvZfLTp1udaASJ1EAmRT9XR-OPQIyU/view

If you would like to see my work please follow this link to my website: https://alkminigkousiari.cargo.site

What drives my desire to create work is having something to say, a need to create an understanding of being a woman. To highlight the awful experiences, the shit we don’t talk about, the late-night breakdowns, the mental health issues we acquire through childhood, the fucking abortions we’re forced to have and the guys we leached onto who hurt us because we just needed to be wanted. I want to show the god damn strength we have, the shit we’re put through and how we don’t let it defeat us we let ourselves fucking flourish, we turn weeds into roses, we’re constantly broken down and re-build ourselves each time more beautiful than before. My work speaks to us, it brings us a glimpse of hope, a mutual cry, a warm feeling that it’s not just me, it in no way makes it fucking right, but we’re growing up through this society together and that’s what I want. A connection, a relationship. I crave it. I go through shit so I can make you feel better when you go through the same shit, I am a mother, an artist.

Ella’s sculptural practice stems from a curiosity with material and form, explored predominantly through the making of vessels and tube-like objects, often suggestive of internal (female) body parts or organs.

Working mainly with ceramics, she creates the work by hand, to intentionally show the body’s relationship to the object through the making process. Her work aims to demonstrate how the making process itself embodies human touch, movement and experience. The resulting objects are repetitive in creation yet all are different in shape, form, weight and height.

Ella’s work draws on colour theory – particularly the psychological effects of red – due to its strong association with flesh, blood, passion and its obvious sexual connotations. She is interested in how colour can influence people’s emotions, their physical encounter with objects and their interaction with their surroundings.

Other work has challenged female objectification, interrogating the male gaze, which seeks to reduce women to mere vessels, existing only for consumption or pleasure.

As well as clay and ceramics, Ella also uses a variety of other materials such as wax, metal, concrete and screen printing in her sculptural installations. The considered positioning of forms and materials, in relationship to each other, sets up its own narrative: a kind of moving between states; an evolution of sorts.

This is done with the purpose of questioning the hierarchy of mimesis which argues that all art is a re-presentation of nature and suggests how a piece of artwork that is imitating a physical form makes it just as valuable as its counterpart.

My research is rooted in science with a particular interest in the life cycle. I explore how time and existence aid the process of deterioration of our anatomy. My work looks at the internal body and realm of viscera, probing towards an understanding of what lies beneath. I use scientific data and materials to synthesise a guttural, intuitive, making process. Sculptural works are produced using a mixture of technological and craft-based techniques which are suggestive of clothing, apparatus and machinery. Works often present as tactile and playful to a high finish aiming to draw the viewer in to inspect the work at a level similar to the scientist’s specimen.

My practice follows personal encounters with natural landscapes, and addresses the subsequent archiving of found terrestrial form. I frequently make work connected to the seaside town I grew up in, hoping to address personal enquiries related to place and orientation, as well as addressing wider curiosities of physical and imagines landscapes. Working primarily with casting processes, I create platforms which provide alternative modes of experiencing the shoreline through sculptural encounter.

My work is driven by field-based research in the form of walking and intervention, supported by anthropological and ecological theory. The sculptural outcomes at times address these topics whilst unpacking a continued analysis of the relationship between body and landscape.

Slip-casting in the medium of ceramics, I engage with the visceral handling of art medium as well as that of the terrestrial – developing a sculptural language concerned with process and material properties. I wish to establish modes of making that are potentially attached to place. In turn, through making – I explore the elements of my practice that are perhaps present due to childhood engagements with the shoreline.

I am Soorin Shin, not yet a cyborg, rather an analogue human celebrating the digital age.

Between the virtual and the real worlds as an East Asian female, feminism and racial issues are integral to my practice. Actualities are significant in the conceptualising and contextualising of my works which are socially engaging and engaged. It takes its forms in digital and physical shapes: sculpture, installation, performance, graphic art, moving images, 3D modelling and 3D printing.

I care very much about sculpting the human form in clay. I am extremely interested in Greek and Celtic mythology, in particular parables with concurrent themes of growth, transformation and symbolism of plants and allegorical human figures. I have a special interest in sculpting within neoclassical tradition, primarily with figurative and portrait sculpture, statues and low reliefs in clay and plaster. I am drawn to the universality of classical aesthetics and principles, the human form in connection to nature and mythology in sculpture. I also have a great interest in human figures as allegories for processes in nature such as the changing of the seasons and plants with mythological significance.

