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talamh fiáin (ode to my debtors) Oil and Polychromos on primed 640gsm FabrianoArtistico with Ash stretcher. Puncture holes gilded with stolen 24ct GoldLeaf (let it be the last thing i take from you). Dried sage. |
The Glasgow School of Art’s prestigious Master of Fine Art programme unveils their final year exhibition, which runs from 30th May to 9th June at Glue Factory, Glasgow.
This year’s exhibition sees the MFA return to the city’s Glue Factory, taking over both the first floor gallery spaces, and the ground floor Tank Room, Warehouse and Red Room to mount an expansive and immersive exhibition of new works by 28 international graduating artists.
Across two floors the exhibition presents a diverse range of mediums and materials, juxtaposing crafted objects and generative AI, sculpture and video works, sound installations and photography. The artists explore multiple themes across migration, familial history, the contemporary digital world, climate crisis, female identity and aging, artificial intelligence, memory, grief and self-discovery.
Incorporating gelatine sculpture, costume & video, Holly O’Brien’s work examines the relationship between the physical body, desire and the digital realm, navigating the feedback loop between the unconscious collective and technology. Amber Jones’ work attempts to form a visual language from the data relating to the climate crisis. Amber’s work is a method of protest, in dialogue with audience and space, evolving relationships which she hopes will sow seed for collective growth and response to the climate crisis.
Images: Holly O’Brien It’s giving head & Scapegoat Projected video | Amber Jones Tipping Point
Jane Skeer explores ageing and womanhood through self portraits, video performance and collected clothing. She informs her work with her cumulative autobiographic reality as a woman, sister, mother, and grandmother who has many lived experiences. Sai Stephenson’s practice is concerned with creolisation as a means for Black Caribbean people to reclaim power and autonomy, with large scale acrylic and muslin screen printed work, including the Guyana flag, as part of her installation.
Chris Farrell’s work Caledonian Inadequezyzy is informed by the Scottish literary theory term ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’, referring to an identity composed of contradictions and dualities. Informed by this Farrell creates detailed narrative fictional versions of himself in large scale paintings, drawings, performance and video works using a prism of ‘Scottishness’ informed by nostalgic material drawn from YouTube footage, personal social media archives, video-game texture packs and stock images.
Blake Ballard’s work is concerned with the role craft culture and communities across the globe. His delicate large scale chalk pen drawings in the Tank Room are influenced by crochet patterns. Louise Campion is fascinated by the corporate world, its specific aesthetic, mindset and mannerisms. Through large scale paintings Campion explores on the portrayal of power and charisma through the body language of her figures, their mannerisms, gestures and attire.
Images: Chris Farrell historic in its void of mud and wire | Jane Skeer self portrait | Sai Stephenson Untitled (arrival)
Heeyoung Noh explores colonial trauma and diaspora through painting by reproducing body images from South Korea in rich figurative paintings displayed in both the project gallery and the Tank room. Through this series she examines collective identity through domestic space, specifically through the origin of ttaemiri, Korean bathing culture.
Sana Obaid’s delicate and intensive work in metal and ceramics strives to convey the pain and suffering of Palestinian children and comfort the loss experienced by parents in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Gaza. As both mother and artist Obaid has been profoundly affected by scenes on social media, and seeks to convey these harrowing experiences through art works that have become a solemn practice of mourning and prayer.
Images: Heeyoung Noh The Face | Sana Obaid Stars II
The MFA 2024 exhibition runs from the 30th May til 9th June at Glue Factory, 22 Farnell St, Glasgow G4 9SE. For full artists details for the exhibition please see editors’ notes. The exhibition is available to explore digitally at the GSA’s digital showcase from 30 May at https://www.gsa.ac.uk/degreeshow24
For further information contact press@gsa.ac.uk
Notes for Editors
MFA ARTIST STATEMENTS – DEGREE SHOW 2024
Blake Ballard
Blake Ballard is an artist and educator from Nebraska, the traditional lands of the Pawnee people. His art practice employs textile, print, and drawing techniques to celebrate his interests, create ties to his family lineage, and connect with craft communities across the globe. These investigations address the role of art in tradition, communal fellowships, queer spaces, and the political ‘status quo’ through an ever-evolving use of textile mediums. The resulting work frames these handmade objects as an avenue to broaden our social, cultural, and physical landscape.
