Smoke Signals, by Ed Carter and David Cranmer

Each signal and sound indicates flow of data leaving behind a translucent sculptural form.

See the artwork on display at The International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester,  31 March –  2 April for Future Everything Festival.

Read more about the artwork here.

This new series is available to view on her flickr page here.

The piece is a development of Techno Utopia from his 2015 exhibit Anticipatory Objects and explores ideas around migration.

Techno Utopia, for 23:57

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Grid Play, 2015, Projected Stop Motion Film, Laser Cut Wood, Perspex, Screenprints

Grid Play installation by Rachel Hendry.

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Catriona provides a useful resource to those seeking hidden gems and well known works. A good example of this is her familiar stomping ground in Edinburgh. Want to take in all of the Antony Gormley series 6 Times? The blog shows all six, including the striking cast Number VI standing at the end of an abandoned pier in Leith.

Antony Gormley, 6 Times cast Number VI

Among the more mainstream or historically significant pieces on the well-tread tourist trail, the collection highlights hidden and temporary works that could easily go unnoticed. Temporary sculptures The Leaf People, situated near Deanhaugh, have been appearing for years now and are there to be appreciated by local passers-by.

The Leaf People

Find locations of the Shutter Project, like this one by Fraser Grey, giving a new lease of life to the shop fronts after hours.

The Shutter Project, Fraser Grey

Art on Your Streets reflects on each city having an aesthetic and gives the reader the insight and tools to explore what each city has to offer. Check the site for all locations including Glasgow, Amsterdam and Singapore.

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Are you willing to participate?, 2015

With the help of the objects and sculptures that I produce or select, I lead an investigation of what objects communicate and are able to modulate within social relations. Through my work I tend to question the impact and subversive potential of our material environment in our lives. I use fiction as a means to negotiate reality: it allows me to explore and point out the artificiality of what is engraved as being intuitive, natural or presented as the norm.

Lately video has taken a substantial place in my practice. I write the scenario at the same time as I produce the objects that will later play a part in the video. In this sense constructing the characters happens both in words and through material research. Therefore the two processes influence one another in the construction of the narration. I see exhibitions as occasions to extend the fictional space developed in videos through sculptures and installation that generate new directions for the work. Likewise the installation of a video can engender another installation, until it reaches a sense of exhaustion.

When I arrived at the Cooper Gallery Summer Residency in July, I’ve just finished the video Nothing Remains, Only Us and freshly set it up in a group exhibition. The video presents a man recalling a community he was part of. The people living in this community aimed to inhabit together a shared house in a way that will disturb their way of living and therefore create new means of experiencing and acting in society. The only rule which is said to have existed and been stressed was to produce a new object a day “which implied as a tacit agreement to break one thing beforehand”. The work shown in Dundee extends the research explored in the video on strategies of resistance towards productivity and participation. It addresses what relations and ways to inhabit the world can material empowerment invent. The sculpture presented acts as a body that spatially regulates the three approaches to material production in relation to individual withdrawal to the logic of labour.

One side of the sculpture shows the video on a flat screen TV. Viewers are invited to sit in this space filled with objects being in a bad mood or displaying their feelings and weaknesses. They express their dissatisfaction toward their functionality echoing a broader contemporary requirement of being happy, complete and accomplished but also functioning and productive. Inter-dependence is put on focus when care is applied to wherever the sculpture needs to: bandages cover flat angle brackets that needed to be added during the install to fix the fleshy beam as for the cushion that stands where the beam needed support.

During the residency, I started to reflect on notion of productivity within an artistic practice when responding to invitations to work. That’s what the opposite side of the sculpture draw upon. There, a drawing of an open mouth made with pink glitters rests on a curvy wall. The hole is cut out which allows to see the inside of the structure. Through this hole I’ve thrown the genuine and organic ceramic objects I made in the first weeks of the residency when aiming to populate and decorate my working environment Dundee. Performing a mindless and wrecker maker seemed to be an appropriate reaction when thinking of perpetual mobility and immediacy of production. I came here reading over The Lesbian Body of Monique Wittig again. The author is known for a statement she made in The Straight Mind, which was that lesbians are not woman since woman is nothing but a social class that they refuse to be part of. What is interesting is how she implies that lesbians refuse to become or to remain heterosexual, implying a conscious decision over passing a simple desire to revolt by taking concrete action endangering the patriarchal society. In The Lesbian Body she recalls the physical, material and mental love from one woman to another. This desire is mediated through the consumption of every bit of the partner’s body. A carnivorous, violent and destructive experimentation where the body has to be eaten and digested in order to be understood adored and re-invented. That was an opening point in considering the motif of destruction as a form of empowerment over one’s existence. This is extremely present in the video and I extend this aspect in the back of the sculpture when thinking of my own relation to labour.