I’m interested in the power of and relationships between people and plants on a spiritual level in mythology, but also a scientific level as I research herbal medicine and taxonomy of plants in relation to their significance to the body and healing. How I hope to convey these ideas through sculpture is by making allegorical human figures which represent certain plants with specific properties. I enjoy implementing clay or plaster figures with an incorporation of composed sculpted flowers and real dried plants and flowers with scents and a genuine medicinal and spiritual (according to folklore) purpose. By drawing on these areas of research I want to create my own narratives and modern mythologies of spirit-like human figures offering healing plants to viewers. I would hope that interaction with my sculptures by means of the “giving” of flowers from the sculpture to the viewer and the taking of them by the viewer from the sculpture, would put this narrative across while allowing for their own interpretation. I am compelled by the work of artists such as Kiki Smith, Cynthia Consentino, Claire Partington, Eleanor Bartleman, Sabrina Bosco and Zoe Dufour because of their common expression of a fascination with storytelling and contemporary personal mythologies through the human figure in relation to emblematic use of flora and fauna. Much of my research also is invested in Hellenistic sculpture as well as the Italian Renaissance, the Beidermeier period, and the Scottish Enlightenment movement.

Victoria Rankin is a mixed media installation artist, who at the moment is making work to provoke thought on our conscious and subconscious mind.

Currently I am exploring repressed emotions, with ideas revolving around the persona, the shadow and the self, amongst other archetypes. Through these themes, I hope to create awareness around the complexities and connecting threads inside each of us and our unity in that. I also feel passionately about highlighting issues about the objectification and systemic oppression of women.

At this time, I am predominantly using embroidery, text, printing and latex/silicone rubber sculpturally to symbolise social pressure to conform to ideals, masking the true self for fear of judgement, and the wearing of a persona that is not actually who you really are, but who you pretend to be to others and at times, even to yourself.

Some artists/creatives that I admire and take inspiration from: Ana Mendieta, Eva Hesse, Renate Bertlmann, Carl Jung, Jeremy Deller, Ivana Bašić, Wayne Barlowe, H R Giger, John Akomfrah, Pati Hill, Samara Scott, Hardeep Pandhal, The London Vagabond

Confrontation and benevolence, isolation and belonging, above and below, humour and disgust, shyness and seduction; somewhere amongst the two exists the life and work of Council Baby. The paradoxes that live within the mind and the dichotomy of life forever being the inspiration.

A fascination with telephone boxes has manifested in a compulsive need to document and distort their image. A returning re appropriation of characteristics of their shape and make up constantly appear in their work, like a shrine to this now forgotten and abandoned communication portal.

“Yanno that gorgeous looking apple that you bite into it and it’s rotten? That’s what my work is about. I’m fascinated in things, people, situations seeming like they’re one thing but then turns out they’re the polar opposite. Growing up I was obsessed with the film Catch Me if You Can; my work explores the hypocrisy of people and the mask we wear everyday; the ability and possibility of becoming whatever and whoever you wish; and the contrasts that live within us.”

Lauren Souter is a Sculpture and Environmental art student from Annandale, Dumfries & Galloway.
Her practice mostly explores the local history and genealogy of the Solway coastline.
Souter creates multi-media installation: including ceramics, illustration, video & written word.
This year Souter has been researching her own family church: Dornock Parish Church. She is so inspired by this site due to her own family ties and a rich history of industry and community.
Souter had her first solo exhibition at Dornock Church on the 15/02/2020 and plans to keep researching and staying inspired by Dornock Church and the surrounding area.

My interests lie in the creative space between physical realities and perception. Seeing the world, as a constructed place, I make use of liminal, in between spaces. I make work in order to question the formation of narrative and ideology that we hold to be true, and how this leaks into our physical relationship to a place.

In a contemporary era of ecological crisis I think it is important that we apply this form of questioning to our cultural relationship to the environment. It is clear that our current structures have been detrimental to our natural space. Through disrupting what we would expect of the natural landscape I hope to encourage the consideration of a viewers personal narrative in relation to that environment. Placing works within this context necessitates a consideration of our place within the natural world, as well as a relinquishing of control. In making work I try to form a collaboration between my own ideas, natural phenomena and, when viewed, an audience’s own ‘constructed space’.