He is currently exploring the influence of crochet patterns distributed throughout rural America in the 1980s through the early 2000s, in an attempt to unravel the complex meanings embedded in these seemingly innocuous patterns. This research reveals connections to religion, nationalism, and white supremacy. Positioned as a catalyst for ongoing inquiry, this current research emphasises the transformative potential within the intersection of craft and culture, ultimately encouraging a broader conversation about the role of craft in shaping inclusive and conscious narratives in contemporary art.
Ballard has presented work internationally in group and semi-solo exhibitions including at The Vicki Myhren Gallery in Denver, Colorado; The Robert Hillestad Textile Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska; The Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore; The Glue Factory in Glasgow, Scotland; and ICAT at HFBK Hamburg, Germany.
Louise Campion
Louise Campion is fascinated by the corporate world. Its specific aesthetic, mindset and mannerisms, display an appeal she aspires to understand and question. Through her series of paintings originally named « Wondering if men in suits turn me on or piss me off », she explores the unwritten rules of the extremely codified office environment, while simultaneously challenging the motivations driving its players. Campion is particularly intrigued by their conception of priorities – what is important. She focuses the energy of her compositions on the portrayal of power and charisma through the body language of her figures —especially in the bust, the position of the shoulders, and the gesture of the hands, creating then an atmosphere of strength in her images which she accentuates with the use of bright and contrasting colour pairings. She likes to play with her medium, subject and viewer, through striking titles and subtle humorous hints. In this installation she particularly increased her scale, aiming for the intimidation factor to kick in and an important inquisition to flourish:Through her research, Campion investigates the aesthetic of the western corporate world and its singular vision of reality, observing and questioning the attractive value of greed.
Extremely mindful of her environmental impact, Campion adopted methods over the years to lower it to a minimum. She learned to build canvases, hand-make paper, mix paint using traditional techniques, recycle solvent -inter alia. These endeavours, albeit sparked by a desire to limit waste, turned into a true fascination for the history of the medium and its relevance to contemporary human problems.
In her oil paintings series The attractive value of greed, Campion examines the aesthetics of the corporate world, questioning its singular vision of reality and challenging its public appeal, with a focus on the body language of power.
Oliver Canessa
Oliver Canessa (born 1994, Gibraltar) is a multidisciplinary artist and poet who works across text, sculpture, sound, video, installation and print. His work explores problems of knowledge, dishonest signalling, acting in bad faith, psycho-geography and the virtualisation of relationships. Canessa studied a BA in Psychological & Behavioural Sciences at the University of Cambridge (2014–2018) and in 2020 he was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize for his piece Invitation to Untitled.
Abi Charlesworth
Abi Charlesworth’s sculptural work surrounds the ideas of object debris and mutation. In transforming the object through materials she alters the functionality and displaces the object into a new landscape. As fictionalised objects they reference the original form before deteriorating and shedding the old objects skin. Anew and functionless they roam between reality and dreams searching for shelter. Charlesworth’s sculptural language is deeply rooted in peripheral object encounters where she is drawn to out of place and partial objects. As a dialogue between herself and the object she converses with the form, material and scale to unfold the objects narrative. Her more recent work explores the boundaries of silence, fossils and traces. In researching around these subjects she is interested in the tension that can be held by objects and landscape. Coded small details are included in the installations as pointers and hints towards the original sculptural encounter with the object. In re-staging the narrative the remnants of an event acts as memories, shifting focus to a new timeline that is temporal and site specific. Each work plays on personal experience with objects and landscape pushing the form through her own understandings, to regurgitate and make sense of the world Charlesworth negotiates. As clues her sculptures relate to each other conversing to produce a new narrative, feeling or atmosphere, allowing herself to unravel closer to comprehension.
