What’s on…

As they’ve grown, so I stand
Esther Thorniley Walker

FOG
CAP4 Interim Show

A Gray In The Life
4th Year Painting Mid-Year Show

Staff Outing III

This exhibition celebrates the exceptional talents of the artists and designers at Gray’s School of Art.

Over 40 staff members have come together to create a diverse fusion of creativity, spanning various mediums from photography and painting, to ceramics, illustration, jewellery, digital art and more.

Exhibition Dates:
28 October - 5 November
Sat + Sun // 11am - 4pm

Look Again Project Space
32 St Andrew Street
AB25 1JA

GagGog.
CAP Graduates exhibition

GagGog invites you to feast your eyes and mind upon the works of eighteen wonderful artists and see their diverse practices with interests spanning from themes of community, environment, play, technology, folklore and the nonhuman, as well as media ranging from performances, interactive work, printmaking and textiles.

Organised by:
Rebecca Rae / Rachael Rutherford / Kate Stewart / Ruth Wilson

Artists:
Elodie Baldwin, Jess Connor, Niamh Coutts, Marion Eleni Clement, Vix Fowler, Rachael Gemmell, Jai James, EmmaJane Kingaby, Rho McGuire, Kai Mellow, Rebecca Rae, Caitlin Robb, Rachael Rutherford, Carla Smith, Kate Stewart, Katie Taylor, Tactics for Togetherness and Ruth Wilson.

SUGO
Carla Smith

Smell bubbling, rising to the surface, red drops bursting. One of those aromas, tangy and complex, that instantly sweeps you somewhere else with a pang of love, a twinge of homesickness. Usually, to childhood. To comfort. To a time when you were cared for, by the simple measure of a ladleful of deep sweet red sugo. 

Artist Carla Smith’s multidisciplinary project SUGO explores the highly personal, intimate ways that relationships and acts of love and care are articulated and transmitted through food. The project considers how the significance of preparing and sharing meals changes as relations shift and grow over time, with a focus on memory and the preservation of something ineffable as the care embedded in a meal prepared by someone you love.

As the recipient of the Peacock Prize at the Gray’s School of Art’s Degree Show 2022, Carla was awarded a year-long Graduate Artist Residency at peacock & the worm. During this time, she has been able to hone her printmaking skills and explore new techniques, with the support of peacock printmaking technicians. Carla has developed SUGO while on residency, with the support of Look Again, (Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University). SUGO comprises of a pasta-making workshop and an exhibition of edible prints, artist books, ceramics, and a moving image work, both hosted at the Look Again Project Space on 32 St Andrew Street, Aberdeen.

The research and study behind Carla Smith’s works are rooted in moments of being together, such as a shared meal, which generate material and ideas in a spontaneous, collaborative way. In this way, the work is not limited to the artist’s individuality, even when it deals with personal, intimate matters, but stays open to a plurality of resonances. The artist has developed this way of working from previous works, such as her Degree Show work as well as more recent works realised as part of her Residency, such as Comfort Foods, acookbook where she collected recipes anonymously that were avenues for sharing memories of comforting, nourishing food secrets.

The first element of SUGO consisted of a public pasta-making workshop, during which participants were invited to explore mark-making and creativity while making fresh pasta, which they then cooked and ate together. Inviting in playfulness and open conversations, the workshop invited considering what it may mean to look after someone by preparing a meal. Approached as a skill-sharing opportunity, the participants explored transmitting knowledge and techniques by working together, mimicking the way that recipes are often fed down by watching the hands of others work.

A Risograph and screenprint book realised by the artist with recipes for fresh pasta was shared with the participants. Considered as a working document, the participants were invited to add notes, comments, suggestions and their own stories. A new version of the book, expanded with recipes for sugo and contorni, as well as documentation of the workshop, realised by Phoebe McBride, will then form part of the final exhibition.

The recipes for fresh pasta that the artist shared in the workshop came to her from her mother, who in turn had learnt them from her grandmother: a handing-down of knowledge, skill and memory. With the final exhibition, sharing meals comes into focus as a concern for the difficult preservation of memory, the transmission of techniques and tools for care against the dispersal of time. 

At the core of the project is the artist’s relationship with her maternal grandparents, amongst other family members, explored in an artist film that the exhibition revolves around. Attentive to small details and moments of connection, the film is aware of the fragile territory surrounding work made around family members, yet handles its material delicately, with awareness and gratitude. The film features a score realised by Saoirse Horne.

The works collected in the exhibition space form a delicate archive of the way these memories, and the people in them, have shaped the artist’s life. Through the various elements within the exhibition, the artist aims to recreate the practices of care inscribed in family recipes and their transmission. Family recipes, passed over, from hand to hand, take on new life each time they are recreated; they can be seen as tools for a kind of knowledge that is changed and adapted, varying according to what is at hand, the ingredients available, the situation, who’s around. 

By introducing interactive elements in the exhibition, and by including a workshop element in the project, SUGO moves away from a solely documentary, memoirist impulse, instead opening up to a work that is communal, situated and relational. Beyond familial relationships, the work also elaborates a form of care that aligns closely with that of friendship. A unique kind of relationship, based on presence, attentiveness, selflessness, and enjoyment as an end in itself, friendship is reciprocal but the exchange is always balanced and equal: the continuous gift of presentness, of being there, of spending time together in a considered, yet light and playful way. In the fact that Carla’s work reproduces acts of nurturing as transmitted by family but through an act of caring for friends, or people who come to take on that role, the work distances itself from gendered aspects of caring as nurturing and opens it up to an alternative way of being together. The workshop participants, as well as the audience, are an integral part of the project, which then comes to be about so much more than the artist and her personal story: just like a recipe, it moulds and adapts and speaks to whoever is in the room, whatever their story is. And their version of sugo. 