More information about my work can be seen on my website.

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 includes a varied range of media depending on the desired outcome. Currently I’m exploring how people interact with objects and how to commodify my personal practice with an interdisciplinary package. There are different facets that operate symbiotically within umbrella practice.

Making art for yourself is a way to improve self value and enables a direction. But in terms of having a sustainable professional practice you need to make work for other people that will pay you for it to carry on beyond more solipsistic navel gazing. Artists can make a living out of visually heightening our encapsulated environment and to do this you need to finding your style and make money from it. Without any particular narrative, the intentions of my two dimensional work are to provide visual pleasure and delight: playing with the brain; colours together to make you tick; compositions and satisfying strokes; casting illusions of space tricking the viewers; deception; squeezing the viewer/consumer into satisfaction; creating a formula for nice things through visual designs.

We live in a world with an excess of consumption, eating up the planet’s resources and space. Art is yet another area of consumption, it is a currency that is valued and exchanged and serves to reinforce the social inequalities of capitalism. Practising ‘successful’ artists create a commodity that is valued and exchanged within pockets in the world. I struggle with this, there is a definite demand with the current climate situation, to rethink making yet more work to be consumed by the art world.

In my Biblical Bikes project: the bikes I sell were once destined for the bin, with a bit of love they can again be used every day. In an exchange of money and bikes I can fill my belly and also attend to what people use every day, producing practical tools. There is a constant demand for bikes as a medium of transport. I can use my art making ability and skills to fix things. Through building relationships with customers the Biblical Bikes project builds a social network that is both eco-friendly, limiting carbon emissions and counteracting our throw away culture.

With this thought; by curating as well as producing a range of products including those that support the higher art game I’d like to believe I’m working towards creating a sustainable art practice with the ingredients of longevity, design, resourcefulness, community and repairing. The reality of the capitalist world asks that if we are going to be more loving and eco friendly it needs also to be profitable. I produce various tools that contribute to how societies function. My artistic outputs themselves can be understood as a catalyst in enabling communities to function positively. As an artist I aim to embrace the duality of my role: both trying to fix this world and create reward for my labour.

I have been responding to mine and my peer groups interest of partying.I have been installing kinetic lights to heighten the visual experience of such an event. There is something interesting about a visual artist focusing on the curation light because all we see is just what light has been in reflected back in to our retina. So by producing light as an art form is raw compact unexpectable experience.It also is a very accessible form of art that people respond to the explosive entertainment, visually exiting spectacles with relevant collaboration of exiting contemporary music.

My work is somewhere between a critique and celebration of film & TV, the artist, artwork and artworld, the real and unreal. I’m interested in making observations about what surrounds an event, object or action; the ‘unseen’ rather than the central; often making work in direct response to the context in which it will be shown.

My practise is site responsive. I work across a range of mediums such as video, sound, writing, sculpture and performance to examine my environment. I like to play on my own experiences, yet in recent projects my practise has become more collaborative. Humour plays an important role in my practise and playfulness is a running theme throughout my work. This could be in the form of set design, where I take objects and repurpose them throughout a performance, or through my use of materials in earlier three dimensional pieces. I enjoy using found objects and readymades in my work, as well as the process of collection.

Recently I have been inspired by theatre. I am particularly interested in arts education, having studied at a variety of different institutions in both the UK and Germany. This is a theme that occurs in my work, such as most recently directing and producing a live musical performance about my experience at art school. I am passionate about accessibility of the arts in all its forms and hope to encourage a multidisciplinary approach to fine art.

Holly Evelyn Smith is an environmental artist creating work for outside spaces. The projects she makes confront the public with information, rather than labelling it as art. Her work employs imagery, symbolism and conventional materials to disguise the unsanctioned work she installs.

These works remain active, hidden in plain sight, occupying public and civic space. Consequently, we can only understand them here through the medium of photography, documenting her unsanctioned interventions, installations and political actions. The themes contained in her work develop organically from an individual response to society’s problems, developing a practise reflecting an irascible confrontation with contemporary life in Britain.

