The Skinny June 2021 by The Skinny

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June 2021 Issue 185

January 2020

Books

THE SKINNY

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THE SKINNY

Art January 2020

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THE SKINNY

The Skinny's song to soundtrack your reintegration into society? Sigur Rós — Hoppípolla BTS — Butter Minnie Riperton — Les Fleurs Rina Sawayama — Comme des Garçons (Like the Boys) Fire Inc — Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young John Williams — Theme from Jurassic Park Jens Lekman — Your Arms Around Me Hot Chip — Ready for the Floor John Denver — Take Me Home, Country Roads Future — Mask Off (feat. Kendrick Lamar) — (Remix) Korn — Good God Kate & Anna McGarrigle — Talk to Me of Mendocino Olivia Rodrigo — Brutal Daði og Gagnamagnið — 10 Years

Listen to this playlist on Spotify — search for 'The Skinny Office Playlist' or scan the below code

Issue 185, June 2021 © Radge Media Ltd. Get in touch: E: hello@theskinny.co.uk

June 2021

The Skinny is Scotland's largest independent entertainment & listings magazine, and offers a wide range of advertising packages and affordable ways to promote your business. Get in touch to find out more. E: sales@theskinny.co.uk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part without the explicit permission of the publisher. The views and opinions expressed within this publication do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the printer or the publisher. Printed by DC Thomson & Co. Ltd, Dundee ABC verified Jan – Dec 2019: 28,197

printed on 100% recycled paper

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Championing creativity in Scotland

Meet the team We asked – What makes you anxious about a 'return to normal life'? Editorial

Rosamund West Editor-in-Chief "The impending FOMO."

Peter Simpson Digital Editor, Food & Drink Editor "Constant mask-based confusion. There's only so many times you can shout 'sorry I didn't catch that' before it gets awkward."

Anahit Behrooz Events Editor "The Return of Bumble: Bumbling Harder."

Jamie Dunn Film Editor, Online Journalist "No longer having a watertight excuse to hand when I want to avoid a night out because I'd rather just stay in and have a bubble bath."

Tallah Brash Music Editor "Being in close proximity to other people, namely strangers."

Nadia Younes Clubs Editor "Weekday hangovers."

Polly Glynn Comedy Editor "No longer being ID'd all the time cos of my mask. My eyes say 18 but clearly the rest of my face..."

Katie Goh Intersections Editor "Literally nothing. Let me out."

Eliza Gearty Theatre Editor "n/a"

Heather McDaid Books Editor "The inevitable social burnout after one outing."

Sales & Business

Production

Rachael Hood Art Director, Production Manager "Any anxiety is outweighed by the fact that I'm becoming an Aunty this month! Welcome to the world little one!"

Adam Benmakhlouf Art Editor "We all lose the lockdown comfort of honestly answering "a bit shit" when asking one another how we're doing."

Phoebe Willison Designer "Having to be tidy again incase anyone comes round."

Sandy Park Commercial Director "Having to make myself fit for public consumption five mornings a week."

Tom McCarthy Creative Projects Manager "People."

George Sully Sales and Brand Strategist "The bit where we return to normal life."

Laurie Presswood General Manager "Eye contact. If you meet me on the street, kindly avert your gaze."

THE SKINNY

Editorial Words: Rosamund West

his month, it’s starting to look a lot more like the world is returning to normal. We’ve got even more listings (still only art, but there is the prospect of more stuff happening just over the horizon). A couple of the major August festivals have announced programmes where things actually happen including physical attendance and live events – thank you Edinburgh Art Festival and Edinburgh International Festival. There are music festivals with actual line-ups scheduled to happen (more on that next month); it’s finally warm enough for outdoor hospitality to not be a weird endurance test. It’s all feeling a lot more hopeful than it has for quite some time. Of course, all route maps and tiers and plans come with a string of caveats and contingencies, so we’re trying to manage our own expectations as much as possible. And wondering after so long of sitting in our houses, socially distancing, how comfortable are we with the prospect of normal social interactions? We’ve polled the team about their biggest anxieties around returning to normality. The consensus seems to be mainly around talking to other people. In a normal year, Record Store Day in April offers a first glimpse of spring, with a programme of events meandering across the cities providing a first chance to see people outside after the long hostile months of winter. It’s been pushed back and pushed back, and it is finally here – we take a look at what to expect from this year’s day(s) and talk to some actual record stores about how the last year has been. The spoken word scene has had to adapt to Zoom performance and collaboration – we talk to a few poetry stalwarts to hear what’s changed, and if there’s any going back from the opportunities afforded by the pivot to digital. The easing of restrictions may suggest a return to live performance, but the reality of social distancing regulations means that the theatre sector is still screwed for the foreseeable

future. To use Glasgow’s Tron as an example, with two metre distancing their 230 seat venue can hold between ten and 16 audience members, with five performers allowed on stage. We talk to some of the theatre professionals asking why the rules are skewed to allow hospitality venues to open, while leaving them unable to function. In more positive news, cinemas are open. In a radical move unseen for many months, this month our Film section returns to business as usual and just talks to some people who’ve made good films that are coming out. We talk to Shiva Baby director Emma Seligman, Ben Wheatley introduces new film In the Earth, and Russian director Victor Kossakovsky discusses his new documentary starring a giant pig named Gunda. Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art is also here, finally, postponed from 2020. Its strength lies in shining a light on the myriad artist-run spaces and idiosyncratic projects that Glasgow is home to. We talk to a few of the artists finally presenting their work in person after long months of closure. In the centre of this magazine we have a very special supplement. Glasgow School of Art present a 16-page special on their Graduate Showcase 2021, offering a deep dive into the different disciplines and their respective shining stars. It provides a muchneeded optimistic glimpse into a future of creative problem solving from a cohort of students who seem to have found opportunity in this unprecedented shift in their educational programmes. In the fourth part of our EIF-partnered series platforming emergent artists, we look at community arts organisations and the vital role they play in fostering creativity for individual and public good, as opposed to the art world orthodoxy of ‘creativity for an unregulated commodities market’. The issue concludes with our usual Q&A, this time answered by K Foundation’s Jimmy Cauty, who brings his ESTATE artwork to Scotland this month. It is, in a word, dystopian.

June 2021 — Chat

Cover Artist Nico Utuk

Nico is an Edinburgh-based Nigerian photographer who aims to document people, moments, and his surroundings through the lens of a camera. i: @nico_utuk

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Love Bites

Love Bites: An Ode to Oor Nikki Sturge This month’s columnist explores why exactly they dig Scotland’s First Minister Words: Kenza Marland

June 2021 — Chat

turge… Oor Nikki... Big Nikki Sturge. Nicknames are used to either tease someone or to show them affection (or both!). In Scotland, when it comes to the First Minister, it often seems that the latter is the case. I grew up in London, and then moved to Edinburgh nearly a decade ago. Nicola Sturgeon is a part of why I’m proud to call Scotland home. I don’t think the SNP are some kind of perfect party, or their policies aren’t flawed. But I do reckon that Sturge is both incredibly competent and genuinely cares about the people of Scotland. I like that she is a respected female leader who takes no shit. I like how much she loves reading novels, and I use her Twitter to keep up-to-date with the best in Scottish fiction. I like how she isn’t afraid to call out the misogynistic bullies with whom she is forced to work (including our own Prime Minister). I like how articulate she is. I like that she seems really just quite normal. I like that she called Jayda Fransen a fascist and a racist to her face, and I like that she called out the UK Home Office after the Pollokshields protest. I like her open promotion of diversity, tolerance, immigration and equality. I like that prescriptions are all free in Scotland, and so is university. I like that Sturge leads a country that doesn’t want to leave the EU. And, I like that everyone expecting a baby is sent a big box full of newborn essentials – including a poem written by the mixed-race Scots Makar, Jackie Kay, called Welcome Wee One. In among Westminster’s sea of corruption and xenophobia, what a breath of fresh fucking air.

