Media Release: MFA Interim Show 2023 - The Glasgow School of Art Media Centre

First year students on the GSA’s acclaimed MFA programme will show works in the Reid Gallery from 25-30 March 2023

Press preview: Friday 24 March

The 28 international artists studying in the first year of The Glasgow School of Art’s acclaimed MFA are set to show new works in MFA Interim Show in The Reid Gallery from 25-30 March 2023. The exhibition, which features pieces in a wide range of media including sound, video, painting, printmaking and sculpture, creates a moment to reflect at the midway point in the MFA programme. It also offers the opportunity for the public to see the latest generation of artistic talent on the programme that no fewer than five Turner Prize winners followed.

The featured artists are: Louis Syed-Anderson, Linus Wever Andersson, Blake Ballard, Louise Campion, Abi Charlesworth, D u e (Xueying Zhang & Jing Xu), Went Fan, Chris Farrell, Liu Jiachen, Anton Geryon, Amber Jones, Holly O’Brien, Manze, Jennifer Elizabeth McNeil, Heeyoung Noh, Sana Obaid, Keir Blockey Richardson, Jane Skeer, Beck Slack, Aaron Smyth, Sai Stephenson, Zeena Wright Al Tai, Cora Weiss, Xiaoyu Xiong, Siqi Yang and Liyuan Zhu

In Blake Ballard’s Working through a mess of lace a folding frame stretched tight with knitted lace creates a division in space, one where viewers are invited to gather in front/around/beside the object. Intimacy changes shape as the lace interferes with the view and conversation travels through countless scarlet stitches. Handbag, a new work made during the MFA course by Linus Andersson consists of a painted canvas, cut out arguably in the shape of a big handbag. Printed versions of the work will carried around the show. The work is open to many interpretations. It’s a painting, a piece of fashion, a sculpture, a prop. French artist Louise Campion investigates the aesthetic of the western office environment and its singular vision of reality, observing and challenging the attractive value of greed in an on-going series of paintings.

In A hollow void sculptural installation artist, Abi Charlesworth, explores the landscapes where the body feels passive and still, as if a temporary passenger in this scape – you don’t belong. Amber Jones looks into soil vitality and health in a series of ceramic sculptures. Each one is the culmination of research exploring regenerative agriculture, monocultures, greenhouse gas emissions, and the vibrancy of soil, raising questions about land use and agricultural practice across the UK. Jennifer MacNeil has been considering the concept of the physical manifestation of incorporeal thought into physical form as well as the study into the shamanic practice of the Tulpa. South Korean painter, Heeyoung Noh, has created a self-portrait. The artist wants to retain national identity mainly in a personal way, whilst simultaneously, blending with people in this Glasgow. The artwork is designed to be moved by third parties to where they want, representing the artist’s ambivalent attitude.

In Vird Sana Obaid explores an everyday journey and the practice of gathering the courage to make that journey. “Being claustrophobic travelling in the subway is very difficult for me, but since this is the only possible commute from my residence to GSA, I am compelled to take the subway every day. To draw strength, I recite Quranic verses repeatedly before and during my journey. The innate practice of Vird is influenced by my parent’s teachings.” Cora Weiss ‘Slow Down Stone Wall’ or ‘To the Stage!’ is an oil painting constructed of disparate parts with canvas nailed to the wall in an attempt to pin down fleeting feelings. Chinese artist Siqi Yang’s research focuses on feminism exploring the objectification of sexuality and the body. Her work, Touching is inspired by the passive position of women and the friction between women and the outside world.

Further details in Notes for Editors

MFA Interim Show is open to the public from 10am – 4.30pm daily. Entry free.

Ends

For further information, images and interviews contact:

press@gsa.ac.uk

Notes for Editors

Blake Ballard

Blake Ballard is an artist, educator, and craft-lover from Denver, Colorado. His art practice employs craft techniques to celebrate his interests, create ties to his family lineage, and connect with craft communities across the globe.

Working through a mess of lace

A folding frame stretched tight with knitted lace creates a division in space, one where viewers are invited to gather in front/around/beside the object. Intimacy changes shape as the lace interferes with the view and conversation travels through countless scarlet stitches. Each encounter between the viewers, the piece, and the space it resides create a temporary collective with unique conditions for exchange. This handmade lace becomes an avenue to mediate our broader social, cultural, and physical landscape.