Just like the sauce it refers to, SUGO brings concerns around family, memory, care and conviviality together, pushing them close to one another, simmering and reducing them down to a new essence. ‘Sugo’ is Italian for a kind of tomato sauce, boiled down for a long time, then filtered and bottled, to keep for months—a storing of time. But sugo is also a meal from another country: it holds a form of longing within it, the struggle of a word that doesn’t quite fit, that takes you to a somewhere else. This becomes Carla’s own way of preserving, not as a form of conservation, but closer to the way a recipe works: it passes knowledge on, by allowing something new to be made each time.

Sugo is one of those preparations that exists in variants, rather than in a single, stable form. There is no origin; rather, a proliferation. I let the oil infuse in garlic and dried chilli, then take the garlic away, before adding the tomatoes. Carla adds onions, chops them generously large, and carrots, following her family’s recipe which always eluded her as a child, full of coveted ingredients she wasn’t always privy to. She rakes through the jars of herbs and spices, seeking to follow the recipe as closely as she can, walking through its steps into memories of days spent cooking with her loved ones side by side. As the sugo bubbles away, memories are made anew, to nourish and nurture, tending to relationships old and new, time, and time again. 
—Enxhi Mandija

 SUGO is jointly supported by peacock & the worm and delivered as part of LACER project by Gray's School of Art, RGU on behalf of Culture Aberdeen. #AtThisPlace.

About Carla Smith

Carla Smith is an artist based in Aberdeen, originally from Edinburgh. She graduated in Contemporary Arts Practice at Gray’s School of Art in 2022, when she was awarded the Peacock Prize, which consisted of a year-long residency at the printmaking studio. During this time, Carla has explored and perfected a variety of printmaking techniques, under the guidance of our printmakers. She has worked on several prints, including The Apple Tree, an etching with screenprint and writing on calico, which was exhibited at the Moray Art Centre (Feb 2023). Other prints from this body of work, as well as other works realised during the residency, have been exhibited at Compass Gallery, Glasgow. She also realised a cookbook, Comfort Foods, a three-colour Risograph book with cyanotype cover containing recipes collected in secrecy, ‘stories of guilty pleasures and meals that remind you of simpler times,’ as the artist writes. Sugo is her first solo project and exhibition.

Tech equipment kindly supported by AV One Solutions.

LOVED SEEDS
by Eldin & Love

Look Again and We Are Here Scotland are working together on new projects to support BPoC (Black People and People of Colour) artists in Scotland. Our Second exhibition in the series is by multi-media artist Helen Love and poet Noon Salah Eldin who use art as a form of activism.

Loved Seeds (an exhibition and performance using poetry and clay) takes you time travelling to the lives of an enslaved family in 1832 Jamaica. They are connected to Aberdeen's Powis Gate, Powis Community Centre (and Jamaica Street) through their 'owner' who never wanted for narrators. Eldin & Love's first collaboration focused on the mother, Quasheba and she and her nine children continued to haunt them. Their family tree was pieced together from original registries (listing no more than name, age, sometimes mother, African or Creole). This then became Loved Seeds.

Noon Salah Eldin's poem: "I named her Maryam" celebrates generations, motherhood. "Skin" speaks of resilience, the healing power of water. Helen Love's nine press moulded ceramic portraits descend along the wall together with prints, installation, sound and film.

Remake the world.

Collaborators:
Lotus crowns for Loved Seeds performance and costume for Quasheba are made by modesty fashion designer Yusra Elsadig of Boutique de Nana.
An outside eye was cast on the performance by performance artist Nic Green.
Research assistance was given by Jenny Brown of Aberdeen City Council's Treasure Hub.
Registries were shared by historians and curators at University of Aberdeen: Neil Curtis, Emma Raymond, Richard Anderson.
Clay was donated by Florence Peake after making Crude Care for British Art Show 9 and recycled to make portraits.
Ceramics workshop facilities provided by Grays School of Art.
Funding and support from We Are Here Scotland and Look Again.
Quasheba was commissioned by Aberdeen City Council (Archives, Gallery & Museums) supported by The Art Fund 2020 Museum of the Year Award.

Gratefull thanks to all,
Eldin & Love

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Loved Seeds Performance by Eldin & Love // Saturday 6th May - 2pm
(performance is 15 mins approximately so don't be late)
* ALL WELCOME *

Combining clay, poetry and projection in this performance, they create a family tree for nine children of an enslaved woman from 1832 Jamaica with connections to Aberdeen.

To begin, Helen Love's animated zoom projection takes you time travelling, leading into Noon Salah Eldin's poem, 'I Named Her Maryam'. Humming a Sudanese lullaby, they work together, kneeling to press clay into carved plaster to form each childs face. Wearing lotus crowns like priestesses or midwives, they present the faces, then hang them up on a driftwood branch. Finally Noon gives a reading of the powerful 'Skin'.

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Noon Salah Eldin is a poet and spoken word artist based in Aberdeen, Scotland. Born and raised in Sudan, she moved to the UK in 2015 to pursue postgraduate medical training in child health. Writing and performing poetry has become an increasingly important part of her life. It has empowered her to process and discuss experiences of childhood traumas, political upheaval, migration and motherhood. She believes that art can be a powerful tool for personal and social transformation and has been asked to share her poems by governmental, NGO, and civil-society organizations. Part of art and activist duo Eldin&Love since 2020.