Crossword Solutions Across 1. STAYCATION 6. ZONE 10. RESUMED 11. ANXIETY 12. WANTON 13. STRICTER 17. LACKADAISICAL 19. BOY MEETS WORLD 22. EXTRUDED 23. JAILER 26. CATCH UP 29. HORIZON 30. MEME 31. IN THE EARTH Down 1. SPRAWL 2. ARSING ABOUT 3. CAMEO 4. TO-DO 5. OVA 7. OWE 8. EEYORE 9. EX NIHILO 14. THIRST 15. TRAILBLAZER 16. ADHERE 18. KOMBUCHA 20. WEBCAM 21. WRENCH 24. AGREE 25. UH-OH 27. TOM 28. PAN

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Heads Up

There’s another artsy month in store, with the longawaited Glasgow International filling the city’s galleries and museums, and many a performing arts festival on screen. Compiled by Anahit Behrooz Photo: Damian Griffiths. Courtesy of Camden Arts Centre

Yuko Mohri

Heads Up

The Pipe Factory, Glasgow, 11-27 Jun Acclaimed Japanese artist Yuko Mohri’s work is defined by almost impossibly delicate kinetics. Incorporating sculpture, installation, and soundscapes, this dreamy exhibition filters the sound coming from three video installations through sensitive microphones that play the vibrations through a self-playing piano, exploring the relationship between artistic subject and object and the very idea of “liveness”.

Buzzcut Festival Online, 3-5 Jun Celebrating the very best of UK performance, Buzzcut Festival has a programme packed full of ongoing shows playing with the possibilities of the digital and the outside world, as well as one-off live performances. Highlights include Celebration Real Life <3, a ritualistic, fantastical exploration of grief and healing, and a marathon livestream on the final day, featuring Jade Blackstock and Mystical Femmes among others. Photo: Alex Gulino

Yuko Mohri, Voluta (2018), Installation view at Camden Arts Centre

Online, 11-27 Jun This unique festival acts as an investigation of the ecological crisis and renewal ideas of social, cultural and political transformation. Started in Glasgow in 2015 and now with sister festivals in New York, Tokyo and Bologna, the sixth edition of Unfix features immersive performances and experimental short films exploring the embodied, personal nature of our environmental crisis. Festival passes are available on a sliding scale.

Photo: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

Photo: Jonathan Herman

Unfix Festival

Guerilla Girls portrait Frida Kahlo and Zubeida Agha

Reuben Joseph, Things My White Friends Say

Photo: Piotr Nykowski

Image: Courtesy of Iman Tajik

Buzzcut Festival, Jade Blackstock

Sam Durant, ‘Caracas, 2004’, (2018)

Guerilla Girls: The Male Gaze

June 2021 — Chat

DCA: Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, 18 Jun-18 Jul For the first time ever, visual arts festival Art Night is moving beyond London and taking to public venues across the UK. Central to this year’s programme is a series of specially commissioned billboards by the acclaimed and subversive collective Guerilla Girls, whose new work The Male Gaze explores toxic masculinity through art history, with one of these billboards due to be unveiled in Dundee in association with DCA – location TBC.

Sam Durant: Iconoclasm The Common Guild, Glasgow, until 11 Jul A timely and vital collection, Sam Durant’s Iconoclasm is a series of 14 drawings depicting the moment in which public monuments and statues are destroyed and deconstructed. Taking place over 14 large-scale billboards and street posters across Glasgow, the exhibition’s outdoor location perfectly speaks to Durant’s interrogation of public space, and who has ownership and responsibility over the histories we choose to memorialise.

Things My White Friends Say Tron Theatre, Online, 1-12 Jun

Unfix Festival Atsushi

Written by Glaswegian playwright Joe McCann and directed by Scottish dramaturg Raman Mundair, Things My White Friends Say is an uncompromising piece of experimental digital theatre, drawing on the global Black Lives Matter movement to confront the realities of racism in Scotland through a unique blurring of reality and fiction.

Martine Syms: S1:E4 Tramway, Glasgow, 11 Jun-26 Jul Photo: Tyler Adams

Photo: Paul Chappells

V&A Dundee, Dundee, until 21 Nov Image: 7N Architecture

Image: Courtesy of Pitlochry Festival Theatre

What if...?/Scotland

Painted People, Nicolas Karimi

Adventures with the Painted People Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Pitlochry, 10 Jun-4 Jul, various times

Refugee Festival

Lynne Russell, Annan

Refugee Festival Scotland Various locations, 14-20 Jun

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Martine Syms, Untitled (2019)

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Dardishi Festival Online, 18-27 Jun Scotland’s only festival dedicated to Arab and North African women and non-binary people’s cultural lives, this year’s Dardishi Festival is taking full advantage of the digital to expand from a weekend-long affair to nine days full of workshops, screenings, and talks celebrating radical modes of community. Highlights include a workshop on feminist voices from the Middle East by Ebtihal Mahadeen and a screening of Tania Kamal-Eldin’s Hollywood Harems.

Edinburgh Short Film Festival Summerhall, Edinburgh, 4-6 Jun The postponed 2020 edition of Edinburgh Short Film Festival is finally coming to screens near you (if you live near Summerhall, that is). Bringing together an astounding programme of shorts, including Academy Award and Palme d’Or nominees and SXSW and BAFTA winners, this is a festival that celebrates the power of cinema even at its shortest.

Mary Herbert + James Owens: Bloodroot Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, 7-27 Jun Heads Up

Photo: Courtesy of Martin Monk

Mary Herbert, Like Milk Was The Flower (2021)

Photo: Musab Sahnon

Photo: Laurie Cuffe

Rooted in the healing properties of plants and their cultural significance as symbols of renewal, this exhibition brings together Mary Herbert’s ethereal, witchy pastel drawings and James Owens’ striking folkloric paintings to explore how ideas of healing, collectivity, and re-emergence can be imagined both through the human and non-human.

'Favoriten' (Favourites) directed by Martin Monk, 2018

Sradagan na Sràide / Street Sparks CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts, Online, 5 Jun, 8pm

Dardishi Mainstreaming Subaltern Writing - Sabah Sanhouri

Sradagan na Sràide / Street Sparks - Maryhill RemJet by Somhairle MacDonald, March 2021

Image: courtesy of artist

Sekai Machache + Thulani Rachia: These stories…

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, 11 Jun-5 Sep

Photo: Alex Wolfe

Jonathan Owen Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until 17 July

Jonathan Owen, Untitled sculpture (2019)

Glasgow School of Art 2021 Graduate Showcase Online, 9-20 Jun Image: Tara Drummie

Image: Courtesy of artist and Ingleby Gallery

Image: Courtesy of the festival

Online, 18-20 Jun

Sekai Machache, Invocation (2017)

Incorporating a range of media, from tapestry and metal to earth and video installation, Canadia artist Nep Sidhu’s An Immeasurable Melody, Medicine for a Nightmare is a study in kinship and interdependence. His bold, vibrant pieces draw on Sikh metaphysics and mythic histories to explore the relationships between memory, memorial, and the divine across space and time.