She sees her role as an activist, using familiar objects to distribute information that is available but intentionally not made accessible. Her work juxtaposes controversy, confrontation and cynicism with the information necessary to inform the audience. Holly Evelyn Smith transforms her anxieties into something that others can understand, share in a collective awareness of… and act.

Ratty Nye Davies’ practice is an endeavour in ‘world-building’, telling abstract narratives of loss, betrayal, heartbreak through live performance, poetry, set-design and drawing. The tales she tells are a crude remix of personal truths and bastardised fictional histories.

Davies references opera, pre-christian pagan mythologies and biblical texts that centre around femme-focused tales of subjugation, using characters found as vehicles to discuss personal experience, formulating ways to live out poetic revenge fantasies.

Through performing the character of ‘ratty byebye’, a woman who exists beyond and in between constructs of fantasy and reality, she is both performer and character simultaneously. ‘ratty byebye’ is the constructed fantasy that allows Ratty as truthful artist, sister and daughter to explore her ‘true’ self. The ‘in-between-ness’ of non-linear definition of her own trans* body allows her to project truths into the fantasies she creates.

The work is performed both in queer nightclub spaces and traditional gallery spaces. By performing typically ‘theatrical’ or ‘cabaret’ style shows in a gallery space, the work is as much Entertainment as serious Fine Art. By presenting sculpture or installation into the club space for performance, the work challenges the limitations and flexibilities that both, differing, spaces and audiences can bring to poetic story-telling.

You can never be everyones cup of tea. Some people prefer cappuccinos. Whatever kind of beverage it is that you like I can make you a paper mâché cup to drink it from. Obviously thats not ideal because you would have to drink that beverage very fast and the cup would get really soggy and this whole scenario would make a big mess and if its a hot beverage you might get burnt, but hey ho maybe thats your ‘cup of tea’. Some people like to drink their tea from a mug and thats fine because let me tell you, I’ve heard many a good joke told over a mug of tea. Life can sometimes feel like an empty cup so lets turn all the tables and chairs around for a sec and let the mug tell the joke.

Biography

Cameron Bridgeman was born in George Town, Grand Cayman in 1997. He was educated in Grand Cayman and left the Cayman Islands in 2016 to study Foundation Art at the Leith School of Art in Edinburgh, Scotland. The following year he transferred to Year 2 of a BA(Hons) in Fine Art, specialising in sculpture at The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, where he is currently completing his 4th year.

Personal Statement

I enjoy searching for a variety of materials that interest me. These are usually found objects and discarded materials in the street; shoes, books, scrap metal and wood, bicycles, typewriters, aircraft parts and industrial materials. I like to take objects that people have discarded and no longer have use for. I want to give new meaning by reimagining an object or materials and creating something new.

I work intuitively with found objects, taking them apart and experimenting with reformatting them, playing with the different forms and textures that the natural objects possess. I place and attach objects that I think complement each other.

This process has come from a childhood fascination of taking things apart to find out how they work. I am attracted to the patterns, the rhythms and the sequences that the objects reveal.

I usually render the object with a single colour in order to unify all the parts of the object to create a whole.
The most interesting thing about using found objects for me is the history of the materials. Once the objects have been abandoned the original purpose for their creation is lost. Taking these objects apart and remaking them to create new sculptures, I am creating a new purpose, a new history, for these materials.

Project Ability Glasgow
Trongate 103 Gallery

My last project before the Covid-19 pandemic was working with Project Ability at the Trongate 103 Gallery in Glasgow.

I worked collaboratively with the artist, John Coza, who attends the Aspire Group at Project Ability. My aim was to help him create a body of work that encouraged John to take risks with his artwork.

To date, John and I have experimented with taking photographs of various materials and making drawings of the shapes we find most interesting. This has been a good way to get ideas flowing. From there we have taken this process further by making collages with the images to create interesting shapes and patterns. I encouraged him to keep the process of making and re-making going, continuing to document the work with drawings and photographs.

John is very ambitious and was excited to push his work to the next level. Being able to work with him was very rewarding and we started the project with a lot of enthusiasm which was sadly cut short before he could fully realise his sculptures. I have been introducing John to the same working process that I take with my own studio work. I wanted to encourage him to push his work as far as he could, to not overthink things, to let the work come naturally, but most of all to have fun.