Helen Love is a multimedia artist (film, ceramics, glass), of immigrant parents (Denmark, South Africa) but rooted in Aberdeen. She been a community artist and art school ceramics technician for many years and has exhibited in Denmark and solo in the Faroe Islands. She is mother of four and after losing her street artist son to overdose, sees her art interventions around the city as a continuity of his legacy. Having met Eldin at a protest they joined words with visualisations to reveal Aberdeen’s flawed history of connections to slavery and to explore how their own identities connected to the local rivers.

COMPOSITION
’with red and yellow’

Look Again and We Are Here Scotland are working together on new projects to support BPoC (Black People and People of Colour) artists in Scotland.

Our first exhibition in the series is by Rudy Kanhye, an interdisciplinary Artist, curator and culinary designer of Mauritian heritage, interested in exploring untold histories and promoting art that is created for communities.

In this exhibition Kanhye offers 8 works reflecting on the politics of Food, decolonisation and the economy of time through the lens of Mauritius Island (where his father is from). The centerpiece of the show and new work supported by Peacock and Look Again, Gray’s School of Art is a Token offer to each visitor. The modest gift with the effigy of the dodo (the symbol of Mauritius) can be taken home as a keepsake, or used to activate other works in the show. The visitor can choose to reactivate the work of Julius Koller, and play ping pong in the middle of the gallery, or use the token to receive spices and menus of two curries from Mauritius island, one red and one yellow, that can be cooked later at home.

Like entering an arcade, the gallery space is home for play and exchange through an alternative economy.  Visitors will be invited to occupy the exhibition space and experience the activation of the work. The artist is trying to engage with the audience in an inventive sharing game centered around the idea of consumption, food and storytelling, in order to create  a space to be activated and appropriate by the visitor. By participating in the play elements (ping pong table, exchange), the visitor enters into a sharing game, proposed by the artist. As a result, the shared experience is making visible an artistic intention that is not limited to the creation of a work of a contemplative and material nature, but rather a participatory work, in other words, event-driven, materialized as a circumstance and created through an exchange game captured through the act of sharing. What matters here is how the visitors who decide to enter the game, participate in the performance by the dialogue which is established during the exchange, and through the appropriation of the space. Here we seek that the passive visitor becomes himself an active participant, like the actor of a work in progress.

Rudy Kanhye’s research for this exhibition is part of a bigger collective that he co-created with artist and activist Lauren La Rose on the notions of decolonisation, BPOC and disability rights."

Kanhye is the co-director of the gunny bag collective, Art Producer and artist led for the Harvest festival(an empty gunny bag cannot stand) 2020 in Glasgow. His recent exhibitions include: Jupiter rising, Jupiter Artland2019/Inverclyde culture collective with RIG arts 2022/ FOOD ART WEEK at Northlands Creative 2022/Cove park Harvest Festival 2022, Jan Van yeck and Fife contemporary for future 2023.

Opening night:
Thursday 2 March
6 - 9pm // All Welcome //

Exhibition Open:
4 - 26 March 2023
Sat + Sun 11am - 4pm

Look Again Project Space
32 St Andrew Street // AB25 1JA

Gray’s School of Art
Student Showcase Exhibitions // NOV - DEC 2022:

UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Stage 4 Painting Exhibition

‘Under Construction’ - Pre-degree show exhibition from the Stage 4 Painting students from Gray’s School of Art, RGU. Showcasing the plethora of work and talents from the final year cohort of 24 students. This exposition demonstrates the imaginative approaches and ideas from aspiring artists of the future and their innovative approaches to contemporary painting in the expanded field.   

Weeklong exhibition of artworks including painting, drawing, installation, moving image, 3d models, printmaking amongst others.

IN MEDIAS RES
CAP 4 Mid Year Show

Final year art students from Gray's School of Art, RGU are set to exhibit their work across two of Aberdeen's key art spaces, Look Again Project Space, St Andrew Street, and the Arkade Gallery at The Anatomy Rooms, off Queen Street.

 With the title "In medias res" or "in the middle," the mid-year exhibition by Contemporary Art Practice fourth years presents thirty-five unique perspectives on diverse and topical themes across a wide range of media.

EDITIONS
S3 3DD Showcase

3DD warmly invite you to their stage 3 exhibition a the Look Again Project Space. The show will be open to the public on Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 Dec 11am-4pm. 

EDITIONS celebrates 3DD's breadth across Jewellery / Ceramics / Product. Students were tasked with creating a ‘batch-produce-able’ Craft Product that is inspired by the city of Aberdeen. Students had 10 weeks in which to research, develop, prototype and present their concepts before presenting a highly resolved, batch producible object at this showcase. 

It’s been just over three years since the inaugural Staff Outing exhibition at the Look Again Project Space, which featured staff from the Contemporary Art Practice programme, and Graduates-in-Residence. So much has happened in the intervening time that that show seems from another world, even if it was in the same city and the same space. This time, the CAP staff are joined by colleagues from Painting, and some Critical & Contextual Studies staff, making this a more rounded showing of current Fine Art practices at Gray’s School of Art.