Ana Mazzei, Run Rabbit Run, (2018)

Ana Mazzei: Drama O’Rama: Other Scenes The Pipe Factory, Glasgow, 11-27 Jun

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Tara Drummie, Communication Design

June 2021 — Chat

This twinned pair of solo exhibitions – The Divine Sky by Sekai Machache and Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo by Thulani Rachia – draw on ideas of simultaneity, plurality, and fragmentation, employing photography and installation to speak to both the collective and disparate experiences of people from the African continent and its diaspora.

Glasgow Jazz Festival

Sradagan na Sràide / Street Sparks - Maryhill RemJet by Somhairle MacDonald, March 2021

Nep Sidhu: An Immeasurable Melody, Medicine for a Nightmare

Studio Pavilion at House for an Art Lover, Glasgow, 11-27 Jun

Liam Shortall, Glasgow Jazz Festival

Photo: Laurie Cuffe

A collaboration between singer/songwriter Pedro Cameron (aka Man of the Minch) and poet Peter Mackay, this collection of songs were commissioned by Gaelic cultural platform Ceòl is Craic to celebrate and reflect on contemporary Gaelic life in Scotland’s urban environments. Combining Cameron’s spacey folk pop with Mackay’s signature lyricism, this performance features some of the best of Scotland’s indie music scene.

May 2021

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5 Meet the Team — 6 Editorial — 7 Love Bites — 8 Heads Up 12 Crossword — 45 Intersections — 56 Local Heroes — 60 Albums 62 Film & TV — 64 Books — 65 Food & Drink — 66 Comedy — 67 Listings 70 The Skinny On… Jimmy Cauty

55 Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) Jonny Mowat; Viki Mladenovski; In The Earth; Andrew Sim; Shiva Baby; Gunda; Yeonsu Ju; Rae-Yen Song; Alison Johnston; Steven McLaren; Mark Agacan; James Deacon

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16 With Record Store Day 2021 just around the corner, we chat to some shop owners about how their past year has been. 20 What has changed in the world of spoken word, how do we return to normal – and should we? 23 Ben Wheatley on his new film In the Earth. 24 As Glasgow International returns, we look at some highlights including Mathew Parkin, Aman Sandhu, Arjuna Neuman and Andrew Sim. 26 Emma Seligman on chaotic black comedy Shiva Baby. 28 Russian director Victor Kossakovsky on his new documentary starring a giant pig named Gunda. 29-44 A very special pull-outand-keep supplement celebrating Glasgow School of Art’s Graduate Showcase 2021 48 A Showcase of work by Glasgow-based artist Rae-Yen Song. 50 The latest piece in our series celebrating emergent writers with Edinburgh International Festival looks at the important role community arts organisations and programmes play. 53 Ahead of releasing her debut album via her own record label, DJ and producer Rebecca Vasmant gives us a track-by-track rundown of With Love, From Glasgow. 55 British photographer and artist Vinca Petersen and Dundee-based artist Scott Duncan discuss creating, collaborating and clubbing. 57 Lockdown star Ania Magliano on her new podcast, work anxiety as a form of material, and her hopes for the future of live comedy. On the website... Watch our collection of short films by Scottish East and South East Asian creatives; get details of HANG, Scotland’s first hip-hop and grime networking event; more book and film reviews

June 2021 — Contents

Features

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Games 1

Across

9 10

16 17

19 20

Down

1. A holiday at home (10) 6. Area (4) 10. Continued (after a pause) (7) 11. Unease – nervousness (7) 12. Wilful – shameless (6) 13. More exacting (8) 17. Without enthusiasm – I'll ask a cicada (anag) (13) 19. 90s American sitcom – Mr. Bloody Sweet (anag) (3,5,5) 22. Forced out – expelled (8) 23. Prison warden (6) 26. Reconnect (5,2) 29. Line in the distance separating sky from earth (7) 30. Piece of dank internet content (4) 31. Ben Wheatley's new horror film (see p23) about a virus taking over the world LOL (2,3,5)

1. Stretch out (6) 2. Faffing around (6,5) 3. Pay celebrities to make personalised video messages (5) 4. Commotion – type of list (2-2) 5. Eggs (3) 7. Be indebted (3) 8. Sad donkey (6) 9. From nothing (Latin) – I nix hole (anag) (2,6) 14. Hunger, but for drinks (6) 15. Trendsetter (11) 16. Stick (to) (6) 18. Fermented tea drink (8) 20. Video device for your computer (6) 21. Sudden pull – sadness about leaving (6) 24. Concur (5) 25. Expression of alarm (2-2) 27. The Skinny's Creative Projects Manager (find him on p5!) (3) 28. Peter ___, flying manchild (3)

25 26

Compiled by George Sully

Turn to page 7 for the solutions

June 2021 — Chat

Can you find these words in this puzzle?

AMAN SANDHU ANDREW SIM ANXIETY ARJUNA NEUMAN AVALANCHES BEN WHEATLEY COMMUNITY DARDISHI FESTIVAL DEGREE SHOW EMMA SELIGMAN ESTATE FREEDOM FRIENDSHIP GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART GUNDA

HOME COOKING KLF MATTHEW PARKIN MONORAIL NEU REEKIE NICOLA STURGEON PARKS AND RECREATION RAE-YEN SONG RECORD STORE DAY SHIVA BABY SONNET YOUTH VOXBOX WHALE ZINES

They could be horizontal, vertical or diagonal, forwards or backwards

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May 2021

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Back to life Photo: Nico Utuk

he prospect of freedom of movement returning seems too good to be true. Can we trust it? After so many months of fearful conditioning, we’re all struggling to comprehend a world of gigs and travel and pints with friends. Also the tier system remains complex and ever-changing, so it’s difficult to know what is currently happening without going outside and checking for ourselves. Record Store Day usually marks the beginning of spring, the first event involving outdoor mingling in its before-times April slot. This year it’s been pushed to June so it can, eh, actually happen, and once again heralds the return of musicadjacent socialising. — 15 —

The spoken word scene has adapted to digital. What does a return to live look like? We invite wild speculation from some of our favourite collectives. Under the current social distancing guidelines, theatre basically can’t happen. We hear from some of those loudly questioning why there’s one rule for hospitality and another for the performing arts. Cinemas are already open, so we do this comfortingly normal thing where we interview some people about their films and then you can go and see them on the big screen. And Glasgow International festival of visual art lands in the endlessly locked-down city with a programme of exhibitions you can actually go to and look at and feel and think things.