Linus Andersson

Handbag is a new work made during the MFA course. It consists of a painted canvas, cut out arguably in the shape of a big handbag. There will be printed versions of the work carried around the show as well. It’s a work open to many interpretations. It’s a painting, a piece of fashion, a sculpture, a prop.

Louise Campion

Body of work/bodies at work?, Oil on canvas, 100 x 140 cm per panel, 2022

Louise Campion is a French artist currently based in Glasgow, Scotland. Primarily interested in painting and drawing, her practice focuses on the exploration of awareness and emotional survival within a context of global violence. Since 2018, Campion participated in many stimulating social and art projects, and has exhibited works internationally.

Campion is fascinated by the corporate world. Its specific mindset and mannerisms, display an appeal she aspires to understand and question. This ongoing painting series explores the unwritten rules of the extremely codified environment, querying the motivations driving its players, and their conception of priorities. She focuses her compositions on the portrayal of power through the body language of the figures, building atmospheres of strength which she accentuates with bright and contrasting colour pairings. In her images, Campion investigates the aesthetic of the western office environment and its singular vision of reality, observing and challenging the attractive value of greed.

Abi Charlesworth

Image caption: A hollow void (2023), Concrete, steel, glass wax and silicone

Abi Charlesworth (b.1997) is a Yorkshire/ Glasgow based sculptural installation artist. Her work surrounds the ideas of object debris and materiality. In transforming the object through materials she alters the functionality and displaces the object into a dystopian landscape. Charlesworth’s sculptural language is deeply rooted in peripheral object encounters where a dialogue starts to unfold.

A hollow void explores the landscapes where the body feels passive and still, as if a temporary passenger in this scape – you don’t belong. The steel structures reference an icicle found hanging from the subway tunnel, something that is perceptively sharp and dangerous but is actually fragile. A silicone spill curves around concrete forms and the objects footprints are left in wake. Something has passed through and on. Small toe rings paired together draw on the bodies fragility and ability to heal in time if supported. In the de-saturated ambience of the install these forms break through the surface half revealing themselves as carcasses of what once was.

Went Fan

A Dubious Stream

An image and sculpture worker, still exploring man and nature, still getting acquainted with the space.

Instagram: haizhu_wa

Dubious Stream

It is a sculptural work made of steel, wire and concrete.

It presents another possibility about this gallery – the space is collapsing, sinking, moving, eroding …… It is a prophecy from the ever approaching future calamity.

Chris Farrell

Farrell’s practice transmutes the specificity of his lived experience within the wider context of Scottish identity, as it morphs and disseminates in an age embedded with digitisation. He navigates a dialectical between the visual and the verbal by utilising ekphrastic methods to dialogue fiction, collage, printmaking and painting.

The fictive realm depicted in Farrell’s paintings, is that of an imaginary Scottish festival titled ‘Swedger Island’. A swedger is a colloquial term for an ecstasy tablet, signalling a crystallisation of sorts: a materialisation of composite pressures distilled into a consumable object. By playfully exploiting tropes of Scottishness, and his position within it, he aims to visualise the absurdity of his own existence by actualising and historicising his position through the grandiose performance of painting. The image below documents a work in progress. It shows his pint-headed self in the murky abyss of a haggis pit. Let him take you to the haggis pit.

Manze Guo

Hovering between the real world and the world of consciousness, Manze is obsessed with exploring fluid relationships, whether with nature, technology, matter, words, or people.

Manze’s work is akin to a serial video poem. All the video poems are about ambiguous relationships between self and other, body and consciousness, individual and the context of the times, future and memory, fantasy and reality, and technology and nature…

Her work is a complex polyhedron, where abstraction and figuration, objectivity and subjectivity, rationality and sensibility, critique and communication coexist, with very different meanings depending on the viewer’s perspective. exploring the relationship between humans and technology, with people, with nature, with society and culture. Conflict and harmony in these relationships are also fluid. She feels that these are intertwined and in a complex network. The whole series is the logic of sculpture, while each video is the logic of poetry, and each image is perceptual.