Wenting Fan
I am currently focusing on the topics of memory, life and death. Heidi Bucher preserves the memory of places and people by topographically reproducing particular buildings and objects. The topographies retain all traces of the original object and exist as a new, stripped-down “inanimate” image. I try to also create bridges of communication between life and death through my sculptures, which resemble a spiritual, ghostly state. You can be very sensitive to travelling through life and peering into death.
Christopher Farrell
‘The existence of virtual worlds reveals identity as a performative, multiple and fluid entity. In this sense, we can no longer speak of a scission of a monologic self, but rather of a proliferation of multiple and dialogic representations of the self. A polysyzygiacal identity…’
Entailing a multiplicity of disciplines and methods, including painting, drawing, digital collage, sculpture, writing fiction, performance, and film, Farrell’s practice can be understood as adopting a ‘polysyzygiacal’ formation.
This emergent term emanates from contemporary Scottish literary theory, being an updated version of the predecessor term ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’. Under antisyzygiacal theory, the Scottish condition was conceived as being divided by an internal split, entailing a ‘zig-zag of contradictions’, of ‘duelling polarities within one entity’. However, more recently, a nuanced discussion has surfaced regarding polysyzygy, positing that Scottish experience engenders a plurality of cultural, social, and psycho-spatial divides, entailing ‘multiple alignments, plural connections, a web of interlinked ideas and words.’
Informed by this theory, Farrell seeks to create fictionalised equivalences of himself, as performative self-portraits shown either in film, as performance, or by creating figurative, narrative paintings that detail fictionalisations of his experiences through the prism of Scotland. Farrell feels that his person is embedded with the inescapability of nationhood, and through intermedial dialogue between modes of fiction and contemporary art, he is able to translate the specificities and peculiarities of his experience to a wider audience, highlighting the role of the digital as intrinsic to contemporary cultural exchange.
Extracting sources from found YouTube footage, personal social media archives, video-game texture packs, stock images, or any other low-resolution visual material of interest, Farrell creates a simulation of a nearby and distant Scotland, reminiscent of bygone music festivals like Rockness or T in the Park, poeticising the simulacrum of his universe through acts of painterly gesture and performative fiction.
Separate to fiction, central themes within the work consider phenomenology, mental health, drug abuse, psychosis, problematic masculinity, colloquialism, and digital aesthetics.
Anton Geryon
lylight continues my investigations into modular structures and systems – both as the legacies of minimalist and conceptual art, and as the underpinning logic of the contemporary digital world. The plinths serve as modular forms that point back to the historical structures that the work emerges from. On top of the plinths, each individual work is defined by an internal logic that is challenged and undermined by the immediate proximity of the other works in the series. These juxtapositions are further amplified in Still Life, where the formal and the serious collide with the informal and the kitsch.
The work described above is in many ways a counterpart to my TSP paper of the same title. Where the paper described itself as “an anxious love letter to art”, the degree show work is its more playful, joyful counterpart. It is simultaneously sincere homage, serious critique, and tongue-in-cheek parody of art and its history, and models the possibility and excitement of making art.
Amber Jones
Amber Jones (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist specialising in sculpture and ceramics based in Northumberland and Glasgow. Her practice often involves collaborating with scientists, community members, and fellow artists to learn collectively from the rapidly changing ecosystems we inhabit.
Her work deals with the climate crisis in an attempt to synthesise data surrounding the Crisis into a visual language, believing artists can create and interact in ways beyond reshaping tangible and intangible structures. 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.
Her most recent work focuses on tension points, realised through her use of materiality, embodied in her ceramic and fabric installation works, becoming abstract representations activated through their display. These works are the culmination of research undertaken as part of a study into artists and environmental practices exploring regenerative agriculture, social and political environments and the vibrancy of collectivism, raising questions about engagement and the importance of ecological understanding across the UK.