Music

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A Record Year

With record shops open once again and Record Store Day 2021 just around the corner, we chat to some shop owners about how their past year has been and get some of their top RSD recommendations Interview: Tony Inglis Illustrations: Jonny Mowat

“B

June 2021 – Feature

igger than Christmas” – so goes the phrase uttered by George Macdonald, who runs Edinburgh record store Underground Solu’shn, describing Record Store Day (RSD), the annual dedicated shopping holiday for vinyl obsessives and music enthusiasts. Over a year into a pandemic that has seen record shops shuttered for in-person custom for extended periods of time, 2021’s two designated Saturdays for the event (12 Jun and 17 Jul), and the hundreds of special releases that come with them, are potentially bigger than any Christmas ever; they could be life-saving for small – often one-person-operated – businesses that have seen their very survival questioned by the impact of coronavirus lockdowns.

“The premise of the day is to keep shops open, and that is one of the things that it has managed to do very successfully,” continues Macdonald. “There’s probably not many [record] shops in the UK that would have survived the last five years without Record Store Day.” That this instalment falls just as the country gradually moves out of this uncertain period and into a different – though still quite uncertain – one, the day is even more vital. The Skinny spoke to some participating record stores in Scotland, and the good news for those who adore these places is they are on their feet and approaching the day with enthusiasm and anticipation, despite capacity and distancing measures restricting the extent of what they can showcase. In Dundee, from the ashes comes something fresh, with the newly opened Thirteen Records hoping to fill the gap left by the dearly departed Groucho’s. And indeed, vinyl record sales seem to be in rude health – according to the British Phonographic Industry, 2020 was one of the best years for vinyl purchasing in decades. “There’s a complete vinyl boom going on just now,” says Stephen McRobbie, co-owner of Glasgow institution

“There’s probably not many record shops in the UK that would have survived the last five years without Record Store Day” George Macdonald, Underground Solu’shn — 16 —

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June 2021 – Feature

traffic” is the norm for a VoxBox RSD event, Yeats enthuses. “The sun has always shone. Last year, after many years of chasing, the stars aligned and we were excited to finally have shop favourite Siobhan Wilson on the bill. And the pandemic scuppered the event before it could be announced.” The event usually distils all that community-building and cultural sharing into a single day, with long queues, packed crowds and live performances. Even if it will be a nice earner, the reality this year, as it was last, is quite different for obvious reasons, and it highlights what a loss it has been to the collective consciousness that record stores have been unable to exist as physical spaces, even as they’ve continued to trade. “There’s a whole 25 years of history of people coming in the shop, we’ve probably served over a million people,” says Underground Solu’shn’s Macdonald. “A lot of those people may have met each other here, and formed very good connections and strong positive experiences almost randomly. There’s a positivity that comes out of people getting to hang out in a place that shares music, history, experience, knowledge, technical information, supporting all the things that people need to encourage their musical journey. You’ve got this place where the more time you spend there, the more you can get out of it.” While Record Store Day isn’t perfect – store owners variously commented on the lack of representation in the release list, the corporate PR nature that can sometimes befall it, and the issue of often buying in event release stock that doesn’t match the usual kind of music found on a normal day – it’s difficult to find fault when something so specialised is so necessary at this very moment. “It’s still incredibly important,” says Yeats. “The releases will all be special to someone. I always say you could have a queue of 500 people all wanting something different. No one is expected to like them all. I love Record Store Day to bits.”

Music

Monorail, “and all the pressing plants are over capacity, so it’s taking longer and longer to turn records around.” Perhaps this is because consumers have spent money on music that may have gone to pints or holidays; or because the soul-crushing nature of lockdown has meant mining joy in the places you could still find it (guilty!); or because the dedicated visitors to record stores felt an obligation to support them through a difficult time (though as more than one shop owner opined, bigger companies that had significant resources for back end, online services sucked up most of the trade, meaning not all of this boost can be attributed to goodwill custom going to the independent outlets that really needed it). Stores being closed has meant a need to be nimble online (which is acknowledged by RSD organisers, as the unique list of releases will be available to sell on store websites after the event), not only to encourage continued sales, but to keep up a dialogue with regulars and get the attention of new customers. “Our sales have actually been pretty good through lockdown, quite steady, probably a lot better than we anticipated – our online side has grown massively and, in some respects, that’s been really positive,” says McRobbie. “It’s forced us to look at what we were doing [before] lockdown. We always saw online as a secondary activity. From the start of Monorail, being of the music community in Glasgow, and of the world really, was a big part of what we wanted to be. And what we do on social media and with our mailouts is we try to represent ourselves in the same way. I think we’re quite a friendly shop to come to, I hope, so we try to be informative because that’s the bottom line, but we try to have a lightness of touch.” Macdonald adds: “We’re very appreciative of all the local people, regulars, and people further afield who don’t have a record shop near them, who ordered online and pretty much kept us alive. It hasn’t always been pretty, but we’re trying to take positives out of what we have done and try to improve what we’re doing. We’re very lucky to have something like Record Store Day to help us bounce back, and it’s been amazing to get the shop open again recently – we’ve been really busy.” But being unable to allow large swathes of people into stores and venues, there’s a lack of the fanfare and trimmings that come alongside the products that will be sold. “I think it becomes more simply transactional in a way,” says McRobbie about this year’s event. And while that’s not to be sniffed at considering the circumstances, RSD is about more than just generating business. Record stores are hubs of conversation and discovery and their absence from life throughout the pandemic has as much of an impact on culture as it does the economy. “For me, it’s less about the exclusive records and more about the community spirit and the promotion of the bands and labels we work with through the year,” says Darren Yeats, owner of Edinburgh’s VoxBox, which celebrated its tenth anniversary in May and is known for its Record Store Day street party in the heart of the city. “I don’t think this year, that I can put on an event that would make me happy or would be appropriate with the current restrictions.” Hosting “the wee and the wonderful in tiny venues down the street and stopping the

June 2021

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Shop Recommendations Mixed Up Records

18 Otago Lane, Glasgow KMD – Mr. Hood: 30th Anniversary Edition “It’s great when they reissue albums that are hard to get and long out of print on vinyl. This is a hip-hop classic and a favourite – been a long time since we’ve had this in the shop, even secondhand.”

520 Victoria Road, Glasgow Alkaline Trio – From Here to Infirmary “Ticks all the right nostalgia boxes, being a 20thanniversary reissue, and the song Private Eye is a particular favourite.” Suzanne Ciani – Xenon “Pretty excited about this first-ever release of the electronic composer and legend’s groundbreaking musical effects for [pinball machine game] Xenon, in their isolated form. Beautifully presented in blue vinyl in a die-cut 7” sleeve.” The Replacements – The Pleasure’s All Yours: The Pleased to Meet Me Outtakes & Alternates “This was recorded in the same studio as their heroes Big Star (as alluded to in their name-checking Alex Chilton). This looks to be an opportunity to see how the classic cult band formed one of their fan favourites.” Tears for Fears – Live at Massey Hall “Although they never seemed like a fashionable band to like growing up in the 80s, Songs from the Big Chair was such a well-crafted pop record, and this seems like a perfect opportunity to hear their classic songs performed in all their pomp from live shows captured in Canada back in 1985.”