Amber Jones

Art is her method of protest. Her practice is an open dialogue with audience and space, leading to dynamic and ever-evolving relationships building on her belief that art should benefit society and expand the audience’s awareness, sowing the seed for a growing holistic and collective response to the climate crisis.

FIELD BOUNDARIES

A series of ceramic works looking into soil vitality and health, featuring abstracted forms of the refracted light from soil samples studied under the microscope, the soil from this series focuses on Northumberland, where the clay originates. Each sculpture is the culmination of research exploring regenerative agriculture, monocultures, greenhouse gas emissions, and the vibrancy of soil, raising questions about land use and agricultural practice across the UK. Each unique form has an individual refraction pattern and variation in the colour palette, highlighting the similarities and individuality of the soil samples used.

Jiachen Liu

I am used to reflecting on my psychological state at various stages in my works, focusing my questions on the development and evolution of my personal identity. How personal identities are built, changed or even taken away. I also hope to explore more diverse relationships in my practice and to visualise them in works.

The long rainy days in Glasgow made me feel like I was melting away as I walked through them, I became the dirt that always made me slip, melting into the gaps in the masonry of the ground with the rain. At the moment, I can only look at the sky and at the soles of many people’s shoes. During the creative process, I can feel more and more that these gaps have become a part of my body. I place the alienated forms of my body according to the positions of the nine planets, deconstructing the street scenes into an abstract universe. As the environment changes, I also see myself in a different perspective, finding a sense of presence in the space and exploring relationship of myself and my own self and my surroundings.

Jennifer McNeil Exhibition Information

Jennifer Elizabeth McNeil is a multi-disciplinary artist, based in Glasgow. Mediums include photography, sculpture, drawing and the moving image. Current interests are the Horror genre, Surrealism, and personal and worldly anxieties. The interaction and domestication of species is considered as a metaphorical investigation into wider socio-political issues.

For this work I have been considering the concept of the physical manifestation of incorporeal thought into physical form as well as the study into the shamanic practice of the Tulpa. This helped direct my work towards sculptural form, one where the viewer may experience a more visceral reaction. The research has led to the creation of key interest points within the artwork such as human/animal interaction, security, domesticity, and domestication. An interest in Myth, Fable and Storytelling, underpins the work.

Heeyoung Noh

Bio. Heeyoung Noh is a painter from South Korea. She received a B.A. from Sungshin Women’s University in 2019. Currently, Heeyoung is studying MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in the UK. As an artist, Heeyoung had several group shows in South Korea. In 2021, she participated in an artistic project <DODODODUK> that was sponsored by the SFAC (Seoul Foundation for Art and Culture) and Seoul Artists’ Platform New&Young. Descrip,on Title: NOH HEE YOUNG The other theme I recently stick into and want to show for the interim show is <3d scanner as a tool to see the world>.

The artwork on the interim display is my self-portrait. The work <NOH HEE YOUNG> is mainly focused on the ambiguity that gelatinous texture can give. I realised I have an ambivalent attitude as a foreigner in the culture here. I want to retain my national identity mainly in a personal way, but simultaneously, I am putting tons of effort into blending with people in this place. I designed the artwork to be moved by third parties to where they want. This represents the ambivalent attitude that I got.

Sana Obaid

Sana Obaid is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice has been influenced by her miniature practice. Her ideas emerge from her Everyday observations and experiences. The process of making is crucial to her practice, she employs repetitive, meticulous methods to create work which facilitates a meditative state. Sana has widely participated in solo/group exhibitions.

‘Vird’ (A Practice)

The work Vird represents my everyday journey and practice of gathering the courage to make that journey. Being claustrophobic travelling in the subway is very difficult for me, but since this is the only possible commute from my residence to GSA, I am compelled to take the subway every day. To draw strength, I recite Quranic verses repeatedly before and during my journey. The innate practice of Vird is influenced by my parent’s teachings. During my journey, I constantly gaze at the window anxiously waiting to reach, through this work I also have tried to examine my relationship with the subway window.

Holly O’Brien

Caption for image : Glandular Fever, Eau De Goat.

Holly O’Brien is an Irish multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow. Incorporating sculpture, costume & performance, her work examines the physicality of human desire. Through the context of mythology, religion, folklore and digital realms, O’Brien’s work reflects the feedback loop between the unconscious collective and the evolution of our technologies.