Staffs at art schools are layered; many new talents have joined us in recent times, building on the experience of senior colleagues who can remember earlier versions of Gray’s from thirty years ago, and who have long years of professional experience behind them. But this is a show which focuses not so much on us as a collective of educators- how our students encounter us on a daily basis- but as a very wide spectrum of creative practitioners and thinkers, who engage actively locally, nationally and internationally.

At the core of the show is a deep commitment to, and understanding of, materials, and their metaphorical and humorous potential. Regular attenders of the annual RSA exhibition will immediately recognise the works of Michael Agnew, Head of Painting, Derrick Guild, and Lyndsey Gilmour. Michael’s work deals with Scottish folklore and colloquial humour; Derrick’s is steeped in the history of painting and delights in tricking us into seeing the familiar as unfamiliar again; Lyndsey invites us to see more in her abstract, organic patterns in a delicately chosen palette. The painters are also represented by Peter Chalmers who has shown new work both here and in Edinburgh in the past year, Marcus Murison, and Hannah Gibson. Marcus and Hannah are recent Gray’s graduates whose practice develops again through seductive abstraction and expanded painterly installation.

From the Contemporary Art Practice grouping we find a strong commitment to materiality through varied installations and performance. Jim Buckley’s long career has taken place against the backdrop of sculpture’s re-definition away from carving in stone or wood, or casting in bronze, to installations in light. In the same space, Jim Hamlyn through his installation explores the sculptural potential of the readymade using the minimalist means of the power socket; the viewer is left to either find subtle humour, intellectual stimulation, or both from the work.  Maja Zećo’s visceral and overwhelming durational performance reflects on the artist’s Bosnian identity and the painful echoes of past conflict in present times. Back upstairs, there is a nice visual pun between the balaclava drawings of Craig Ellis, and the remarkable sculpted black headpiece by Craig Barrowman.

David Blyth, head of CAP, once again intrigues us and encourages us to peel back the layers of meaning with his fascinating sculptural objects, whilst new member of staff Caitlyn Main presents an interesting wall based work, combining drawing, painting and organic materials, reflecting on body parts and focusing on disconnected parts of the anatomy, referencing literature and stagecraft in an intriguing conversation between disciplines and ideas. Helen Scarlett O’Neill, meanwhile, presents work from her recent involvement in the Story Trails project, providing a window into the world of Augmented Reality and virtual story telling.

At Gray’s we are pushing hard to integrate studio and theoretical learning ever more, and this is reflected in the interventions made by our CCS staff. Jen Clarke’s concrete poem and associated brightly coloured images draw out of a series of lecture performances in recent times and deal with a range of ideas related to ecosystems, birth, the life cycle and the parasite, growing out of her background in Art & Anthropology.

Chris Fremantle, meanwhile produces an installation deriving from his interest in the work of the conceptual artist John Latham (1921-2006) and his work in the West Lothian bings, and Chris’ own take on the “mental furniture industry”. Judith Winter delves deep into her extensive art historical knowledge and interest in showing two very rare student magazines from the 1960s, with contributions from William Tucker and Lawrence Alloway. Finally, my own contribution relates to recent curatorial projects here in Scotland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Belarus and North Macedonia, my ongoing work on activism, art & football, and some music. You can take time to read some of our work too, in the dedicated reading area.

An art school often reflects the character of the city that it is based in. In the past six years Aberdeen has undergone a perfect storm of change that normally takes quarter of a century, and there is no sign of this process slowing down. Whilst it follows that Gray’s is changing quickly, too, in our engagement with the city and in our offer to our students, there are constants. These are seen here in the integrity of making, a desire to confront and take risks, to be socially aware and engaged, not being afraid to being wrong interestingly, and a selflessness in sharing ideas with others. It’s these qualities which we do our best to pass onto those who study with us.

We really hope that you will enjoy our show and that it provokes you to ask more questions of us, and of each other.

Dr Jon Blackwood
Reader in Contemporary Art

Terra Incognita (as above, so below) is a newly commissioned project hosted by MIASMA and Look Again for Wonderland Festival.

A weirding and reenchantment of the city held across various sites, where audiences may traverse through a cyclical route across scapes of deep time and feral space. 

Themes across works range from archaeology and folk belief to the worship of sacred wells; from networks of mycelium, to that of community radio; uncanny structures of surveillance loom over scapes of corrosion and of civic space all the while a lonely guide promotes subterranean tours to the depths of a ‘shadow biosphere’. 

Through the psychogeographic and the spiritual, the mythic and the eerie, works explore and think through interrelations and entanglements between zenith, nadir, and the strange ephemera that dance between the two. 

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MIASMA is a curatorial project, artist collective and guild of worldbuilders based in Aberdeen, Scotland with areas of interest spanning natural history, ecological phenomena, folk belief, altered reality and weird technology. 

Previous projects include SWAMPWATCH publication and Swamp Island, a temporary outdoor living history museum “celebrating swamp spirits around the world protecting us from harm”.   

While some dream of touch, conversations, spirits and music, drawn to living in a community that is still an idealised memory, others learn to adapt to the rhythm of nature by discovering a new ability of being in their own company and listening to their bodies. In both of these attitudes there is a longing, a primal desire to unite and find oneself as part of a larger, metaphysical organism.   

The lack of physicality results in a feeling of loss and bizarre loneliness, so we compensate for it with cold air, the smell of fog and rot, the taste of rain. Wanting to multiply the sensory experiences of our bodies thriving for connection, we run away to nature, paradoxically looking for other people in it.   