Finally, on top of the structure, I’ve placed a terracotta pot that my mum made before I was born. We had a discussion around this pot a couple of days before I left for Dundee. It served as a proxy to discuss her long life living-and-working economy in which I was raised.  My stepfather and her started to rehabilitate a house whilst we were living there decades ago. Once the house was ready, it was sold in order to buy a new site. This process happened over and over and merged work and life. The pot is one of the rare objects that remain from all the relocations. Family and friends already appeared in some of my works, either through their material production or featuring some videos. Florent Dubois who plays the interviewee in the video presented at the Cooper Gallery is also a friend of mine. It was his first experience as an actor and for me the first time I asked someone to enact a well-defined role and to deliver a script. We spent three days together in what used to be my studio in Lyon and shot the whole thing on green screen.

Anouchka Oler will exhibit at Cooper Summer Residency Exhibition 2015: THINGNESS? until 10 October.

Images courtesy of the artist and Cooper Gallery DJCAD, University of Dundee. Photographer: Ross Fraser McLean.

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Celebrating the best of international contemporary art practice, the annual RSA Open Exhibition has a long history of over 180 years. The exhibition in the RSA’s Lower Galleries showcases a wide range of small and medium sized works (max. 80cm in any direction) selected through open submission and includes paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, electronic media and photographs.

The RSA Open showcases nearly 400 artworks each year and incorporates the ever-popular Own Art scheme. Find out more about Own Art on Central Station here.

There is a small entry fee and all artists will need to register and complete the online application process at www.regroyalscottishacademy.org.

For more information, please see the guidelines and FAQs online.

Deadline: 18 October

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Brickwork A, 2013

Here she talks about her process and upcoming solo exhibition From A Horizontal Line at St Margaret’s House, Edinburgh.

Often evolving from diagrams and technical drawings, my work seems to come from a fascination in the relationship between principle geometric forms and reoccurring systems of support. The diagrams act as propositions, exploring how one shape defines another, creating parameters within the drawings that are transposed into the physical constructions through the introduction of load and/or directional forces.

Spiral Diagram, 2015

Spheroid Diagram 1, 2015

The Transition from diagram to actual structure is reliant on engaging material properties of mass, flexibility, elasticity and strength, composing each structure from the minimum material components possible keeping every element necessary to the overall stability. Most of the time the works are constructed consecutively; the act of making one will lead to another. So there is a constant process of dismantling and reconstruction in which materials get repurposed as the idea moves on. However, the use of repeating identical elements (i.e brick) is purposeful and intended to construct visible units of measure within the structures that can be compared throughout the body of work.

Load at A (Spheroid), 2015

From A Horizontal Line collates an ongoing series of work that focuses on capturing the material tension produced when creating a curve from a linear form. The work is based on the idea that condensing a straight line between two opposing points, usually positioned at either end, will produce a curve. Therefore all the works in the show originate ‘from a horizontal line’ and through an addition of load/force a curve is formed. The material tension of the curve itself supports the load/force, creating a continuous reactionary process between the components that is perfectly, but tenuously, balanced.

This notion of constructing a curve has always been of significant interest and particularly present in the drawings. Usually beginning with the cube structure, the curve is drawn freehand according to points mapped out from the surrounding cube/square, identifying the key points on the curve that create its shape. Acting as diagrams, the drawings all aim towards demonstrating some form of physical construction that may or may not be realised directly, but aspects are explored in the sculptures.

Untitled, 2015

Utilising the curve within the sculptures has always been more difficult than other works. The tensions can change over time making something that was initially balanced suddenly spring outwards, or curl up and collapse. A small amount of trial and error is needed to find the right amount of force and where exactly to apply it. Often it is just a case of adjusting angles and placements or simply using two bricks instead of one. Eventually, the equilibrium is found and the structural stability within a kinetic interaction is achieved, perpetually paused in motion.