Jiachen Liu
In my past projects, I explored different relationships and the subtle, sensitive changes that occur in the physical, natural and psychological aspects of relational associations. After coming to Glasgow, I often notice objects in the gaps of the urban environment and unconsciously anthropomorphise them. In my work I combine them with parts of my body to create new ‘creatures’. At the same time I connect with these objects through the performance in the images. I want to embrace the connection between the self and the physical body, and all that is felt in the external world. In the exhibitions, I act as a medium to form new spaces with my works, in which the sense of atmosphere extends outwards to the entire exhibition space, towards the viewer and towards the world outside the exhibition. In the process, I experiment and anticipate what kind of temporary connections I will make with different environments. I build a bridge between the alienation of the self and the anthropomorphisation of objects, exploring the tripartite interaction between people, objects and spaces.
Jennifer McNeil
Jennifer Elizabeth McNeil is a multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow. Inspired by ever adventurous and distant dog walks, in an attempt to escape the constraints of society, this work is made in response to both personal and worldly anxieties. The autoethnographic is employed to examine themes of motherhood, the domestic, domestication and human and animal interaction.
Psychoanalysis, the role of capitalism and storytelling are considered in relation to forms of control.
Jennifer is a current student on the MFA at The Glasgow School of Art where she also completed her BA in Fine Art. Jennifer was awarded the RGI Graduate Award in 2021 and was a FUTUREPROOF 2021 selected artist. She is a recipient of the Hope Scott Postgraduate Scholarship.
Rose Nicholas
Suggestive anthropomorphisms, uncontrollable motion, and surreal domesticity lie at the core of Rose Nicholas’s practice. Working with found quotidian objects, she extracts them from their natural habitat and introduces them to a new environment, testing their functionality.
The Everyday plays a major role throughout her practice as she estranges the familiar, causing one to reflect on what underlies the mundane. Ceaseless cycles and continual leaks are recurrent motifs throughout her work. She highlights the unstoppable and ever-changing facets of life that elude our attempts at control. The work has a humorous and melancholic tone as it ostensibly presents as something of importance, but on closer inspection, it is seemingly futile, leaving a sense of paradox.
Heeyoung Noh
This work is based on the experience of doing ttaemiri, rubbing the dead skin cells (the Korean way of bathing) in the tiny shower booth. This practice involves compulsively scrubbing the skin with a sandpaper-textured towel. It became apparent that this painful bathing culture had expanded during the era of Japanese colonialism, driven by the manipulated dominant discourse that “Koreans are dirty”. The colonial trauma still exists in the body, like the deeply inscribed line on the skin. The inscribed arrows on the body parts imply the directions of rubbing which is a custom fixed by the historical tradition. Moreover, the fragmented body parts give the sense of the violence of objectification of dominant power. I noticed that when I am dividing my body to do a more effective rubbing, the way of dividing the body is resembled the campaign of reorganising the colonies by the colonial power.
Holly O Brien
Visuals from digital platforms bleed out into the optical arena and public psyche, creating a visual language, an unspoken narrative. The internet presents a medium through which we navigate and relate our own experiential framework of values and desires. O’Brien’s work is highly inspired by mythology and folklore and how these stories weave narrative and visuals to cultures’ shared experience. As our contemporary culture becomes inextricably interconnected with technology her work attempts to reflect back possible glimpses from our new subconscious pool, the online abyss. A swamp of desire, addiction, pleasure and escapism.
Creatures emerge beneath the landscape of our conscious world, conglomerated, a hybrid of origins, dispersed throughout digital realms.
Sana Obad
My current body of work is influenced by the heart-wrenching images of ongoing genocide that inundate social media. As a mother, I am profoundly affected by the harrowing scenes of senseless violence tearing families apart, particularly in conflict-ridden regions like Gaza. My art bears witness to the vulnerability of children and the gaping void left by their absence. It serves as a testament to the brutality of war, where innocence is shattered and lives are irrevocably altered.