12 Kings Court, Glasgow Ariana Grande – k bye for now (swt live) “God IS a woman, and her name is Ariana. Probably this year’s hottest release, a live album from one of the best chart-dominating singers to be doing it. The tracklist reads like a Now That’s What I Call Music 2021 and no tears left to cry is probably one of the greatest pop songs in modern memory.” Molly Nilsson – The Travels “Every Molly Nilsson record is magical and moving and life-affirming. She’s Berlin-Stockholm but maybe a little Glasgow too, an emblem of the EU type of world we need to be back in. The Travels is a perfect title, a perfect record – originally released in 2013, this time around on green vinyl.”

100 Marchmont Crescent, Edinburgh Fontaines D.C. – Live at Kilmainham Gaol “Over the past few years, it’s been refreshing to see a revival of band music – Fontaines D.C. are at the centre of that. It’s rare to see a group appeal to such a wide range of audiences... Fontaines represent a reason to be optimistic for the future of band music. I’m excited to see what the future brings for them.”

Underground Solu’shn

VoxBox

Le Freak Records

159 Perth Road, Dundee Timebox – Beggin’ b/w Girl Don’t Make Me Wait “Although the Frankie Valli/Four Seasons original is an absolute doozy, there’s something about Timebox’s 1968 take – it’s a bit more soulful, a bit more unpolished and they’ve got better barnets.”

Thirteen Records

13 Union Street, Dundee Lupe Fiasco – Food & Liquor I & II “Lupe’s first Food & Liquor album was the very first CD I [Lee from the shop] ever bought with my own money so it always holds a special wee place in my heart. Really excited to see this package coming out. Kick, Push is still one of the greatest skateboard hip-hop songs ever!”

Assai Records

33 Union Street, Dundee; 1 Grindlay Street, Edinburgh Bernard Butler – People Move On “The Suede guitarist’s debut solo album originally on Creation Records, it features the incredible single Stay.” Donny Hathaway – Live “One of my favourite live albums of all time, with stunning versions of What’s Going On and You’ve Got a Friend.” — 19 —

21 St Stephen Street, Edinburgh Desmond Dekker – King of Ska (The Ska Singles Collection) “Ten impossibly rare singles in a box set.” Ike & Tina Turner – Bold Soul Sister / Somebody (Somewhere) Needs You “Amazing tracks. Ike’s behaviour tarnished the legacy but a lot of folk still haven’t heard how great they were.” The Stooges – Whiskey a Go-Go “My son is named after Iggy Pop. I think he’s a great role model. I’ll be sourcing a copy of this. Hope the sound quality is okay.” Warren Zevon – Preludes “An artist I really admire. I was chuffed to see this on the list as I missed the CD release all those years ago. A double album of unreleased songs and rarities. I almost shed a happy tear.” The Brian Jonestown Massacre/The Telescopes – Before I Forget/Come Down My Love “I’ve developed an unhealthy obsession with The BJM over lockdown. I have pretty much all the albums now. So I need this release too. I wish Anton would stop releasing stuff so I can catch up. Then I think... No! Never change.”

Record Store Day takes place at participating record shops on 12 Jun and 17 Jul; more info can be found at recordstoreday.co.uk For more RSD picks from the above record shops head to theskinny.co.uk/music

June 2021 – Feature

Monorail

Ilium

9 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh Art of Noise – Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise? / Who’s Afraid of Goodbye? “This was probably one of the first things that I bought as a kid. I would have been 12 when I got the cassette. It got me into music production, sampling, synthesizers. It’s a fantastically cheerful record, which we could all do with at this point.”

Love Music

34 Dundas Street, Glasgow “It’s the classic rock artists that are exciting the old rockers at Love Music this year. The Madness B-Sides album looks interesting, and I’ll definitely be replacing my 50-year-old copy of The Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks with a shiny new 180-gram yellow vinyl version. There are two Steely Dan albums that haven’t been on vinyl before, and the Joe Strummer picture disc won’t last long. The Lathums’ live album and the Haim 7” single should both do well too.”

Garbage – No Gods No Masters “The return of Garbage is always exciting and to have a RSD edition is really cool!” The Thrills – So Much for the City “A favourite since it was released in 2003 with the Big Sur single one of the songs of the decade for me. Never seen it on vinyl and I’m sure many of our customers are looking forward to picking this up.” Music

Some Great Reward

Jonathan Richman – Having a Party with Jonathan Richman “For years most of his records were out of print so it’s great rejoicing when one comes back in. Richman is an optimist, a believer, a true gem. This period of his music is groovy, light on its feet, lyrically sassy and in the moment. He’s an original, immediately recognisable in all that he does.” Bobbie Gentry – Windows of the World “Everything that Bobbie Gentry ever sung is worth listening to. She straddles country, soul and pop – makes it her thing whatever she does. This is an abandoned album from around the time of the great Hushabye Mountain which is here in two unreleased versions. Can’t wait to hear this one.” Mogwai – ZeroZeroZero OST “This is like a 2021 lap of honour from a group that keeps getting better and better. It’s the unreleased soundtrack to an eight-part crime series. Heavy hitters, you bet. On double white vinyl.”

THE SKINNY

The New Normal As we venture ever more carefully out into the world with the easing of restrictions, it feels the perfect time to check in with Scotland’s spoken word scene: what has changed, how do we return to normal – and should we?

June 2021 — Feature

Books

Words: Heather McDaid Illustration: Viki Mladenovski

ack to normal. It’s a phrase we’re hearing with increasing regularity, as if one day a switch will be flipped and we’ll jump right back where we were over a year ago. For programmers and performers, and events in general though, the landscape has shifted vastly, sometimes irreparably; on the precipice of entering back out into the world, it feels the perfect time to check in across Scotland’s spoken word scene and see: What has been normal? What could it now be? “Like many in our quirky gang, the big still caused us to have to rejig every element of a full year’s event programme,” notes Neu! Reekie!’s Michael Pedersen. “But nowt is truly lost in this game right, there’s always resurfacings and reincarnations? Here’s hoping.” It was a similar case for Sonnet Youth. “It happened so fast we didn’t have time to get upset or freak out,” explains co-founder Cat Hepburn. “We just put our heads together and focused on how we could still reach our audiences and keep artists working.” There was a chaotic, fun energy to their work; and it’s something that was picked up from the performer side too. “At first, it was very daunting,” acknowledges poet and performer Nadine Aisha Jassat. “But I also felt a huge energy from organisers and artists alike to keep moving, and keep performing.” Poetry at Inn Deep was one of the first events to pull the plug when the pandemic struck, notes host Sam Small, but they didn’t feel the live atmosphere could be captured with full justice, instead focusing on their own publisher SpecBooks, where they utilised Zoom for launches. Change wasn’t just in the physical vs digital realm. “It was also what we needed from performance, or even that we needed it,” continues Jassat. “In a time of change, fear, grief and huge uncertainty, performers were able to offer something to their audiences as small comforts or distractions.” Across the board, the industry went “giddy into the digital ballrooms” – Neu! Reekie! experimented widely online, including having to replace their planned 10th birthday extravaganza at Central Hall with Neu! Reekie! #TV1, a live stream including Garbage’s Shirley Manson and Nova Scotia the Truth. Challenges were manifold, whether for performers to ‘be on’ while they’re also overwhelmed humans in a pandemic, or the vulnerability of inviting people into your home rather than the “protective cloak of a stage”, trying to set boundaries, or being ‘Zoom bombed’. Some found a great opportunity in Zoom workshops and performance, others found it more difficult to engage with people as easily.