Born into isolation under the spell of myth-makers Eryka Aniol and Abby Quick, the word ‘miasma’ itself is excavated from a defunct theory, where it was once believed that epidemics were caused by rotting organic matter, or ‘night air’, encouraging the masses to stay inside and away from the natural world.

// EMERGENT //

Look Again invited artists and designers, currently on the Graduate in Residence (GIR) scheme at Gray's School of Art to engage with collection items held within RGU Art & Heritage Collections. The GIR's selected an object from the collection to be used as a trigger, a catalyst for a new piece of contemporary work based on their current research themes. In this exhibition you can engage with our local heritage through the museum object while engaging with a living archive in response to our past.

Gray’s School of Art Graduate in Residence scheme is an unpaid post, where high-achieving graduates are invited to apply to spend time in the school. The aim is for the graduate to be able to actively contribute to the life of the school and learn more about education. It is hoped the graduates will bring fresh thinking and new insights, as well as giving staff and students a chance to benefit from their experience.

Creative Entrepreneurship // Showcase //

The Look Again Project Space opened its doors for the first of two Creative Entrepreneurship Showcases celebrating the talent and creativity of the alumni who took part in the Creative Entrepreneurship course during 2020 and 2021. Presenting exciting new fine art, fashion, ceramics, and illustration from practitioners across Scotland.

// PRISM //
Explorations With Colour

PRISM was the first in a series of experiments in artistic interaction by five artists, each of whom uses colour in different ways and for different reasons - whether through process, material or aesthetic. Although PRISM did not contain any works that directly use light, the exhibition aimed to complement SPECTRA’s mission of bringing ‘light to the winter nights’ by presenting artworks that focus on the fact that colour is a property of light. A ‘dispersive’ prism - having five facets - transforms white light into the colours of the spectrum. 

Artists:
Gordon Burnett
Julia Gardiner
Carole Gray
Robin Palmer
Allan Watson

// ONWARDS //
Postgraduate Showcase 2021

OPENING NIGHT: Friday 12 November
6pm-8pm // ALL WELCOME

EXHIBITION: 13 - 28 November 2021

This Exhibition will include a wide range of work across a number of Design and Fine Art MA disciplines including: Photography, Animation, Video and Sculptural installation, Painting, and Jewellery. Whilst the range of work is wide ranging there are significant common themes that the Masters Students have been addressing, which have been developed in the very middle of the COVID pandemic.

The work of these Masters students as a result, seeking to make more direct connections with our environment, our physical and emotional surroundings and the personal narratives we have increasingly relied on and which have been so very important over this challenging period. 

JULIJA ASTASONOKA
ÉLODIE BALDWIN
HANNA DAVIDSON
LEAH DAVIS
LAURA NICHOLSON
MARIA ROMAN
IRIS WALKER-REID
NIAMH COUTTS
HANNAH BERESFORD
BEN CAIRNS
ROSS HENDERSON
JOAN MACLEOD
AMELIE PETERS
TRACEY SCOTT
NINA STANGER
MATTHEW WELLS

Previous Exhibitions:

// Paradigms //
Curated by Rachel Grant

OPENING NIGHT: Thursday 30 Sept 6-8pm // ALL WELCOME

Opening Hours:
Thu // 5-8pm
Fri // 12-5pm
Sat + Sun // 11-4pm

Paradigms is an exhibition of contemporary works from artists based in Aberdeen and Plymouth, curated by Rachel Grant. Paradigms are systems of ideas, values and practice that constitute a way of viewing reality. As such the artists’ works are wide ranging in character and these ideas are explored through their everyday environments. The work includes multi-media installation, film, sculpture and photography.

As part of the Paradigms exhibition we have a series of public programs including talks from the artists and Where do we go from here? a series of conversations about the arts ecology in Aberdeen produced by and for those working in the sector. Keep in touch with our social media channels for more information. 

Writer Tilly Craig and artists Phoebe McBride, Molly Erin McCarthy, Rhys Morgan, Carly Seller and Abby Beatrice Quick. 

// C R U D E //
Curated by Fertile Ground

OPENING NIGHT: Friday 27th of August 6pm-7.30pm // ALL WELCOME

Look Again are delighted to host CRUDE, curated by Fertile Ground at the Project Space. The exhibition explores our complex relationship to crude oil, focusing on the sticky interplays of politics, culture and ecology through newly commissioned works from artists and writers; Ashanti Harris, Alison Scott, and Shane Strachan. The project has situated oil as an agent of transformation and invited the commissioned practitioners to think through the implications of oil’s ability to dominate all political, social and economic life the world over.

Located in Aberdeen, the previously self-proclaimed ‘Oil Capital of Europe’, the exhibition aims to take a critical lens to oil in local, national and international contexts. The works drill down into aspects of oil narratives which are often projected as fluid and creating wealth for all. Instead they operate in the friction, making visible counter narratives and reflecting on the ways on which fossil fuels make identities.

For the duration of the exhibition selected texts and publications will be available providing a further insight into the discourse of crude oil. Including locally produced publications of Aberdeen Peoples Press ‘Oil Over Troubled Water. A Report and Critique of Oil Developments in North East Scotland’ and selected editions of ‘Blow Out’ magazine a publication produced by and for oil workers in the North East.

The project has been supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland’s Open Fund: Sustaining Creative Development and Look Again.

Energy Politics and Just Transition
Saturday 4th September
Visit Creative Carbon Scotland's website for more details:
https://www.creativecarbonscotland.com/.../green-tease.../

The opening night and public events will be in line with Scottish Government regulations and we will continue to monitor the situation in the run up to this event. This includes planned safety measures such as a track and trace system, hand sanitising on entry and exit, and masks worn throughout the evening.