Robyn’s exhibition From A Horizontal Line will be on at St Margaret’s House, Edinburgh from Saturday 27 June – Sunday 12 July with the preview happening tomorrow, Friday 26 June. Find out more information here.

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Joe Keogh’s Chasing Ghosts is the first public show to grace the Art School’s project space. Tucked away on the top floor, the space is intimate, a not-so-secret clubhouse that breaks with the hustle and bustle of the café downstairs. It’s a place for ideas and thinking, and most of all it’s a place for art. Two white walls and a window offer a view into The Glasgow School of Art’s main library. It’s a fitting view considering the depth of Joe Keogh’s work. Based on a fascination with the Cosmos, Chasing Ghosts is an exhibition that plays with ideas around dark matter, dematerialisation and the undetectable.

Echo (4 drawings layered, ink on translucent paper, steel pins)

It’s also a return to Keogh’s roots as an artist. He studied at the GSA in the 80s, leaving with a degree in sculpture. At the time, the MFA course didn’t exist, and although he considered a postgrad in sculpture, he was persuaded to do the Masters in Design. “I wasn’t so happy with that, unfortunately. I kept saying, “I’m an artist!” but it was really interesting. We were learning a lot of new stuff.” He deviously put on a sculpture show in his second year anyway and passed his degree.

Chasing Ghosts remains true to Keogh’s sculptural roots, “The work is about sculpture and traditional sculptural ideas like forms relating to other forms in space.” The exhibition features three new pieces: Halo and Tau which are both small wall pieces and Echo which consists of 4 layered drawings.

Tau

Halo

Halo and Tau are white fibreboard sculptures. Halo is layered on the wall in different configurations, filled with holes and shadows. With the lighting, Halo appears full of different circular layers and depths that seem to build upon each other. Keogh explains,“I read an article recently about a halo of dark matter around galaxies and that just struck me. Although it’s not halo shaped in any way, it has halos in it. And halos, religion and spirituality aside, suggest something that is invisible. You never see a halo, but it’s a traditional and round object.”

It’s here within Halo that Keogh begins his play with positive and negative spaces. “You can imagine that the negative spaces could somehow be positive and that the white elements could be space that’s made into a positive tangible thing,” he remarks.

Tau (detail)

As it turns out, the two pieces although separate, are in fact a part of each other. Tau, named after one of the three types of neutrinos, was created out of offcuts from Halo. “I thought it suited because those elements are the positive elements that came from Halo. I threw most of those away before I discovered that they had something about them. Once he created it, he pierced it; liking the idea of it as a dematerialised work.

Tau (detail)

Tau isn’t the only piece where chance intervened in his practice. Keogh initially worked experimenting with ellipses on canvas. “I had cut out loads of ellipses, almost like a pack of cards. They all spilled off my desk and made all these intricate patterns. I manipulated them a bit and then I put them onto tracing paper so that I could remember the pattern that they made. I discovered that I quite liked the look and decided I was going to layer several drawings so you could see one through to the next.” These drawings became Echo, a piece which through a simple gesture is transformed. As he runs his hand over the paper, he reveals three more layers of drawn ellipses and likens it to the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang.

Echo (detail)

It’s a piece that draws from Keogh’s fascination with the Cosmos and science. When I ask him how he came to be interested in the Cosmos, he talks about an interest in all things scientific, stemming from a knowledge of the periodic table as a result of using elemental metals such as copper and aluminium in his work. Of the cosmic elements, he cites a love of learning, “I read a lot about quantum physics. It fires my imagination…things are never one dimensional. They’re always in several dimensions and layers. It’s about trying to put ideas together.”

Halo (detail)

Halo (detail)

This foresight and depth is what give Keogh’s work such strength. Inspired by the invisibility and raw potential of ghost particles and dark matter, he transforms the undetectable into a tangible play on the theme of visible/invisible. “I envisaged that Halo would be on a white wall at some point, white on white, making it camouflaged and invisible. I had the pieces out on the floor and they actually looked quite good sitting one next to another, but I had to make it more three-dimensional, to give it much more depth. Having layers of things makes it far more interesting.”