As I immerse myself in the creative process, I confront the maddening and disturbing crisis unfolding before us. I choose laborious, painful, and cathartic processes which demand physical and mental engagement in crafting each work. The process of creating allows me to process the grief that grips my soul witnessing these unbearable sights. Each piece is infused with a rhythm of creation and prayer, a solemn tribute to the lost and distressed souls.
Through meticulous craftsmanship, I strive to capture the raw reality of children caught in the genocide—some orphaned, others forcibly displaced, all facing the harsh uncertainty of survival. Through each piece, I extend a prayer for peace, seeking to ignite a sense of awareness that condemns such atrocities and fervently appeals for a world devoid of such unfathomable tragedies.
Yiachen Qian
In my artistic practice, I harness the mediums of video and text to explore the intricate interplay between emerging technologies and our rapidly evolving digital existence. Through research-based inquiry, I delve into the dynamic shifts brought forth by new technologies and contemporary ideologies, interrogating their profound implications on the status quo of our digital lives.
Central to my creative process is the art of digital editing, which I perceive not merely as a technical tool, but rather as a form of information processing. I draw parallels between the operations of human cognition and the algorithms of artificial intelligence, reflecting upon the symbiotic relationship between human consciousness and technological advancement.
By melding video and text, I construct immersive narratives that invite viewers to contemplate the complex intersections of technology, thought, and society. Through my work, I strive to provoke critical dialogue and introspection, challenging perceptions and unraveling the intricate fabric of our digital age.
Jane Skeer
Each of us must draw strength from our rage.
I permit myself to speak, and I listen. I regret my years of silence. Approaching sixty, I walk with newfound strength and conviction towards my future. I speak now as a woman, sister, mother, and grandmother who has many lived experiences, both rewarding and painful. I look with pride upon myself, recognising my ability to survive and prosper.
Every woman has a story, and not all stories get told. I write my truths today for visibility and reparation, and I, as Audre Lorde describes, “transfer silence into language and action.”[1]
Writing is now essential to my art practice, linking reflection and making. I look inward to make sense of my life and better understand myself, my place within society and my circumstances. I use my weighty past as the vital ingredient for creative power. In my work I face my vulnerabilities head-on, knowing they will empower and not destroy me. The work I create is a direct response to my autobiographical reality.
Beck Slack
Fishing Out The Foul Frog (in my throat)
Evolving Installation (2024)
This installation work bears many sentiments. Acts of sending and receiving, vitality and decay, warmth and escapism all meld together in an eerie, liminal landscape. Through gifts of former mentors, inherited artifacts of dead relatives, and the ghostings of sites passed; one finds themselves amongst an anti-futurist divide of being-in-the-present and presence as the continuous looming of “what haunts”. The pieces presented here rift a triangulated divide of the artist’s own position within institutional presence. In creating points of reference between the folk warnings of their childhood, the works of past MFA alumni, and the literal rotting of both the venue and school’s infrastructure (architecturally and culturally), there emerges a gnawing tension of institutional critique through hauntological means. Amidst it all, one thing remains consistent: an unspeakable kind of hesitancy that comes to light.
Beck Slack (b.1999) is an artist born from the American Midwest.
“Beck is not one to care to master, nor do they engage in any mechanisms to ascertain full visibility in their actions or 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 in the face of agency and power relations within aesthetic appearance.”
Aaron Smyth
This new body of work narrates a personal ceremonial journey, intertwining it within the broader socio-historical relationship with the transcendental, exploring our intimate connection with absence, grief and the intentionality of its associated phenomena, the things we use to mark and the markings we carry along with us. A shrine to people begged, borrowed and stolen, exploring their haunting, enchanting spectral presence.