National Gallery of the Cayman Islands – Virtual Tour

National Gallery of the Cayman Islands – Artist Blog

Project Ability GSA Project Blog

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

My practice attempts to be a space where absence can be contained and examined. This often feels like I am trying to describe a body that is just out of sight. To do this I try to highlight connections between ephemeral by-products of embodiment such as breath, dreams, memories and language. Resultant works contain absence at their core – taking the form of, for example, an empty bed or a departing butterfly. I hope that this agitation between what is physically present and what is suggested to have just departed the scene allows viewers to consider their own embodiment and experience of time in their own lives. I work across multiple media – sculpture, video, drawing, family archival material, and writing – often incorporating several media into one work. Absence, coupled with this multiplicity of forms attempts to describe how dreams, memory, and embodiment are sprawling and intangible – always just out of reach of language. In absenting a fixed body from these investigations I hope to make space for whatever ghosts the viewer may bring to the work.

In my video Who is that hiding under my breath? I present a rubbing of my great-grandmother’s bed hung from my mother’s bedroom window. As the drawing breathes, butterflies come and go from the frame. The work attempts to consolidate what about the lives of four generations of women is shared – having been born, having slept, having dreamt, having drawn breath. Sleep is presented as a space for co-existence, where linear time collapses and lives which are separated by mortal boundaries can transect. The butterfly, whose life is lived in different bodies, hints at the possibility that a common embodied experience could drift between vessels – such as bodies, furniture, or dreams.

My work is frequently concerned with giving a bland, mass produced object a personality.

I find great value in hands on practice and hard work. To me, the more that the viewer can tell about my making process and use of materials, the better. I would also extend the making process to include all of the social interactions, journeys, and challenges that are encountered along the way.

I want to see at what point one thing becomes another thing, can something manufactured become, through the investment of time, something handmade?

Reflecting on her personal experiences, and drawing upon the experiences of close friends and family, Lindsay’s work engages with ideas relating to growing up in a Scottish working-class environment. She is interested in the ways in which these areas shape those who are raised within them, and the culture of working-class youths. The research and inspiration behind her work comes from the town of Wishaw, North Lanarkshire, where she was brought up and continues to live in.
Through her multi-media practice Lindsay aims to explore and exhibit her own experiences within working-class culture, how she grew up, and the way in which it has shaped her as a person; pushing this personal exploration to involve the experiences of the wider area in which she resides, showing the relationships between the collective experiences of working-class youth. She is also interested in the way in which the working-class is represented and appropriated within the media, art, and society, and exploring the theoretical ideas underpinning this phenomenon through her work.

Bench: is a sculptural piece which was included in the exhibition ‘Something I Heard’ in the community base Platform, Easterhouse, in February of 2020; based on themes of community, identity, and collective experience.
I’d Know That Accent Anywhere: is an exploration of place and memory of youth in Wishaw.

Jack McElroy is a multidisciplinary artist that explores subjects surrounding Scottish identity and social history through personal and participatory research with people that then develops and takes the form of an archive.
Born in Glasgow, and being brought up in a working-class background, McElroy has informed his interests in accessibility to the arts, and makes artwork that attempts to attract people who may not typically think of themselves as ‘interested in art’.This usually then takes form of creating spaces out with the gallery to give a platform to share research through artworks that are interactive or require participation from the viewer to bring the work together by facilitating conversations and spaces.
What the “art work” actually looks like is dependent on who the work is made for in mind from photography, performance, sculpture and installation usually made with the intention to be used for something else in mind therefore the treatment to his artwork varies from not being too precious (because it can be made again and is intend on being used for something) to taking care and archiving objects that hold memory and have been collected through the research.

Working and collaborating with people McElroy often takes role of curator, organiser or host, bringing a performative element to the work. He is interested in exploring themes around appropriation art.

With his work being mostly environmental art – performative, event, temporary – he explores ways to which he can document that through sculpture using photographs.

Through this process he concentrates on making those spaces fit to content of the research-based work and start questioning what art spaces are and what it means to make art in them as an artist that makes environmental art.