While the driving forces have unquestionably been bad, not all experience has been, and as we step ever more carefully back into the world, it’s worth remembering the highs: reach and accessibility. “When we start our night back up, we’ll definitely be keeping an online element,” notes Small. “Live streaming events and online workshops can work hand-in-hand with IRL events.” “I am now a Zoom workshop queen!” says Jassat. “There have been so many positives, including being able to work with international poets at the drop of a hat/Zoom link, being able to reach a variety of audiences so easily. Online events can be so much more accessible, and have helped bring us closer together in a safe way.” Without the barrier of travel costs, Sonnet Youth were able to invite guests from further afield, a recurring positive; the chat section became a new take on applause, allowing for discussions to open up. “It unified us together in a time that felt quite unknown and scary sometimes,” says Hepburn. We have ultimately been waiting for the moment where we can return to normality, but – the real question is – should we? The lost year is naturally shrouded in difficulty and struggle, but from there, everyone who has had to power on has found something new. The international accessibility of streaming digitally is key for Neu! Reekie! and something they’re hoping to include in all new projects; accessibility is recurring – events have opened up like never before, and none plan to close that off. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of our favourite venues fold under the lack of support from the government,” Hepburn acknowledges, “so we don’t know what the live arts landscape will look like when things reopen. We are hopeful that regular nights and gigs will be reintroduced, and know that by its very nature, poetry will always find a way to get heard. We’re seeing some fantastic emerging voices who are digitally savvy and can work both online and on a real stage, — 20 —

so we’re looking forward to seeing what the new wave of spoken word artists come up with.” “I would love to see spoken word able to thrive in digital and in-person spaces where audiences and performers can connect, and words and minds and emotions can thrive and inspire,” concludes Jassat. “I hope that for us as spoken word performers, for whom voice is so key and connecting to our voices and our audiences especially, that we can keep connecting to ourselves, to community, to creativity, and to the world in the next steps as we go forward! “And hopefully with lots of funding, too!” Listen to the SpecBooks poetry podcast: specbooks.net/podcast Visit Neu! Reekie!'s website: neureekie.scot Subscribe to Sonnet Youth's Patreon: patreon.com/sonnetyouth Upcoming events on 10 & 24 Jun, 8 Jul, all 8pm

THE SKINNY

Comedy

May 2021 — Review

— 21 —

THE SKINNY

What’s Next for Theatres? Theatre

Pubs, restaurants, gyms and indoor leisure centres have all opened up for business again this summer. It is essential that theatres, bound by strict social distancing stipulations, don’t get left behind Words: Eliza Gearty

June 2021 — Feature

ust a few short months ago, I contributed an optimistic piece for The Skinny’s March issue titled Why Theatre Will Recover from COVID-19. Recounting the various times in history when theatres in the UK had struggled to survive, I put a positive spin on the 15-month blackout the industry has been experiencing. Look at all the challenges we’ve overcome in the past, I pointed out. Despite the obstacles pitted throughout our history, Scotland has maintained a theatre and performing arts scene that is unrivalled anywhere else in the world. But as other industries prepare for a summer that will hopefully be “something much more like normality”, as Nicola Sturgeon put it, theatres in Scotland have been dealt another blow. Andy Arnold, the Artistic Director of Glasgow’s Tron Theatre, identified the issues in a statement that was released by the Tron at the end of April: “[In terms of reopening]... performing arts venues, theatres and concert halls are at the end of the line, and we accept that,” he stated. “The government guidelines say that at Level Two, performing arts venues can open with a maximum capacity of 100 people and that at Level Zero – anticipated by summer – our capacities can stretch to 300. This is excellent – our artists and audiences have been waiting a long time. Only there is a major catch. The stipulations venues must apply are more severe than ever before.” The strict requirements theatres will be expected to adhere to include a 2.5 metre distance between ticket holders and a 2.6 metre distance between performers. Putting aside the creative implications of these guidelines, such a model will make it economically unfeasible for many venues to reopen. According to Arnold, the stipulations would mean the Tron’s “230 seat auditorium would only be able to accommodate ten ticket holders”. The Federation of Scottish Theatre and 11 of Scotland’s leading performing arts venues, including the Tron, have called on the Scottish government to reconsider. In a recent survey conducted by the Federation, 96% of members responded that it is not economically viable for them to reopen while that level of social distancing is required. In his statement, Andy Arnold points out a contradiction in Scotland’s recovery plan – the fact that businesses in the hospitality industry are required to apply a one metre distance between customers. As such, he says, a pre-drink before a show could see eight friends “facing and talking to each other, maskless and a metre apart” before heading into a “large and fully ventilated auditorium” to sit “five seats apart with masks on, all facing the same direction” with a handful of others. If the stipulations are being implemented in the name of safety, then why are the distancing guidelines more extreme for theatres than they are for bars? The double standard here highlights a bigger issue. We must begin to regard spaces where we can collectively

experience art as just as essential to our well-being as leisure facilities, pubs, cafes and restaurants. As the playwright Peter Arnott argued in his ‘Arts Manifesto’ for Bella Caledonia in March – we need to fight for “the consensus that arts activity is a national ‘good’, that sits alongside health and education as elements of what we are beginning to call ‘well-being’.” By proffering different social distancing guidelines for the hospitality sector and our performing art venues, the Scottish government is essentially saying that it’s more worthwhile to take a public health risk in the pursuit of collective ‘well-being’ in our boozers and eateries than in the places where we experience art. It may well be true that we should not be gathering in indoor spaces without a two metre distance between us anytime soon. But in that case, that stipulation should be extended across all sectors – and theatres unable to open due to it should be able to access financial support.

“We must begin to regard spaces where we can collectively experience art as just as essential to our well-being as leisure facilities, pubs, cafes and restaurants” I would go one step further and argue that relief funds from the government until it is safe for theatres to reopen at a higher capacity wouldn’t be going far enough. We are undoubtedly entering a difficult period of slow and arduous ‘recovery’ – it could be years before we see the kind of audiences that flooded into theatres pre-pandemic return. Some of the greatest theatrical institutions we have were created following the invention of the Scottish and English Arts councils, which were in turn established after the devastating impact of World War Two. After that global crisis decimated cultural life here, the government saw investing in the arts as a necessary step towards rebuilding it. Thanks to that radical but sensible decision – to see art as an essential public utility, like health, education and transport – we now have the Edinburgh International Festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre of Scotland. Today, the government must take a similarly progressive action if we truly want to see creativity in Scotland not just survive, but thrive.