Although initially reluctant to proceed with his Masters in Design, it is perhaps this experience which continues to influence his artistic practice; leading to the creation of such precisely well-designed sculptures.

Interview and words by Madeleine Schmoll. All images by Gordon Ballantyne.

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Fiona Robertson is a Glasgow based artist and Head of Fourth Year Painting & Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art. Here, she details her most recent project, The Green Man.

Ideas involving chance, chaos and the subconscious are central to all my work. The original source for the work is often rooted in a dream image, a piece of writing or in a chance encounter. Like the art that inspires me, I draw from an eclectic range of sources including personal iconography and primitive ancient cultures. I draw inspiration from a Dadaist approach to art and the ideas associated with a number of modern art movements of the early 20th century: Expressionism, Spiritualism and Primitivism. My work employs a range of media including drawing, painting and video, and consistently engages with an Expressionistic lexis that I feel is situated within the tradition of the carnivalesque in art.

Drawing is often at the inception of a body of work, as a way of pulling together different strands of my thought and practice. Installation – and more recently film- plays a vital role in the resolution of my work. Over the past 4 years I have been exploring more closely the ritualistic and performative aspects of my work in creating site-specific sculpture and film. I view the sculpture and performance/film as a poetic metaphor, an expressive gesture in the tradition of Dada. I am interested in the idea of ‘gesture’ across a range of mediums and in particular the writings of Antonin Artaud when he talks about the gap ‘between thought and gesture’.

The Green Man in the Necropolis is part of an ongoing project and the 3rd grass head sculpture I have made. My intention was to build a large sculpture situated within and created out of the existing urban landscape: a large pagan-like head covered in grass, which would ideally be situated in a public site in the East End of Glasgow. The juxtaposition between the ‘modern’, post-industrial cityscape and the pre-modern, counter-rational totem-like work is fundamental to my project; but should not be seen as an alien intrusion, rather a codification, an expression of tensions already evident in the existing geography of the city, both physical, psychological and mythic.

My original concept (inspired by a dream) was that the head would form the stage for a performance, where characters inhabited the space underground, emerging to the surface intermittently. Building an underground complex large enough to hold multiple characters simultaneously proved to be too ambitious within the constraints of my budget; as an alternative I constructed the original head with a tunnel running through the mouth. I built a proto-type for the sculpture in my garden and filmed some short sequences – through this iterative process I modified costumes and simplified the narrative in the final version of the film ‘GREEN HEAD’ (2014).

In 2013, Kennyhill Allotments in Riddrie agreed that I could a use vacant ground for the duration of the summer and it was here that I filmed “GREEN HEAD”. Placing my project within an existing community, such as an allotment or the Necropolis, imbeds it further in the ‘conventional’ city and exposes wider human strata to the artwork; blurring the lines between audience and participant. The interaction with the public while building on these sites was a rewarding experience and allowed the works to become more autonomous as they evolve and are embraced by to the communities they are placed in.

Earlier this year I was approached by Ruth Johnston from The Friends of the Necropolis and asked if I could adapt the project and build a similar construction in the Necropolis Wildlife garden. As part of the Wildlife garden the sculpture was used as a base for planting and as such creates a ‘Green Man’ in Glasgow’s Necropolis. Traditionally the Green Man is defined as a sculpture, drawing or other representation of a face surrounded by or made from leaves. Representatives from TVC Conservation Volunteers Scotland helped in planting of wild flowers alongside local school children from Haghillpark Primary School.

I began construction in July 2014. The sculpture was to be slightly larger than the one in the allotment site and was located on a steep bank. This was challenging in terms of the build but gave the work a great vantage point. I built wooden templates as steps to stop the soil sliding. I also used stones and wire to construct the foundation. Modeling the features from mud proved a comfortable way to work, akin to making small-scale sculptures. After laying the turf some planting took place and some more planting is scheduled for autumn. I am currently working on a group of drawings and paintings in relation to the project; a publication will be launched later in the year alongside a screening of the film.

See The Green Man at the Glasgow Necropolis on 21 August. For more information see the event page.

The project is supported The Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow City Council, Dennistoun Community Council, Dennistoun Conservation Society and Foundation Scotland.

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