DEGREE SHOW WORK:

“For the Degree show I wanted to make a site-specific sculpture of a Stage, a recurring motif that appeared in previous projects.
Exhibited against a window space on the ground floor, the Stage would have been built on either side of the Stow college building to give the illusion that the building was cutting through the Stage.
The inside space/ Backstage would have presented two publications on previous projects that explored the importance of the arts and green spaces to our mental health and well-being after event based works made after research into on-going cuts made to arts funding and education and the ongoing campaigns to save green spaces in the city.
Throughout the week of degree show on the outside space/ the Stage would have been a programme of events throughout the week, the events; loosely based around what I do to keep a good well-being, that could be shared with degree show visitors and fellow graduating students after thoughts about the period of time after graduating known as ‘degree show blues’.
The programme of events ranged from a DJ and a drag show on opening night, an afternoon with live music amongst other activities such as life drawing, yoga, a picnic, haircuts and a children’s art workshop.
The Stage and programme would have acted as a platform for me to collaborate with other creative people within and out with the institution.”

My practice comes from an interest and passion for exploring the natural world that surrounds us. I am intrigued by how things grow and move to create forms between each other. These hidden lines and forms inspire and motivate me. Inosculation creates a space for narrative, and a setting to stimulate thoughts and reflect. I see human qualities and behaviour reflected in these spaces when I look closely at the detail and form and observe their ability to engulf, alter and takeover spaces.

My work examines how the body inhabits and moves through natural space. I am interested in dissecting and pulling out shapes and forms and in particular plants, trees and other growing elements from spaces we pass through. This is a way of mapping the space to understand and how we relate ourselves to it.

One of the ways I build on my ideas is working within collaborative workshops; both movement workshops to create video and photography research as well as mark making workshops as a means of exploring a space. The workshops I lead allow for appreciation of natural spaces and appreciation of contact and what it means to share space with others. These workshops also act as a platform for discussion and group collaboration. I have lead children and teen outreach programs as well as older group workshops and have become experienced in working collaboratively and with an open mind with no limit to age or ability. I believe everyone should be able to explore and express themselves regardless of their circumstances or age. Access to art and expression for all is of central importance to me and is at the heart of my practice. These workshops allow me to promote this belief, start conversations and form important relationships and connections.

The process of dissecting and mapping, discussion and collaboration allows me to articulate and share experiences of inhabiting our environment. I use the creation of sculptural pieces to represent these forms and experiences. I work with a variety of media including wood, metal and various casting materials. I utilise mixed free hand building, video and photography.

I represent these forms through making large sculptural pieces. I have worked previously with wood and metal, various casting, mixed free hand building and video and photography. I pull out forms created in workshops to form a variety of figurative sculptural art. The nature of the way I work allows visibility of my contact with materials. I let materials determine and direct how they want to be used and experimented with. Spending time exploring the nature of a material creates a relationship between me and the work. This way of working allows for similar meditative, active approach to that of the mapping workshops. Activating spaces, materials and starting conversation is at the core of my work and is the intrinsic motivation to make and learn in my practice.

My current practice uses digital animation, I generate 3D computer images, in which I try to capture my emotion in my art and share an aesthetic experience.  My art is driven by a desire to recognise the way the world moves and how we feel it move with us.  My work and films explore people’s relationship to their own history and their perception of time, experience, and memory. Building emotional and poetic worlds in the digital inevitably provokes me to explore ideas of reality, the virtual and the imagined and what affect art has on perception.

I am drawn to people’s imagination and memories in all its possible potentials. Thoughts and memories only exists as visual traces in the individual’s minds; they are personal, we can tell stories of our perceptions, but we can never fully realise what is going on in our heads, when we explain it in words. Trying to recreate people’s memories by building something from scratch using computer software, where anything can be realised, however impractical, gives us the freedom to explore all the possibilities that pop up in people’s heads. By combining people’s imagined or remembered into a collective vision, presented as an animation, the vision will become more than the sum of its parts. It will demonstrate the potential of what new technology can offer; liberating and illuminating shared experience and bringing a single thing into the world that previously lived solely in people’s mind’s eye.

I like to explore childhood in my work and the freedom and naivety of children’s minds. I am fascinated by how the unknowing drives children to test things, like life and death, power and our place in the world. It is about touching the aesthetic world of feeling affect and emotion, and how do we do this is an unreal mythological, speculative way. When we are children we admit to the reasons behind our actions in an open and honest way, however as adults, we typically try justify our actions through practicality and reason, never purely for the sake of feeling and aesthetic experience.