— 22 —

THE SKINNY

Wood Shock Ben Wheatley is so prolific, it’s no surprise he’s managed to write and shoot a film during the COVID pandemic. He fills us in on the production of In the Earth ahead of its UK release Interview: Josh Slater-Williams Film

“W

“Woods are so primal. It’s a very straightforward route to scaring people” Ben Wheatley is one of the few to be shot and entirely conceived within the pandemic. “For the budget that we had,” says Wheatley, “quite a proportion of that went into the safety stuff, which was a bit alarming. But absolutely necessary.” The film’s American distributor, Neon, provided the majority of that budget, having been in talks with Wheatley and his company Rook Films. “You write something and then it’s a modest enough budget that you know you can put it into production,” he says of penning the film last spring. “I’ve been doing this thing of a larger film and then a smaller film, back and forth, over the last ten years. So, it fits into that A Field in England, [Happy New Year,] Colin Burstead kind of world, which is reacting to the moment. “I like that kind of cinema,” he continues. “It’s very rare to be able to get something out as fast as we have done, because usually, from writing it to – if you’ve got the finance – distributing it is a good couple of years. But from writing this to — 23 —

In the Earth is released on 18 Jun by Universal

June 2021 — Feature

e were the first people back and – whether it’s true or not – we really felt like the eyes of production were on us across the board.” Writer-director Ben Wheatley is speaking to The Skinny over Zoom about In the Earth, the horror feature he wrote during the first few weeks of the COVID pandemic and shot with a small crew over 15 days in the early summer, as the UK came out of its initial lockdown period. While Hollywood blockbusters with hired studio spaces – such as Jurassic World: Dominion – were able to resume shooting in the UK last summer after they had to hit pause, In the Earth was among the very first low budget productions to get going in late June 2020. And being first off the blocks had its pressures. “If we ballsed it up,” says Wheatley, “A, it would have been really embarrassing. B, it would have been dangerous. C, it might have endangered how insurance would look at other productions going forward. So, we took it super seriously. We were filming in the woods with full PPE and masks, and COVID czars. It was temperature checks every morning and during the day, and then tests every other day. And nothing happened. No one got sick and no one had to be isolated, so it was good.” Most of the other films shot last summer were projects that had already been in production before COVID-19 caused a shutdown. In the Earth

being in a screen with audiences, it’s under a year, so it’s been quick. And that way you can actually write about the experiences that you’re having, rather than most cinema, which is so far behind the ball it has to be almost historical to make it make sense.” If it seems like we’ve been deliberately vague about what In the Earth is actually about, be assured there’s a good reason. A hybrid of folk- and eco-horror (Alex Garland’s Annihilation would be an example of the latter), Wheatley’s return to explicitly scary territory thrives on hallucinogenic detours and unpredictability. We tell Wheatley the film reminds us of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass stories, alongside John Carpenter’s Kneale-influenced Prince of Darkness. He tells us that 1970s Doctor Who was a reference point; presumably a far gorier version of Doctor Who than most saw. What’s worth knowing beforehand is that In the Earth features only six credited actors, including Joel Fry, Ellora Torchia, Reece Shearsmith and Hayley Squires. It’s set during an unspecified pandemic, where scientists are seeking to cure a catastrophic virus. There’s a curiously fertile forest outside Bristol where studies are being performed. It’s there that one scientist (Fry) and a park scout (Torchia) venture to find the site of the former’s old colleague (Squires). Things quickly get weird(er). The outdoor locations proved beneficial to the production for their relative safety when it comes to transmission rates, but also for Wheatley to explore the freaky potential of the territory: “A lot of the things I think about and dwell on are about the problem with modernity, and where we think we are in this moment. I feel that we’re more than just the people we are at this point, we’re all the people we’ve ever been. I think about that a lot. And it’s to do with the context of your own history and the context of the country’s or the world’s history. “The woods themselves are so primal,” he continues. “And it’s a very straightforward route to scaring people. Even now, if you went wandering off stupidly and don’t respect it, you can get into trouble, even in Britain where the woods are reasonably small. You can go wrong quite quickly. It’s a legitimate fear. I’m very unlikely to be attacked by a vampire or zombie, but I could probably get myself into quite a dangerous situation in a wood if I wasn’t careful.”

THE SKINNY

One for Glasgow Glasgow International is back after a year's hiatus. With an exciting programme of new exhibitions, some of the organisers and artists give a sense of what the festival will bring to audiences through this month

Art

Interview: Adam Benmakhlouf

June 2021 — Feature

Image: courtesy of artist Andrew Sim, portrait of a werewolf without hair (2021)

titled In The House of My Father. Through this work, Sergeant suggests, Rodney describes “the fragility of what home or what belonging might mean.” “The symbol of the house comes up repeatedly in his practice drawn onto x-ray sheets, a material he also used in his drawings in the Britannia Hospital series,” Sergeant continues. “He used these one metre by one-metre x-ray sheets, interested in what they could imply in terms of seeing beneath the surface of what was really happening, considering what lies beneath British society.” For the presentation at Celine, Sergeant was drawn to works in which Rodney himself talks aloud. “It was one part of the work 3 Songs on Pain Light & Time that surprised me the most, to hear his voice after he’s been Rosie's Disobedient Press, Teneu, Digital collaged image featuring found image of St Thaney, icons of Mull Monastery gone for such a long time.” Along with two other pieces, Autoicon and Genome Chronicles, Sergeant describes the work in this exhibition as Rodney seeking to self-archive, as he realised “the limited time he had because of his illness, and that he needed to memorialise some of his works.” In this regard, Sergeant also credits the exceptional efforts of the Donald Rodney Estate in ensuring the survival of Rodney’s work. As another challenge to generalising narratives of immigrant experiences, Aman Sandhu’s The Magic Roundabout revolves around a group of Punjabi males in Swindon, whom Sandhu describes as engaging in “nefarious activities, bootleggers [that] have been in and out of prison.” He sees in these figures a disruption of the “linear colonial framing of the South Asian migrant, who works on the grid to raise their children.” For his digital presentation, Sandhu shows a video of the hectic roundabout system in Swindon, which has one central roundabout with five smaller ones around it. “It’s a frightening road system and I remember my fear as a kid going into it,” he says. The video is accompanied by new writing that in its form is similarly as looping and nauseating as the footage itself. He’ll be showing this alongside a new work by artist Andrew Black in their two-person show, The Magic Roundabout and The Naked Man. Without his co-exhibitor, Sandhu says his new work would not exist, emerging from their years of thinking together as friends. Just as Sandu and Black’s show has changed in its form during the intervening time between the original and revised dates of GI, over the last few months, Mathew Wayne Parkin also set about reconfiguring their contribution to the festival. From

— 24 —

Image: courtesy of Rosie's Disobedient Press

s always, the biennial art festival Glasgow International is defined entirely by its projects. So to get a flavour of what’s on offer, here’s a selection of just a few of the organisers and artists involved, speaking about their work and aspirations for what will be on show this month. While there’s a craze in current discourses to speak of epoch changes and the exceptional present time, in considering the work of Donald Rodney (1961 – 1998), which will feature in an exhibit in Celine Gallery, curator Ian Sergeant takes care to set the current moment within a far longer history of the Black British immigrant experience. In particular, Sergeant speaks of Rodney’s work – which spans from the 70s to the late 90s – as being informed by and responding to the first-generation experience. “[Rodney’s] parents came to Britain as British subjects on their passports,” Sergeant explains. “But he was the first generation to be born Black in Britain. In his practice, there was that struggle to confirm an identity that was still in question.” Sergeant nevertheless situates Rodney’s experience as consistent with continuing oppression of Black British people, referring to “the so-called Windrush generation. Their identity and sense of belonging were called into question and” with that so were “the generations that have been born here”. Introducing Rodney, Sergeant refers to the artist’s “pragmatic” use of materials he encountered during the medical procedures related to his sickle cell anaemia. One famous work saw Rodney using his own skin graft to form My Mother. My Father. My Sister. My Brother., a small, pinned together house sculpture that fit in the palm of his hand – a close-up photographic image of the same work sitting in Rodney’s palm is