ZsaZsa McGregor
// Forecast //

Forecast is an exhibition at the Look Again Project Space by Gray’s graduate ZsaZsa McGregor. She was invited to create new work in response to the RGU Art & Heritage Collections, with the commission supported by our Seed Fund programme.

Forecast is Inspired by a nautical scene in needle work created by Beatrice Campbell and Lily Yeats from the RGU Art & Heritage Collections and research into weather and element summoning.

Forecast also takes inspiration from tales of the Cailleach Scottish deity, Northeast lore surrounding storm raising, witches and magic knots, raising questions on female potential and power as well as exploring women’s relationships and roles connected with the forming and un-forming of landscapes through earthly elements.

These themes led McGregor to further investigate climate change and the effects of flooding on the environment, questioning the potential of renewable power sources particularly focusing on water and wind and the North Easts relationship with them.

The Window Vitrine will showcase installation, film and performances by McGregor relating to the two categories - Water and Wind. Live performances will take place within the window space throughout the exhibition period.

About Zsa Zsa McGregor:
McGregor’s practice is enveloped in the feminine and seeks to unearth ideas surrounding women’s roles and power through historic residue, particularly relating to the Scottish female identity and Scottish landscape. Feminine rites and ideologies are re-examined and reformed in order to question post, present and future woman and unearth ideas relating to the ecology between the feminine and our natural landscapes. Her practice recently considers climate change and the potential of natural power resources. McGregor investigates these themes through performative explorations with body, props and garments. Her practice uses historic and folkloric information to inform her performances and explore contemporary issues of the natural world and feminine potential.

Indie McCue
// Roy Gets Sad //

Roy Gets Sad is an exhibition at the Look Again Project Space by recent Gray’s graduate Indie McCue. He was invited to create new work in response to the RGU Art & Heritage Collections, with the commission supported by our Seed Fund programme.

Taking work by Gray’s graduate Stewart Comrie as a starting point, and with a focus on the LGBTQIA community, McCue was struck by the need for more diversity in the institution’s collections, and has developed a suite of animations featuring a character called Roy, who embodies both difference and the search for belonging. Roy strives to find a place of solace, fun and friendship, and the audience are invited to help him by taking part in a series of 8-bit computer games. Head down to the Project Space and play your part in his journey to acceptance.

www.indiemccue.com

About Indie McCue:

exploration of transitioning and the external narratives that accompany his transition physically, emotionally and socially – this is at the centre of the creation of his work.

Participatory work is a wider focus of McCue’s as he is under the firm impression that in order to affect social change you must include everyone in the conversation by removing access barriers in order to achieve this. McCue’s practice aims to create continuous conversation about community, playfulness and the importance of each individual’s role in the rebuilding of societal idealisations.

@indiemccue

Jiggle n Juice
// Funhouse //

Welcome to the Jiggle n Juice Funhouse! Come one, come all! Take in the delightful and vibrant visuals of our chaotic carnival experience. Line up at the ticket both to scan your very own interactive pop-up version, so you can take the funhouse home. 

The Jiggle n Juice Funhouse came from the collective’s exploration of Robert Gordon University’s Art & Heritage Collection where they were inspired by summer fairground themed paper pop-ups and games. They were initially drawn to these items because of the bold saturated colour palettes, playful font types, and the use of characters, such as clowns; which had been a theme that Georgia and Shae have each explored previously in their individual practices. However, it was the idea of how these two-dimensional works could be shared and interacted with to become a three-dimensional sculpture, game or toy with the viewer’s participation. Since the Jiggle n Juice duo live thousands of miles apart in different countries, all the content, materials and work they produce together has to be either online or mailed to one another. This is just another way the pop-up travelling fairgrounds relates to how the collective works. Accessibility is one of the driving forces behind how they produce work, keeping support resources free and (so long as someone has access to a computer) anyone in the world can access their content. J&J wants to engage the public by having a scannable QR code that allows access to a digital pop-up version of the installation that can be printed out and built at home.

Funhouses have a very specific and alluring exterior that draws participants in. However, due to the COVID-19 restrictions, the gallery space will be closed to the public during the duration of the exhibition. So, what does this mean for the Jiggle n Juice Funhouse? And for that matter, Funhouses everywhere? The way we think about and interact with participatory environments has forever been changed because of the pandemic. Wondering when the last time something has been sanitized or how close you are to other strangers will likely live in the collective consciousness long after the pandemic is over. Installing a Funhouse in this type of setting behind glass turns it into an artifact from another time. In a time where everything has moved online, the QR code becomes a key element of the work in order for the public to participate in the Funhouse in the safety of their own homes.

About Jiggle n Juice:

Jiggle n Juice is a collective formed by two artists who happen to be best friends, Shae Myles and Georgia Tooke. They also happen to live 4,405 miles apart. The pair met in 2019 at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, Scotland, where Shae was studying and Georgia undertook her exchange semester. Jiggle n Juice is a platform dedicated to engaging in discursive and critical conversation, and showcasing creativity. They aim to foster a support system for creatives by producing materials that help to bridge the gap from art school to professional practice.

@jigglenjuice

Shae Myles:

Shae Myles is a contemporary artist indulging in the delicious pleasures of food and sex. The basis of her work is to question the nature of our sex-saturated society, which paradoxically still views sex as 'taboo'. By intertwining food practices and rituals into this exploration, she sets out to highlight the balancing act between celebrating power and lust, and being faced with objectification and disgust. Her work typically takes the form of film, photography, and installation. A recent graduate from Gray's School of Art, Shae currently lives and works in Aberdeen. 