My work seeks to make intimate and small gestures that cross private and shared space to live between the half imagined, the real and the virtual.

It’s pretty hard to put a collection of work together like this. How to show work is something I think about a lot. There’s a kind of boring inevitability about having to go back to the gallery (or the online showcase) to legitimise your experiment, observation and work. Because the work isn’t designed to be an image. Or an mp3 file. Or a video. It’s something to be experienced, and then has to find a form that fits itself, and be documented in a way that makes sense too.

I feel very lucky to be able to use my life like this, everyday has many moments, which could be experimented with, discovered, extracted, examined and re-imagined.

One year I decided I would give every single person I saw in a day a genuine smile. And to greet every single person I saw the following day. The document of this work can be many things, a book, an image, a poster, a video, a long recording for the radio. But that’s not so important, it’s an experiment in living, one that anyone could try. This year I have enlisted others, to not make myself the only ‘everywoman’ in my work.

Many of these ideas are works in progress; I’ve not completely worked them out yet. I’m always a beginner (in material, constantly learning a new skill or technology or subject) and my projects are like a navy of intrepid enquirers. I want them to travel down many different small tributaries to navigate this vast world. Sometimes I feel very excited by this potential. And sometimes I feel very lost and uncertain.

My work finds value in the in-betweens and the everyday. That’s where I think a person’s value ought to lie too, in the way they think about and relate to other people and the world around them.

Obsessed with our oversaturated-with-media-society. My work attempts to re-contextualize our seemingly unlimited access to this media. By utilising repetition, visual effects, editing software and my own source material I try to create new meaning from this over abundance of resources we recently acquired. Works like ‘100 Lightning strikes’ comments on our commodification of mother nature itself, and our seemingly selfish desire to economise on a natural beauty like lightning.

I also use my work to focus on cultural phenomenon like cinema and club culture with an added awareness of other contemporary artistic practices. ‘24x Psycho’ for example is a re-contextualisation of Douglas Gordon’s ’24 Hour Psycho’ and by using modern programs to repeat every second 24 times instead of stretching the film to 24 hours I have created a new meaning to an already very well known piece of art. Or my work ‘I listen to Blue Monday every Monday’ that being almost meditative video piece on the worldwide impact and the effect of club music, and specifically the effect of Blue Monday.

My work re-contextualises already known phenomena and place the viewer into a position where they have no choice but to think of this phoneme in an entirely different light.

The stories we hear as children form our impression of the world. They teach us of morality, sexuality and society; simultaneously reflecting and shaping human understanding and culture. From the books that are read to us before we sleep, to the words that fall from our parents’ lips, these tales influence our interactions and aspirations, moulding the very fibre of our being… but what if the tales our society tells are corrupt? What if their lessons intend to condition us to conform to our own oppression?

Elianor Oudjedi is a french video artist with an intimate and dreamlike world. Her work focuses on the notion of resilience and uses the medium of moving image to capture and present narratives commonly dismissed in the collective imagination.
Advocating that fragility is an immense strength she seeks to absorb her audience into an empathetic gaze through her use of poetic sceneries and means of storytelling.
Firstly trained as a designer, Elianor uses a thorough methodology and intentions in her visual work. Convinced that the Intimate is political she works on collecting personal stories and exploring ways to preserve distance while sublimating them through visual art. Often evocative, her work illustrates her intention to give her audience just enough tools to understand their own stories through others’ and introduce leads to reflect on society.

My works focus on introducing alternative discourses and shedding light onto pertinent issues that are often veiled with insidious deception. By uncovering these hegemonic illusions with another layer that counterclaims the hypocrisy and contradictions that have been perpetually engrained in human consciousness, my pieces interrogate and confront these fallacies with the intention of evoking critical contemplations.

In other words: I make art about life so that you can see how I see life.

Thinking of the term “craft” as a transformative and non-linear process, my work aims to rebirth, or recode, politics behind the workshop – without gender politics being imposed onto myself as an artist. Indeed, the work is not intended as “female artist within the workshop”, rather how can I master my craft in order to create space and accessibility for others that aren’t traditionally invited into such spaces. Like many other queer creatives, my primary areas of interest growing up came from monsters and mythology.

Sustainability and the idea of transformation are central to my practice. As a working class artist, accessibility is important to me and informs my chosen materials. I only carve discarded woods, giving them new life as artworks.

