Exhibitions
Xylo, 2024, Glasgow Project Room
A showcase of new work alongside Patrick Jameson and Ragnar Jonasson. Three Glasgow-based artists working with wood as material and support. Each artist plays with surface signs and signatures of once-living things. Each line a wrinkle or stretch mark of players from a more-than-human world. Each artist integrates their own symbolic system into the grain of the wood, adopting the surface, and the lines of a life lived, to bring fresh perspectives on the practice of thinking-through-making.
photo credits: Patrick Jameson
Installation shots include the work of Patrick Jameson and Ragnar Jonasson
Exhibited at Simone DeSousa Gallery, Detroit as part of the group exhibition ‘Over Over Over, curated by artist Cedric Tai.
Inspired by industrial boom towns and decline, I was interested in drawing connections between the Detroit motor industry, the oil industry in the North East of Scotland and the 70’s Swiss mechanical watch industry. The work was intended to peel away at an aesthetic of endless prosperity.
Tiny abstract paintings on the dials of old mechanical watches were wound up, ticking and strapped onto artificial concrete knot forms. The sculptures were displayed on shiny, cardboard and plastic, cosmos effect, plinths. Gold abstract paintings with motifs resonating with the watch dials were propped up on the installation and hung around the space.
On the opening night the work was accompanied by a 24 minute drum kit performance by John Nicol, Cedric Tai and Detroit musician Efe Bes.
Good Times Bad Times, 2015, Installation of sculptures, paintings, painted mechanical vintage watches and drum performance.
Photo credit, Cedric Tai
Indirectly, Yours, 2013, Collaboration with Cedric Tai, mixed media Installation, Intermedia Gallery CCA, Glasgow
Indirectly, Yours was painting show turned into a single installation. The paintings by Tai were interventions of the actual palettes of other local painters to create a sort of portrait of that particular painter's work and personality. To tease out the language of each artist is to embody their mindset and focus and to go back to consider the dried paint anew is to see a compression of all of the paintings that also could have existed.
Tai then passed over complete creative control over the objects, which could be altered in any way I wanted when making the final Installation. I created shelving unit sculpture/paintings to display all of the objects and a vocal harmonic sound work. With a focus on the tension of collaboration and preciousness I aimed to respond to the objects and collaborative context in a playful way.
Hunner Pound Jumpers and Opium Tea, 2012, mixed media installation for the exhibition Guerre-en-Scene, with Sam Derounian.
The installation was an exploration of themes concerned with conflict, contradiction, aesthetics and value. The sculptures acted out a form of dandyism. Cold, detached, hollow and aesthetic. Glimmers of colour and pattern reflected from the kaleidoscopic interiors of the plastic objects. Commonplace materials and found objects were reinvented into artworks, or objects performing the role of the artwork.
The works adorned subtle traces of fashion emblems left over from a bygone era of life in the 1990s, North East of Scotland. A make believe opulent time paralleling the decadence period of the 1890s like haunted remnants from a culture of sensory indulgence and moral indifference, powered by an endless purse of oil wealth.
The stereotypical turn of the century dandy, squandering the family inheritance on pleasure is replaced by a generation of oil industry children, expensive branding and pocket money drug abuse.
An Abominable Affair, 2012, Mixed media installation.
Produced during an 8-month residency at the Muse 269 space in London. The research during the residency was concerned with yeti’s, dandy’s and psychedelic Japanese toys from the 60s that were recently discovered on a visit to Tokyo. To fit within his residency budget the work was mainly produced from found objects and materials purchased at the local £1 store.
Romantic Escape Reality Downer, 2014, Mixed media installation.
Sehnsucht at the Chalet for Glasgow International 2014
The sculptures took the shape of common artists A-frame painting easels. The easels were made from tree branches, resembling a homemade forest shelter or human survival structure found in an imagined wilderness. A remnant of the artist in reclusion.
The paintings were flipped over and converted into mirrored shelves to hold a collection of objects. Remote controls, perfume dispensers and a toilet roll holder to offer some creature comforts.
A small speaker played the ‘sounds of an imaginary forest’ with fake animal calls and false bird songs to help with sleep.