“ Playing by yourself ”

A cloak for your quest, into the labyrinth’s abyss.

Riding solo on the mammalian saddle.

A journey so full of wonder you won’t want to go home.

Searching for hidden treasure, the perfect chalice, one cup, maybe two.

The monster finds us lost,

silly billy, spilled his seed.

Hast though the power to tame the beast.

Name:

nil

Talk is cheap. Take a look at my work.

100 words about the work:

“It is possible that all swans are white.” True or False?

Keir Blockey Richardson

A spectator or voyeur in the perceiving nature- a forest. The title being ‘Chrome Forest’, in this project I aim to comment on our condition amongst technology, its power within uses of media and its visual draw of attention. I am documenting sculpture and material in a montage, a collage of layering, presenting an analogue virtual reality using projection. In a painterly sense, an abstraction, functioning through digital printing, reflective material and screens, distorting images using digital audio and photography/cinematography.

Keir Blockey Richardson, born in Brighton, studying at Varndean College taught by painter Johnathon Smith, Brighton City College and University of West of England, Bristol, tutored in the final year by Artist Lizzie Lloyd. Incorporating skills learnt in construction; scenic painting and stone masonry.

Most recently exhibiting in London at Koppel Project, Holborn and Project 13 Gallery, Soho Square.

Jane Skeer

Jane Skeer’s art practice is unpredictable and often needs to be clarified. She offers the city

as material, a place of interpretation, observing life through a whimsical lens. Skeer works

with a sense of mischief, enabling the unexpected to emerge. Jane Skeer strives to highlight

the urgency and temporality of our actions to make sense of the world.

Walking the streets of Glasgow has robbed me of looking up, dreaming, and getting lost in

my thoughts. I walk, fearful of treading on something undesirable on its verges; dog poop,

vomit, or mushy, waterlogged cardboard boxes; the latter having similar material qualities

as the previous two. As an artist constantly looking for beauty, I am forced to critically consider my vulnerabilities and private agonies and open a conversation through artmaking to reveal this struggle. I cannot look up because of you presents images depicting another way of seeing the world, through the playful lens of an artist.

The Baby (I cannot look up because of you!)

Jane Skeer2023digital image

Beck Slack

a murmuration,

like swelling

“Beck is not one to care to master, nor do they engage in any mechanisms to ascertain

full visibility in art. Like Beck’s work itself, there is erosion, wayfaring, entropy, yet empathy and inclusion to behave as debris. There isn’t orthodoxy toward, nor rebellion against, but, instead, an incredible pliancy.”

A large, angular fragment of white vein quartz. What undulant rushes – thumbs spading clay. The mud mound ‘mound’, mountain, piles upwards only, for instance, if this rush disperses. Dissipates as gaseous, or in a branch-like nothingness, time escaping, the errant ripening of sediment. What I have now is this: the vapid membrane of our imprints. Wind, syntax, a caydence, a route Yellow, Purple, Brown. Undulant rushes, folds, leaving behind traces of breads, molds, rotting organics, and – haven, fleeting, always. Loose bricks under motorways. Loose brick in hand. Wind tunnels through, the mechanical droning of… life without that – ever so consistent.

Aaron Smyth

Aaron Smyth (b.1992) is an Irish artist whose interdisciplinary practice investigates identity and its formation. His work explores how our experience is visually coded within power systems and how these codings in-turn shape us, producing a reflection of the contradictions and truths cradled between our realities and fictions.

‘a way a lone a last a loved a long the’ (2023) combines disparate socio-cultural referents to examine the theological and sociological landscape of the twentieth century, specifically how this has shaped a relationship with death in the present day.

The work takes formal cues from Iconography, contrasting it with archival photography, cinema and art historical reference. Through physical layering the work forms new meaning in the friction generated in-between these elements. In this way, the work reflects on modern societal tensions globally, emphasising the gaps, overlaps and folds in our rival cultural conceptions of death and dying.

Cora Weiss

Cora Weiss (b.2000) is an artist currently based in Glasgow. She completed her BA in Fine Art at Newcastle University in 2022. Her practice spans photography, painting, print and writing. Central to her practice is the (in)balance between conscious and subconscious decision making in art.