Observing modes of articulation in childhood toys reintroduced me to the concept of learning through making. Incorporating movable features extends the potential of a carved sculpture and allows interactivity with an audience. The notion of “play” subverts polarities such as fear and attraction; beauty and repulsion.

In response to the cancellation of the Degree Show I have started experimenting with 3D scanning to show my carvings online. I have transformed my small flat into a live-in studio and I often go to bed with woodchips and splinters in the sheets. However, I’m grateful to have my work to distract me from the uncertainty of graduating at this time.

My practice explores our relationship with the natural landscape. The work considers the environment as being in a constant state of cyclical change, aliveness and movement. Through these themes, I create compositions that explore subtle workings within the landscape and how they may be linked to ourselves (- our bodies and our experiences).

Using a mixed media practice, the work often begins with a collecting process from the environment. This is not limited to just physical objects but also image and sound. From here I draw on the relationships between material, process and embodied experience.

Resolved work can take many forms, such as installation, video and photography and I’m interested in the potentials of participation and sustainability. The context for my work is not limited to the gallery space. Wherever it exists, I hope it serves to provide a welcoming environment to open a dialogue or a new perspective.

The recent video work shown here is an audio-visual composition that draws on the intimate relationship between image and sound. It explores the idea of a changing landscape, living, breathing and malleable in nature. Most importantly, both the original installation and current online version, set up a place of mindfulness and rest.

The audio is made to be experienced through headphones, and draws on the resonance of cello sounds being the closest to human breathing. In turn, the video/projection places us in an environment, viewing a reflection. The work itself becomes a cycle, which creates a dialogue about the both the continual transfer of natural material and the air we live and breathe.

I use analogue technology to bridge the gap between performative sound and a physical work for an audience. As an artist, I aim to create an experience and, though this may have an underlying concept, the main intention is to set up a situation so that the audience’s interaction stimulates the outcome.

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

I am driven to observe, experiment with and then facilitate opportunities for change in urban environments. My particular interest lies in how people engage with urban ‘non-spaces’. Non-spaces, described by Marc Augé as ‘spaces of circulation, consumption and communication’, are places of low cultural, social or symbolic significance; through-roads, a means to an end rather than a destination and seen generally as cold and inanimate. The unfriendly human experience in such spaces usually prompts people to keep their heads down and simply rush through – I aim to leaven those repressive feelings by showing such spaces a little care.
My work hones in on their routine use. When a space is designed with a certain function in mind as urban landscapes are, a purpose that has driven it to exist and be used as it is, I am intrigued by the opportunity for alteration in that function. Tapping into the innate almost childlike human curiosity aroused by change, I try to open a dialogue between the space and the audience by using text and phrasing questions to them. Questions with no answers, chairs with nothing to wait for, crafted structures with no apparent purpose – these are tools I have experimented with to divorce people from the unthinking routine of the everyday and bring about a new emotional awareness of the space around them. These works are experiments to see what small interventions can achieve. The smallest change of spatial function, of bodily movement, of physical occupation, can increase that audience awareness of these seemingly empty, purpose-less areas.

The distance between myself and the work means the interactions take place for the most part in my absence. Due to the nature of the work I keep photographing or videoing it in use to a minimum in order to elicit a more organic untainted response from my audience. While implications of my interference with the space can therefore go mostly undocumented, I find most value in the candid participation of my audience over the duration of the work; I want audiences to feel unobserved, to feel uncertainty in how to behave or interact with the changes.

Recently my predominantly sculptural practice has focused on illusionistic ways of working, producing works that momentarily cause confusion in the viewer: Pieces can be easily mistaken for the real thing before being seen as an art object.

This is achieved through realistic sculpting and casting processes with detailed paint applications – re-creating recognisable objects that relate both to my class background and everyday surroundings.

Sometimes though, the sculptures deliberately expose the processes used to make them; setting up a paradox or contradiction between representation and the deceptive aspects of my practice.

The installation of works intentionally plays with context and expectation, which sometimes might make the work seem ephemeral, incongruous or alien to gallery spaces.

Within my work, I attempt to draw parallels between class, masculinity and status – using influences that range from GREGGS pastries to historical paintings – which manifest in quasi-figurative sculptures that blend the grotesque, the bodily and the absurd.