Ruth Barker is a Glasgow based artist who works with text, performance, and installation. Her practice uses a strange poetry to throw autobiographical sketches together with echoes of humanity’s oldest stories.
Reflecting theoretical ideas of connectivity and finitude, Barker works between written text and spoken word, often recounting her complex prose-poems from memory as live performances. Her practices, on first examination, foreground the artist’s own daily experiences and the quotidian narratives of life as a mother-of-two in contemporary Scotland (nappies and pushchairs, shopping lists from Lidl, Hovis bread with cut crusts, stubbled legs and the TV news). However, the work is underpinned by the larger, longer stories of our own mortality, our sense of self, and our unconscious internalisation of ancient myth. Barker’s performance poems are hypnotic, ritualised, events, often accompanied by lavish costume or unconventional locations. Her words are layered in structure and intensity, and use repetition, mnemonic, and moments of unexpected humour. Barker’s exhibition practice uses installation, audio recordings, scripts, and sometimes chaotic assemblages to draw the essence of a performed work into a staged re-encounter with the artist’s voice.
Ruth Barker is represented by the Agency Gallery, London. http://theagencygallery.co.uk
The practice of Jasper Coppes (1983, The Netherlands) unfolds around the transformation of spaces – through precise gestures and détournements, Coppes challenges the material and immaterial conditions that shape natural and man-made sites. His practice takes the form of large-scale architectural installations, films, sculptures and texts – often positioned as silent obstacles, in need of activation yet perpetually present. Coppes graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2008 and was a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2010 and 2011. He also holds an MLitt in Fine Art Practice from Glasgow School of Art. Besides his artistic practice he is a freelance writer; part time tutor at the KABK – Royal Academy of The Hague; guest tutor at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, and guest lecturer at the Hogeschool Zuyd in Maastricht.
Alan Currall was born in 1964 in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England. He grew up in Staffordshire and Ayrshire, Scotland. Between 1981 and 1983 he studied art at Newcastle-Under-Lyme School of Art and North Staffordshire Polytechnic and from 1989 to 1992 he studied painting at Staffordshire University. In 1993 he entered the MFA programme at Glasgow School of Art (GSA). Upon completing this in 1995 he remained in Glasgow, taking up teaching work at GSA. In 1998 he was the recipient of the Richard Hough Bursary. In 2002 he was selected for the inaugural Jerwood Platform award. In 2003 he was shortlisted for the Beck’s Futures Prize. His work is represented in several public collections. He continues to teach part- time at GSA, in the Department of Sculpture and Environmental Art, and between 2002 and 2010 he was a School of Fine Art Researcher. Between 2010 and 2017, he also taught part-time at Edinburgh College of Art on the Intermedia programme. He lives and works in rural Dumfries & Galloway, Scotland.
Sarah Forrest (b. 1981 Dundee) is an artist based in Glasgow. She received her MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2010. Recent exhibitions include: TWO NIGHT STANDS, co-curated by Lynda Morris and Sophia Hao, Cooper Gallery, Dundee; Again, it objects, Supplement, New York; (all 2017). Again, it objects, (solo) Kunstraum Dusseldorf, Germany; FFWWD>> Moving Image from Scotland, CURRENT: Contemporary Art from Scotland, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China; NEO NEO // Extreme Past, Pig Rock Bothy, National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Tall Tales, Women artists, fact, fiction and somewhere in between, Glasgow Women’s Library and The Freud Museum, London (all 2016). The Shock of Victory, CCA, Glasgow; Ripples in the Pond, GOMA, Glasgow; A Skull and a Screen, Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Arts Centre, North Uist (all 2015). Mood is Made, Temperature is Taken, curated by Quinn Latimer; I will wear a plastic guise / I will wear a fabric guise, Dog Park, Christ Church, New Zealand (all 2014). Two Solo Shows: Sarah Forrest and Mounira Al Sohl (solo), CCA, Glasgow; Next to Perplexed you, curated by Jan Verwoert: Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; You Blink at the Plughole, M.E.X.I.C.O, Leeds; Phenotypic Plasticity, with OaPaO (Mark Briggs, Amelia Bywater, and Rebecca Wilcox); ReMap 4, Athens (all 2013). Sarah Forrest is recipient of the Margret Tait Award 2017/18.
Susan Brind studied Fine Art at Reading University and the Slade School of Art. She is a Reader in Contemporary Art: Practice & Events in the School of Fine Art, Department of Sculpture & Environmental Art, Glasgow School of Art. She previously taught at a number of UK institutions including Oxford Brookes University, Central St Martin’s, London, and Grays School of Art, Aberdeen, as well as being a visiting lecturer in Germany and Canada. Her work, which takes the form of sculptural, textual and time-based installations, plays on the tensions between rational forms of knowledge and the body as a site of understanding. She has exhibited widely in Europe and the UK, including a site-specific permanent commission for the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and her works are held in public and private collections in the UK and Australia. Her praxis has incorporated collaborative curatorial projects such The Reading Room (with Jane Rolo of Book Works, London, 1994) and Curious: Artists’ Research in Expert Culture (for Visual Art Projects, Glasgow, 1999). Published works include The State of the Real: Aesthetics in the Digital Age (co-edited with Damian Sutton and Ray McKenzie, IB Tauris 2007).