@ssssssssssssshae // shaemyles.com

Georgia Tooke:

Georgia Tooke is a contemporary artist and a graduate of the University of Victoria. She is based on the unceded lands of the Lekwungen people, the Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ nations, otherwise known as Victoria, BC, Canada. Tooke uses video, performance, installation, painting and sculpture to examine life’s delicious pleasures and the depths of our sinister subconscious. Fascinated with how performance is present within every aspect of her life, she pulls from her background in the theatre to explore female sexuality, rodeos, power dynamics, breakfast, family psychology, and the idea of fabricated femininity. 

@georgiatooke //georgiatooke.com

Look Again’s annual Seed Fund awards take a new form this year in response to Covid 19. 

A central part of Look Again Visual Art and Design festival over the past 5 years, this year Seed Fund has been adapted to suit our new context. The artists have been invited to undertake a Digital Residency, working with us over July, August and September to take over the Look Again Instagram feed. 

The ambitious new works are a creative response to this digital realm, utilising it to invite dialogue with wider audiences, create new international connections stream live performance and document physical work in new ways. 

With thanks to the artists for their resilience and vision in reimagining their work for this programme.

A Spoon is the Safest Vessel

Glasgow Women’s Library
Juliane Foronda / Kirsty Russell / Tako Taal

A Spoon is the Safest Vessel was a new collaboration between emerging artists Juliane Foronda, Kirsty Russell and Tako Taal that explored the barely visible gestures and behind the scenes work that make up a hosting practice. The artists took inspiration from the unique collection of archive materials at Glasgow Women’s Library in dialogue with items from Robert Gordon University’s fascinating art & heritage collections to play host in this exhibition, presenting new works to both feed and challenge the senses. 

New works, and some initially presented at Glasgow Women’s Library last year, were due to be exhibited at the Look Again Project space this spring. Due to the unprecedented circumstances brought about by the current global health crisis the exhibition was unable to take place at this time. However, with considerations of how best to host in changed times to the fore, the artists prepared a small online response to stand in for aspects of the show.

During the four week duration of the exhibition in April, the artists and curator Caroline Gausden took a minimal and distanced approach sharing a small selection of images and texts that related to the exhibition themes via social media.  

Ferning Foaming Bloom

A co-commission with Spectra, Scotland’s Festival of Light, this new work by multi-disciplinary artist Amy Gear was a response to the theme of coasts and waters. An exhibition, new projection and sound work explored the possible (and impossible) interrelationships between landscape, coast and the body - playfully knotting together film, spoken word, Shetland dialect and myth.

An Empirically Grey Area

How can we approach making in the face of a threat from meaninglessness? Beyond a question of whether he should be making at all, Peter Chalmers’ work is centred around a question of what and how to make and whether the act of making can in itself create meaning.

The new body of work presented in this exhibition used Martin Frederiksen’s book, ‘An anthropology of nothing in particular’ as a key point of reference and departure. Image and narrative were largely removed in favour of anticipation and waiting, as Chalmers seeks to make tangible this figurative grey area of meaning. The work aimed to evoke the sense of suspense found in a glimpse over a dividing wall or the action that occurs just off stage. A reality that anticipates the possibility of meaning, but that must find a way of existing without any certainty of it. 

photos courtesy of Kirstin Murie

EMBEDDING

The partnership between Gray’s School of Art (Robert Gordon University) and RockRose Energy has been one of unexpected outcomes. By placing students within the work place, and challenging them to respond to the threads that connect the people that make those places what they are, both the students and the employees have reassessed the image of the North Sea oil industry. 

Where the stereotypical image may be one of heavy industry, the outcomes that the students have produced in collaboration with Rockrose Energy have seen it squarely through the lens of a people centric work place.

As such, this exhibition presented the development and achievements of local talent, whilst telling distinctly human stories. Stories that are not often seen from an industry, which typically has its most iconic structures seated just over the horizon.

The exhibition showcased a mix of work from all ten students who have received support and mentoring through this ongoing collaboration. Bringing together photography, sculpture, painting, sound art and graphic design to showcase the work facilitated by Rockrose Energy, and highlight the progressive trajectory these students exhibited directly due the support they received.

Staff Outing
Contemporary Art Practice // Gray’s School of Art

‘Staff Outing’ was a diverse and timely exhibition showcasing the wide range of expertise within the Gray’s School of Art Contemporary Art Practice department.
The exhibition included prints, sculpture and multi-media works, as well as a programme of performances, talks and events. It was a chance for the public to explore the techniques, skills and ideas that underpin the teaching at Gray’s and that supports the talented graduates coming out of the school. It was also an opportunity for students to understand more about the professional practice of those who teach them, the exhibition was also used as a learning resource, allowing students to develop a stronger understanding about exhibiting at a professional level. 

Photos by Fergus Connor @ Gray’s School of Art, RGU, 2019

Creative Accelerator // Exposition

The Look Again Creative Accelerator is a 12 week programme of intensive creative business support. Ten ambitious, creative individuals and companies wishing to turn their business ideas into reality or take their existing business to the next level were selected for the programme which began in June 2019.