In this way, the work seeks to foster a contemplative space in which to negotiate these social or personal histories, one which might act as a catalyst to generate new knowledge, engender alternate practices or reveal dynamic perspectives on our interconnectedness.
The work takes formal cues from art historical and cinematic references, channelling and questioning their role in the formation of cultural knowledge. These representations are translated, layered and bound together to enshrine meaning in their proximity. Weight, reiteration and material selection add to this at a quantum level, different kinds of silent speech, a dialogue, collection or collision of intent from which we scramble towards Truths.
In a world shaped by structural and historical circumstances, global influences and localised positioning, this work aims to present a counter-contextualised enigmatic encounter, a curious and mischievous Riddle where meaning is found or forged in the overlaps and gaps that emerge inbetween elements and audience, continuing to unfold through time and reflection.
Aaron Alexander Smyth (b.1992) is an Irish interdisciplinary artist whose practice investigates identity and its formation. His work explores how our experience is visually coded within systems of power and how these codings, in turn, shape us, reflecting on the contradictions and truths cradled between our realities and fictions.
His work draws from art historical, cinematic and archival imagery, weaving them together to construct a world suspended between the real and the subconscious, a reflection on our
contradictions and truths, a silhouette of the present and mutual truth that is timeless.
Smyth graduated from The National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2015 with a first class honours degree with distinction and is currently completing his Masters of Fine Art in the Glasgow School of Art
Smyth has been awarded Artist-in-Residence positions alongside GUM Collective in The National Gallery of Ireland, The Royal Hibernian Academy Dublin and The Black Church Printmakers. During this time he has also been the recipient of the Mary Cawley Bursary, D-Light BLOW PhotoAward and the Leverhulme Master of Fine Art Bursary.
Sai Stephenson
Stephenson’s practice is concerned with creolisation as a means for Black
Caribbean people to reclaim power and autonomy. She incorporates characters
and traditions from Trinidadian Carnival traditions in her work and regards them
as devices for liberation.
Louis Syed-Anderson
My interdisciplinary practice-based research contends with history, memory and temporality.
I explore my sensory and physical interaction in different environments, my embodied perception, as well as connection to meaningful places.
I explore the agency of memory objects, inextricably linked to our history, focusing on their materiality and ingrained depth of temporality. Exploring our interrelationship with more-than-human landscapes, I consider spatial perception, duration, and time in relation to place.
Navigating thresholds of presence, I explore spatial experiences, and piece together narrative fragments that we leave behind. I convey my understanding and the essence of spaces through making and methodologies surrounding autoethnography and the haptic. I’m fascinated by traces of human presence, gesture and intervention in our surroundings, observing the land’s transformation over time, and weaving together (human) histories and heritage.
Focusing into the microscopic, my close focus into micro-scapes enables me to build a greater understanding of the fabric of the land through its minutiae. I delve into my personal history, engaging with archives, family artefacts and storytelling. Whilst considering emotion and memory, I think about my sense of belonging and identity.
Cora Weiss
Cora Weiss (b.2000) is a multi-disciplinary artist on the MFA (2022-24) at Glasgow School of Art, with a BA in Fine Art (First Class) from Newcastle University in 2022. Most recent shows include Chaos Reigns at David Dale Gallery Warehouse, Swatched x Blush at the Pipe Factory, and HFBK x GSA in Hamburg (2023).
Weiss is developing an interface between painting, photography, print and writing. She creates curated melodies of image-fragments, presenting translations across media that comment on our growing insensitivities to reading images. This interface revolves around the desire to see all at once. Her current project <TEMPO!> explores links between time, style and referencing. Anime and the guiding force of music take centre stage.
Zeena Wright- Alti
Zeena AlTai is a draw-er and textiles artist working in Glasgow and London. Al Tai’s mixed-media practice features fantastical environments and scenarios that explore the space between solitude, realism, fantasy, psychosis, and neo-colonialism (both of Earth and Body).