http://www.gsa.ac.uk/research/fine-art-profiles/b/brind,-susan/
http://art.lshtm.ac.uk/Brind.pdf
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Jim Harold studied Fine Art at Reading University, and has a doctorate from Glasgow University for his research into the comparative analysis of the poetics of the desert and of desert spaces as found in the literature of Arab and European travellers. He has worked extensively as a lecturer and senior lecturer in Fine Art, most significantly at Central St Martin’s, London, Northumbria University at Newcastle, and Glasgow School of Art where he is currently a visiting lecturer. He has also been a visiting lecturer to institutions in Germany, Finland and Canada. His work has been exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, and he has work in public and private collections in Australia, the USA and the UK, including the Arts Council of England and the V&A Museum. His practice focuses upon our understanding of landscape and its re-figuring within European cultures as a result of the shifting currents of thought set in motion by the disciplines of aesthetics, the natural sciences, philosophy, sociology and politics. It considers the way that ‘value’ has been placed on certain types of land or landscape experiences: in particular, the question of marginality in those areas of land that exist at the edge or at the limit. Published works include: ‘Caesura: Cyprus–Kibris–Kypros’ in Interstices, ‘The Drouth’, Issue 54, Winter/Spring 2016; ‘Witnessing the Momentous: Crowds, Stones and Images, Silent Witnesses’ in Tanya Leighton & Pavel Büchler (eds) Saving the Image: Art after film, CCA, Glasgow/MMU, Manchester 2003; ‘Andres Serrano: The Sea of Possibility’ in Sci-Fi Aesthetics, Art & Design Magazine No. 56, London, 1997; and Desert, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 1996.
https://altvinyl.bandcamp.com/album/last-30-minutes
Collaborative works:
Susan Brind & Jim Harold also have a substantial collaborative practice which has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with expertise in working in response to site and context. Their joint projects include Passieren, Bremen (1992) and Mysteries of the heart, Camden Arts Centre, London (1994). More recent collaborations include: a temporary commission for the Library at Hospitalfield House, Arbroath (2010); sound installations for the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2008) and for What we make with words, CCA, Glasgow (2011); and a wall text, Hinterlands, Renmin University Gallery, Beijing (2015). Further recent text installations include, Foreign Encounter, Munich (2015); and For you …, part of the Bitter Rose project, Glasgow International (2016). Their published collaborative works include Curious Arts – No.6, (a book funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, published by CCA, 2013) and artist’s pages in the journal ‘The Burning Sands: Vol 5’ (April 2016). Both publications focus on the relationship between culture and nature. They are currently working with artists, Duncan Higgins (KHiB, Bergen and Nottingham Trent University) and Shauna McMullan (Glasgow School of Art), Ana Souto (NTU) and Yiorgos Hadjichristou (University of Nicosia) on an international inter-disciplinary project entitled, Creative Centre for Fluid Territories, investigating concepts of territory, agency, boundaries and borders in defining or contributing to the negotiation and representation of a place.
http://bitter-rose.com/A-Bitter-Rose
http://www.cca-glasgow.com/programme/52d56a701b5a4e2b2f00001d
Shona Macnaughton an artist whose practice is rooted in performance, writing and film staging reenactments of the relationships between characters, making scripts and actions which are set up to confront an audience. She uses a method of reframing texts relating to the site of display, transferring them from their original context onto present political and technological conditions. Her work is responsive to the political conditions around specific architectures, which can be both physical and virtual spaces and how their design works.
Macnaughton completed her MFA at Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. Recent exhibitions include Arm’s Length Government Body, Céline, Glasgow, The Endarkenment. Art and Unreason. 1945 – Present, Dovecot, Edinburgh and Blend the acclaim of your chant with the Timbrels, Jerwood Staging Series, Jerwood Space, London (all 2016).
Duncan Marquiss (b.1979 Scotland) is a Glasgow based artist who works with film & video, drawing, writing and music. Much of his work explores overlaps between the cultural and the biological. His recent documentary work Evolutionary Jerks & Gradualist Creeps (2016) considered analogies between evolutionary patterns within the fossil record and the cultural evolution of popular music.
Marquiss graduated from the MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 2005 and undertook the LUX Associate Artist Programme, London in 2009. He was the recipient of the Margaret Tait Award 2015-16. Recent exhibitions include Renderuin at Glasgow International Festival 2016 and a solo exhibition Copying Errors at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Recent screenings include Experimenta at the BFI London Film Festival 2015 and Index screening at Microscope Gallery, New York.
Born in Northern Ireland and based in Glasgow, Shauna McMullan is an artist and educator. She studied Sculpture in Cheltenham, England followed by a Masters Degree at Glasgow School of Art and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received a number of awards including a Scottish Arts Council Scholarship at the British School at Rome and residencies at the NIFCA (Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art) in the Faroe Islands and Triangle Artist Workshop in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at major museums as well as through permanent public commissions such as The Albert Drive Colour Chart for Tramway, Glasgow (2013); The Blue Spine Collection made for Glasgow Women’s Library (2010); Travelling the Distance commissioned by and for the Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh (2006); and Via shown in the Toyota Museum of Modern Art, Japan (2005).
Shauna’s main areas of research are in community, mapping and place. She is interested in the relationship between geography and art and wonders if it’s possible as an artist to employ the language of cartography to create alternative mappings or counter cartographies. At its core the work attempts to deal with the collision of these two fields – cartography and fine art.
She works as a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art where she is a contributor to the GSA Reading Landscape Research Group.
Joanna Peace is an artist, writer and educator based in Glasgow. Her longstanding interest in psychological and structural space and female subjectivity demands that her work emerges from direct experience, seeking to extend the sensation of particular bodies in particular places. She uses her practice to pay attention to – and heighten – atmospheres and sensorial experience, and believes that what we pay attention to, and how, can be a generative and critical act. Joanna has contributed to exhibitions, events, residencies and publications across the UK and internationally. Entangled with her artistic practice is her work as a facilitator of participatory projects, and as a teacher she has lectured at the Plymouth College of Art and Glasgow School of Art.