The Bill Gibb Line
written and performed by Shane Strachan

The Bill Gibb Line was a spoken-word film and exhibition of new narratives across poetry and fashion inspired by the life and work of the Northeast-born fashion designer who was world renowned in the 1970s. Centred around six new poems by writer-performer Shane Strachan, each inspired by a different fashion show across Gibb’s illustrious and tumultuous career from the late 60s to the mid-80s.

Supported by filmmaker Graeme Roger of Wildbird, the film featured a spoken word performance by Shane along with new garments created by 3rd-year Fashion and Textiles students at Gray’s School of Art, all influenced by Gibb’s diverse designs.

The exhibition also featured the poems digitally printed on textiles in the space, alongside a new dress design by Gray’s students Beth Coventry and Catherine Macdonald inspired by drawings and pattern cuttings held at Robert Gordon’s Art & Heritage Collections for Gibb’s final 1985 fashion show, ‘The Bronze Age’.

Originally from Bill Gibb’s hometown of Fraserburgh, Shane Strachan is a writer and performer based in Aberdeen. His work for both page and stage is concerned with the Northeast’s relationship with the wider world, including his work-in-progress novel inspired by Gibb’s life and work for which he was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Aberdeen.

// PART OF LOOK AGAIN FESTIVAL //

SHUFFLE // facilitated by Lyndsey Gilmour

Launch Night: Friday 3 May // 6 - 8pm - All Welcome!
Exhibition open: 4 - 18 May 2019 (Thu 5-8pm // Fri-Sun 11am-5pm)

This emphasis of this project was on publicly exhibiting a body of research and development that Lyndsey Gilmour has been working on during the past 18months, in collaboration with performing arts venue The Lemon Tree and volunteer participants from Rosemount Community Centre and Transition Extreme. The project and exhibition was curated and designed by Lyndsey and the work produced has a shared ownership between all 13 participants.

Shuffle expands on Gilmour’s broader research interests in the static nature of Painting and the role movement can play in this medium. Previous work has focused on the importance of time within Painting; celebrating the aging process of decay, rot and rust, enabling the image, colour and tonal structure to change over time. As with Theatre, although the structure remains no two viewing experiences are the same. Shuffle continues this exploration through the (de)constructing of the imagery evident in both the changeable and interactive nature of the drawings, a rhythm is introduced through the projected film and the Paintings merely fix compilations of imagery, adding a stillness to the show.    

List of Participants:

Sam Begg, Calum Chalmers, Jack Dow, Linzi Harrow, Becky Laird, Naomi Leckie, Owen Livingston, Carol McDonald, Alison Muir, Diane Needler, Freda Still, Dorothy Sutherland, Cora Taylor, Dennis Noble, Helen Watson, Ethan West.

Tendency Towards presents: A Room For A Handshake
Madeleine Hope-Fraser, Jack McCombe & Stephanie Mann

Opening Evening: Sat 30th March, 6-8pm
Exhibition Run: 31 March - 28th April (Thu 5-8pm, Fri - Sun 11am - 5pm)

Tendency Towards presents newly commissioned sculptural, text and sound works by Madeleine Hope-Fraser, Jack McCombe and Stephanie Mann jointly investigating the formation and narration of communal architectures. Considering the role artist-led spaces play in forming local cultural identities, A Room For a Handshake envisages exhibition-making as a framework for supporting artist actions. A programme of activations including a weekly guided library, shared meals, artists workshops and advice sessions delivered jointly by Look Again and Tendency Towards will populate the projects’ month long run at Look Again’s new city-centre project space.

 Madeleine Hope-Fraser, Jack McCombe and Stephanie Mann all investigate materiality, objects, space and thingliness within their practices in multi-disciplinary methods. Covering site-specific installations, sculpture, text, performance and video, their practices are broad and explorative in their approach to exhibitions

 Creating work collectively, Hope-Fraser and McCombe both studied at Glasgow School of Art, now based jointly in Toronto and Glasgow; Stephanie Mann is based in Edinburgh, currently participating in the inaugural two-year Talbot Rice Residents Programme.

 A Room For a Handshake is a continuation of projects by Tendency Towards investigating the formation, operation and working methods within artist communities, often specifically looking at the emotional labor involved in contemporary collective visual arts practices.

 Tendency Towards is an artist-led curatorial initiative based in Aberdeen, comprising of artists Yvette Bathgate, Jessica Barrie, Donald Butler, Paula Buškevica, Mary Gordon & Jake Shepherd. Operating since 2017, Tendency Towards curates public exhibitions, workshops, events, engages in national visual arts conversations and make work collectively.

 A Room For a Handshake is curated by Tendency Towards, supported by funds from Aberdeen City Council’s Creative Fund and Look Again.

We were delighted to launch our new Look Again Project Space with ORAL SUSPENSION - a collaborative project by Scottish artists David Blyth and Nick Gordon, celebrating Scottish cultural heritage through an investigation of the customs and folk traditions surrounding the Skate, in fishing communities in Aberdeenshire and Orkney. 
 
The exhibition is the product of an ongoing dialogue between Blyth and Gordon, where oral traditions and storytelling inform the development of the work. The artists have met with fishermen, fishmongers and other skateholders (Orkney Skate Trust) who aim to raise public awareness of this critically endangered species. 
 
Building upon the legacy of artists such as Bellany, Ensor and Soutine, this project weaves together multiple forms of knowledge and experience to create a contemporary portrait of this uncanny fish of the North Sea. 
 
David Blyth and Nick Gordon are both graduates of Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen. Their individual practices share a pre-occupation with human-animal relations and with museological approaches in the display and transmission of artifactual information.