Xiaoyu Xiong
As an artist, Xiaoyu is interested in how we see the world around us and how this can be altered through images and physical interaction with space and people. The art practice mainly focuses on the subjective images of individuals behind art heritages, she prefers to based on the methodology of Everyday Life to use different materials and the forms of participatory (interactive) art to develop and extend the understandings and thinking. Recently,The artist frequently studied and lived between China and the UK. Multiculturalism and multilingualism have influenced the artist’s artistic practice. Therefore, artists have focused on how language and words, discourse and power subtly influence and even control people’s everyday life.
By creating her own words, she attempts to break through the erosion of people’s sensibility by ubiquitous power discourse. The work “My world, My word” uses different emotions to form words. It arouses the audience’s perception by emphasising the connection between objective things and individual subjective emotions. If someone asks “Why do you create your own words?”, then the best answer may be the work “Word World”, which uses Scotland as an example to visually represent the words with the natural and cultural landscape of Scotland. Thus, it expresses the interdependent and co-growing relationship between words and nature, society and each individual. The artist focuses on socially involved artistic practices, and the interactivity of her works is a major feature. ‘I create with them, not for them.’ Xiaoyu Claimed.
Jing Xu
Jing is an artist who was born in China in 1999. Her work presents personal perceptions in media environments, particularly in relation to the topic of “chaos”. Her recent projects revolve around creative generative AI, and extend to topics related to psychology, visual neuro-culture, and cognitive science. Her practice attempts to construct an interdisciplinary framework that forgoes clarity in favour of ambiguity and abstraction, providing a space for perception and thus unleashing the imagination and the unconscious. Her main mediums include video, performance, installation, and so on.
Siqi Yang
Influenced by her traditional upbringing, family background and personal memories, Siqi yang’s work focuses on topics such as childhood trauma and stereotypes of female identity. Through the medium of sculpture, painting, text and video, she tries to experiment with unspecified symbols, exploring the relationship between symbolic language and women’s identity, and attempting to counteract the grand narratives of collectivism with personal expression.
It’s a boring daydream. Disorientating, grotesque and unreal. Consciousness is constantly descending. The images are filled with confusion and unease about being lost and caught in a fog. Crossing time and space, blurring the real and the false, and examining what is happening now in imitation and reconstruction. But, remember, it’s just a meaningless dream.
This project uses the abstracted, emotional text and paintings from the artist’s diary as a medium to allow AI to interpret the diary from a third-party and non-human perspective and generate AI art images. The generated AI images are then used as a base for secondary creation by adding real-life everyday footage, which is ultimately presented to the audience in the form of a video.
The artist attempts to construct a dynamic, open and structural framework that cannot be fully defined by expanding the characteristics of fluidity and flexibility that emotions possess, in a poetic form that undermines the inherent colours that may be latent in AI-generated images and creates a tendency to destabilise and re-contextualise them.
Xueying Zhang
My works will mainly explore the different ways of projection and how to find the vague relations in a specific space.I don’t want the work to passively adapt to the space but to actively integrate with it.So I will probably use various projections and some traditional ritual elements to represent the link with the things already in the space. the things in the glue factory already exist on their own and live in their own time.
Liyuan ZHU
As an artist, my work delves into the intricate realms of subconscious, emotion, and spiritual philosophy. With each brushstroke, I aim to unravel the mysteries hidden within the depths of the human psyche. Through my art, I strive to capture the fleeting moments of raw emotion and translate them into visual narratives that resonate with the viewer on a profound level. Drawing inspiration from the rich tapestry of human experience, I explore the complexities of the subconscious mind and the interplay between conscious thought and unconscious desires. My creative journey is a quest to understand the essence of existence and the interconnectedness of all things. By delving into the realms of emotion and spirituality, I seek to evoke introspection and contemplation in the observer, inviting them to embark on their own journey of self-discovery. Through my art, I aspire to illuminate the universal truths that bind us all and foster a deeper connection to the world around us.