‘Before the Painting’

‘Slow Down Stone Wall’ or ‘To the Stage!’ is an oil painting constructed of disparate parts. The canvas is nailed to the wall in an attempt to pin down fleeting feelings. In part a metaphor on the struggle of painting itself, that push and pull between the paint and the painter’s intentions. It presents a stage in the process of capturing and then expressing spaces that resonate. It is fiction anchored in reality. It is a proposition of atmospheres, sentiments. Slow down, speed up. A reflection on psychological pressures.

Zeena Wright AlTai

Zeena Wright AlTai (b. 1996, USA) is a draw-er and installation artist obsessed with textiles, carving, and botanicals. Employing wordplay, smut, and tongue-in-cheek metaphors, Wright AlTai portrays womxn luxuriating in surreal environments. This composition-making is made in stark contrast to the dire realities of later-stage capitalism, rapidly changing landscapes, and violence against womxn.

Wright AlTai gained her AA from Parsons School of Design, BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting with First Class Honours from UAL: Wimbledon College of Arts, and is currently studying MFA Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art.

Tell Them Fairies Left Annwfyn is a diptych portraying tale from the Welsh tome of folktales, The Mabinogion, in which the fairy folk leave their world to cause havoc in our realm. Thematically, my work frequently relates to the idea that time is running out (ie. Political warfare and climate change) in surreal, mythological environments; this fantastical piece offers a metaphorical approach to escaping and responding to a situation in time to avoid difficulty. Tell Them The Fairies Left Annwfyn is two 2A0 lino prints on fabriano paper, frames by handcut wooden frames.

Xiaoyu Xiong

Xiaoyu Xiong is an artist based in China and UK, Chinese. Her art practice focuses on the subjective images of individuals behind art heritages. She is based on the Everyday Life theory to use participatory art extending the emotions behind cultures. ‘I create with them, not for them.’ Xiaoyu Claimed.

Name: Please Allow Me To Read You A Poetry.

Form: moving image

Duration: 1 mins 11 seconds

What is cultural appropriation? Should it have a standard specification? James O. Young claimed (2005): “the dilettante whose profoundly offensive use of cultural appropriation produces aesthetic rubbish could still have acted wrongly.” Is it means that a current aesthetic standard and value standard can determine the quality of a work is it bad? Don’t “wrong” works have the right to use cultural heritage?

This work uses “right” poetry showing forms with the “wrong” poetry reading pronunciation and techniques to show the big contrast, thus making the public think about whether “aesthetic and value standards” can be used to regulate cultural appropriation standards.

D u e

The Year of Fate

Artist’s name: D u e (Jing and Xueying)

An introduction of artist:

We are D u e. We were formed tomorrow and disbanded yesterday.

An introduction of artwork:

This is a mockumentary about the story of Tai Sui`.

Medium:

Video, colour and sound, (a projection or monitors)

Duration:

no decided yet.

Siqi Yang

My name is Siqi Yang,I am originally from China and my current research focuses on feminism. The themes I explore focus on the objectification of sexuality and the body. I define myself as an existential feminist, attempting to escape the state of second sex through my work.

This work (touching) is inspired by the passive position of women and the friction between women and the outside world. The act of touching and observing led to the construction of the self and a nurturing appreciation of the ever-changing body. Participants encountered and reflected on the frictions in themselves, their homes and their social environments that stemmed from social stigmas and stereotypes of the female body.

Liyuan Zhu

Liyuan Zhu, graduated from Soochow University with an undergraduate degree in oil painting and is in the first year of her MFA master’s degree at Glasgow School of Art. Her works focus on emotions and social phenomena. Her current experimental direction is related to emotional psychology, including the motivational externalization of subtle emotions and subconscious expression.

Liyuan Zhu has been exposed to and studied painting since childhood, and in the process of thinking about it, she often organizes her consciousness through some form of tangled dots and lines, and finds it an interesting form of observing and coping with emotions. In this work, the artist, as a dialogue with her inner self, wants to try to present the image of the mind under the activity of consciousness through the weaving of some new materials, like a child’s random scribbling moment on the paper. In this process, some emotions of external harm and internal self-consumption are broken up and reorganized to build up an organized narrative.