- A short film by 2022 Foulis Medal winner, Sofia Melander, Night at the Art School was made in collaboration with a group of recent GSA graduates
- The film was shot in the iconic “Vic” café/bar.
On a dark winter’s night a pedestrian pulls their coat closer to keep out the cold whilst walking through the atmospheric, lamp lit streets of Glasgow before arriving at a metal door marked “smile”. Thus begins the GSA’s 2022 Christmas card – a joyful celebration of the School’s students and their work – which was launched with a screening at the GFT today, 6 December 2022.
Directed by MDes Sound for the Moving Image graduate and winner of the 2022 Foulis Medal, Sofia Mellander, the short film is a collaboration between sculptors, illustrators, painters, performance artists, musicians, and fashion designers which was shot in the iconic “Vic” café/bar.
“Our annual Christmas Cards demonstrate the imagination and innovation for which Glasgow School of Art students and graduates are celebrated,” says Professor Penny Macbeth, Director of The Glasgow School of Art. “I’m delighted that this year’s film not only showcases the work of our 2022 Foulis Medal winner, Sofia Mellander, but is a collaboration with so many talented artists and designers who have developed their creative practice here at the GSA.”
“When I was invited to create this year’s GSA Christmas Card I felt immediately that I wanted to collaborate with as many GSA artists as possible,” says Sofia. “The concept of the film is chaotic, theatrical, and humorous – and called for lots of different artistic voices and an array of artistic practices.”
Sofia brought together a creative team of colleagues from the Sound for the Moving Image programme and Glaswegian DoP, Polly B Morrison, and to find the artists for the collaboration she looked over the work featured in the GSA’s Postgraduate Showcase as well as putting out a call for collaborators over social media.
“Everyone in the cast has produced work that is deliciously superb,” she adds “and it was particularly exciting that so many people could take part given the tight turn around for the filming.”
At the heart of the film is a performance – a combination of pre-existing work devised by Len Goetzee, Hester Grant, Esyllt Lewis, and Emma Lewis-Jones, with pre-planned elements and plenty of improv – alongside pieces brought in by the other artists (drawings, paintings, sculpture, installation).
Night at the Art School is a short film by Sofia Mellander with a creative team comprising Polly Morrison (Director of Photography), Linus Johnsson (Sound Design), Lewis Hardy (Sound Operator) Emily Harling (Art Direction). It features a performance by recent graduates Yiyang Chen, Len Goetzee, Hester Grant, Emily Harling, Esyllt Lewis, David More, Tamir Amar Pettet, Alice Sherlock and Emma Lewis-Jones with additional work by Megan Devenny, Yuan Chen Wei Zhang and Dan Hou.
https://gsashowcase.net/christmas-card/
Ends
For further information contact:
Lesley Booth, 07799414474 / press@gsa.ac.uk
Notes for Editors
· Night at the Art School is being hosted in a website created specially by GSA graduate-founded company Rectangle
Recent GSA Christmas e-cards have been created by:
Julia Johnstone with Lucas Orozco, Eirini Kalogera, Sam Vaherlehto, James Cockrell, Franz Maggs, Michelle Watson, Craig Nixon, Paul Docherty and Nina Candido (2021)
Sean De Francesco, (2020)
Eleanor Stewart, founder of Clubhouse, with music by Fiona McNeill (2019)
Graeme John Douglas Ronald (2018)
Roxanne Clifford, aka Patience (2017)
Donald Barr (2016)
James Houston (2015)
Ross Hogg (2014)
2022 cast and creative team biographies
CREATIVE TEAM
Sofia Mellander (Writer, Director & Producer)
GSA MDes Sound for the Moving Image 2022
Sofia Mellander, who also goes by the stage name Salt, is a sound artist, musician, and filmmaker. Her work spans from pop music to 20-harmony hymns, to binaural experiences, film scores and documentaries. Themes found in the work include incels, assisted suicide, sex, and how insane it was that Brian from the Beach Boys wrote that song ‘Hey Little Tomboy’. Her work is often funny, dark, emotional, and strange. Sofia is the 2022 recipient of the Foulis Medal and her audio-visual triptych ‘Control My Bodiless Form’ has been shortlisted for the October John Byrne Award.
Instagram: @verysaltymusic
Polly B Morrison (Director of Photography)
Polly B is a writer and filmmaker based in Glasgow. She has directed and shot documentaries, and has worked on commercial promotional videos, music videos, and with professional digital and analogue photography. Her work is both visually poetic and packs an emotional punch.
Instagram: @pollybfilm
Lewis Hardy (Sound Operation)
MDes Sound for the Moving Image 2022
Linus Johnsson (Sound Design)
MDes Sound for the Moving Image 2022
Linus Johsson is a music composer and sound designer from Sweden, based in Glasgow.
Website:
https://www.linusjohnsson.com/
Emily Harling bio (Art Direction & Cast)
MLitt 2022
Emily Harling (b. 1996) grew up in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, is a Glasgow based artist.
Harling’s work is introspective, it addresses her fleeting thoughts and feelings about life in
relation to her mental health. She draws daily doodles accompanied by relatable and often
melancholy phrases, that lead to large, colourful mural installations. She is also the creator
and curator of independent artist-led zine, Chroma Zone Magazine.
Instagram: @idontlikecricet
CAST
Yiyang Chen
MLitt Fine Art Practice 2022
Yiyang’s works explore what could be seen as female symbols, associated with historical objects, popular culture, and the comparison analysis between the Eastern and Western social contexts on the discipline of women’s body. She concentrates on feminism, the gaze, the body, and the relationship between virtuality and reality through various medium. Fandom (appropriation), archive, collage, painting, ceramic could be regarded as the methodologies of her practice. Yiyang’s work is inspired by social phenomena and the concept of misogyny within Asian culture, and aims to protest the patriarchy by applying more surreal symbols and fantasy notions to her works.
Instagram: yiyang_paintings
Website: yiyangart.cargo.site
Len Goetzee
MLitt Fine Art Practice 2022
Seeking a state of bewilderment through a trans methodology of collapse and dispossession via an un-building of autobiography, they dismantle delineations between music, voice and the written word to excavate a past enmeshed with the non-human+ more than human. Through vocal performances they inhabit onto-epistemological encounters with time-traveling bunnies, E numbers in bubble gum and mugs at B&M. Binaries breakdown and temporalities become twisted into entanglements; an anti-propulsive practice reversing into queer resistance and into old futures.
Instagram: @len_goetzee
Hester Grant bio
MLitt Fine Art Practice 2022
Hester Grant is a Scottish artist originally from Moffat who lives and works in Glasgow. Grant makes artworks of a variety of mediums that explore subjects such as accelerationism, ableism, bodily fluids and software programming. Grant has run and participated in a number of socially engaged projects such as organising and curating a Zine Fest in Inverness, running an Art Theory book group and hiring artists to run art writing workshops for young people in the Highlands. Her work, Poundland, was created using the blood, sweat, tears, secretions and jizz of various famous writers who happened to grace your correspondent’s Goodreads. Poundland spans across a number of genres and mediums; erotica, satire, metafiction, autofiction, science fiction and journalism. There is something for everyone…except children.
Instagram: @lidl.kim
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/lidlkim
Emma Lewis-Jones bio
MLitt Fine Art Practice 2022
Emma Lewis-Jones is a Glasgow-based artist working in the realm of performance-making. This practice includes delivery of workshops, advising, researching and creating. As a facilitator she is dedicated to supporting people to realise their own choreographic potential. Her training in choreography and performance art underpin Emma’s creative practice today. She draws on matters close to her heart such as feminism, sexuality, climate justice, grief, the border crisis and trespass.
Instagram: @emmalewj
Website: https://www.emmalewisjones.com
Esyllt Lewis bio
MLitt Fine Art Practice 2022
Esyllt Angharad Lewis is an artist, translator and editor from Craig-Cefn-Parc, Wales. Working across printmaking, drawing, writing, sculpture, painting, conversation and performance, her practice centres tensions of language and communication, seeking to investigate and problematise the aesthetics of translation as a minority language speaker.
Instagram: @esylltesylit
Tamir Amar Pettet
Tamir Amar Pettet is an artist working with the self portrait, conlang enthusiast and an adoring fan of the blessed Xerox machine. They are a lover of all art except their own. Tamir is also a queer Jew which means they are full of malaise and sometimes partial to wandering to the sea and screaming, although they don’t live in Bournemouth anymore.
Instagram: @tamirpettet
Alice Sherlock
MLitt Fine Art Practice 2022
Alice Sherlock (b. 1997, Guildford) lives and works in Glasgow. Sherlock is an interdisciplinary artist working in print, painting and sculpture. Her work focuses around the idea of verbatim aural storytelling and reflective nostalgia. Sherlock has recently graduated from the MLitt Fine Art Practice Print Media from the Glasgow School of Art in September 2022. She also studied BA Hons Fine Art and Theatre at Lancaster University graduating in 2019 focusing on contemporary performance. She has been awarded the Gold Lancaster Award in 2019. During her undergraduate degree she spent her second year abroad at SUNY Binghamton, New York, studying acting and performance.
Instagram: @alicesherlockart
ADDITIONAL WORK FEATURED IN THE FILM
“toilet cherubs” Megan Devenny (Fine Art Practice 2021)
Instagram: @megandevenny
“Transitional Layer” Yuan Chen (MDes Fashion and Textiles)
Instagram: @nichloerty
“In the penumbra, the strange wave” (video) – Wei Zhang (MFA 2020)
Instagram: @Weizhangpictures
“You Me” Dan Hou (MDes Fashion and Textiles 2022)
Instagram: @hou__dan