THE SKINNY

Image: courtesy of artists Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, 4 waters, film still

Art

Image: courtesy of artist

Image: courtesy of the estate of Donald Rodney

Aman Sandhu, The Magic Roundabout (2021)

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GI runs 11-27 Jun at various venues across Glasgow and online; for full details, head to glasgowinternational.org

June 2021 — Feature

Image: courtesy of Aman Sandhu

thinking about an art historical reference of the film Swamp by artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, which sees them working together to navigate a New Jersey swamp while Holt’s vision is obscured by a Bolex 16mm camera, Parkin’s thinking turned towards access to cruising sites, for disabled people and their ability to navigate them as well as for trans and nonbinary people and the risks to their safety or the liberatoriness of that access. Bats also came up as a metaphorical and research thread, in terms of their sight limitations, their same-sex relationships, their vector of disease, and how they navigate with sonar. “How does someone who is sight-impaired access cruising?” asks Parkin. “What are the different codes of looking compared to tapping in a toilet?” Parkin gives an indication of some of the books that might be suggested reading, including T Fleischmann’s Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, about the work of Felix Gonzáles-Torres. By bringing together texts that are “heavily anecdotal, as a deviation from talking about theory”, Parkin is allowing for something “meandering” to happen in the group. Speaking of the Holt and Smithson work with Parkin, there’s a resonance with filmmaker Arjuna Neuman’s recounting of their collaborative filming with the philosopher, academic and practising artist Denise Ferreira da Silva. This month in CCA, the pair show their latest film Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum from a sequence of works that take the four elements as their organising structure. Each centre Unknown photographer, untitled photograph (1987) on a set of politicised sites, setting them within a constellation of social/scientific-philosophical knowledge, theory and thinking. For the GI work, they go to the Brazil mining capital Minas Gerais, where multiple devastating dam collapses have happened in quick succession – the latest at the start of 2019. They chose this site as a way into making a film about resource extraction, and Minas Gerais also happened to be Ferreira da Silva’s home state. Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum will be shown in a CCA exhibition space alongside resources including interviews, playlists, tarot readings, essays and images that surround the work in topical ways. In so doing, audiences are allowed to choose their pathway to the work, which spans from more concentrated discourse on dark matter to literary scholarship, history and crystology. They will also share a new publication on relationships between Glasgow and its role in colonisation as an administrativelogistical centre of empire. Also at GI mining the history of Glasgow is Rosie’s Disobedient Press, a new publishing body from artist-writers Lisette May Monroe (‘Lis’ for short) and Adrien Hester, which is dedicated

predominantly to writing by working-class and queer writers and aiming to find a way to circulate that work internationally. As well as marking the launch of this newly minted press, GI sees Rosie’s Disobedient Press present new audio work Tenau, which takes its name from its central figure, who is also known popularly as Saint Enoch. The relationship with the mall (St Enoch’s Centre) is more than lip service, with it being the spot where the saint is buried. The sounds and performance of the work are created by singer, performer and linguist Cass Ezeji, who Lis and Hester imagined for the voice of the work even before the collaboration was secured. In Tenau, they let the saint speak her concerns from underneath the food court, and layers of concrete, where her chapel once stood. She’s characterised in the work as “motherly” and having “been through all the stages of the city”. For Lis, this work offers a guiding hand around the city centre as many people make their way around town for the first time since lockdown. “This work is a companion to look and see and breath the city as you listen to it,” she says. Glasgow’s Mathew Wayne Parkin, work in progress still (2020) tradition of building over mythical and ancient sites comes up too in speaking to artist Andrew Sim as they describe some of the landscapes that feature in their pastel drawings. Some of these are formerly sacred or religious sites, “now just little fenced-off bits behind the Tennent’s factory,” notes Sim. These urban green pockets have a “bleak and abandoned quality,” and Sim recounts growing up (and drinking there) in these kinds of places. Speaking about the werewolves and Bigfoots that feature in their work, Sim refers to The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, the 1691 book by Robert Kirk about magical creatures. “[Kirk] described these creatures as existing ‘betwixt man and angel’,” explains Sim. “And that really resonated as a description of what queer people have to live up to, balancing mundaneness with this expectation of being quasi-magic.” Sim sees the hairless werewolves as symbolic of being on a night out and visibly queer – “there’s a socialness and awkwardness”. Working at an unprecedentedly large scale for this body of work, and in triptychs, Sim also imagines the show as the final form of some of this subject matter, which they’ve been working with for several years. After this, they imagine new signifiers and symbols being given space to emerge in their drawings. They hint at some of these, including “full-size horses and aliens”. When I speak with the artists and curators above, and at the time of writing, Glasgow is still in lockdown. So what’s left is a festival for the city and the people who live here. A general consensus across the interviewees is that it’s not the worst thing right now for the festival to take an edition off from catering, in large part, to a specific class of artworld short-stay visitors. Without so much of the international aspect, this time around GI might just be about bringing in as many of the diverse communities and classes in Glasgow to the festival and over the threshold of the city’s galleries and museums. A tall order – and a long time coming.

Film

THE SKINNY

Shiva Baby

Funeral Party Writer-director Emma Seligman talks us through her debut feature Shiva Baby, a wickedly funny black comedy about a young woman trying to navigate her queer, sexual and Jewish identities while attending a shiva Interview: Anahit Behrooz

June 2021 — Feature

“I

always felt like shivas were funny,” says writer-director Emma Seligman, referring to the funereal setting of her new black comedy, Shiva Baby. “They’re just like every other family event – people would be chatting and complaining and bragging, and I’d be like: ‘Didn’t someone just die? And we’re here gabbing about that bitch in the corner?’” She bursts out laughing. “I’ve always liked contrast and a shiva – at least in my reformed community – always felt like it had contrast baked into it. We’re supposed to be sad, but we’re sitting here talking shit about somebody.” This delight in inherent contradiction is latent in every moment of Seligman’s debut feature. Adapted from her own short film of the same name (her university thesis project, no less), Shiva Baby is an object lesson in sheer chaos, a wickedly funny study of worlds clashing that is breathless both in its hilarity and claustrophobia. It follows an almostgraduate Danielle (played by Rachel Sennott, reprising her role from the short film) who attends a shiva surrounded by well-meaning yet domineering family members and – to her horror – her ex-girlfriend Maya, sugar daddy Max, and his beautiful wife Kim. The action takes place almost entirely in real-time in one small house, lending the comingof-adulthood story a uniquely horror-like tone. “It came out of practical reasons more than anything,” explains Seligman of this innovative

approach. “I was worried about how to keep an audience on the edge of their seat and interested in staying in one house. I knew I was going to be able to make it funny, just because of my association with my community, but I was really worried it was going to be boring.” This was a concern that was, it turns out, utterly groundless. Every aspect of Shiva Baby, from cinematography to score, is meticulously crafted to ensure maximum tension as Danielle is buffeted from awkward situation to (more) awkward situation, the handheld camera close to her face, zooming in across the room, relentlessly moving in mimicry of Danielle’s all-too-relatable state of agitation. “It expanded into this horror-ish genre organically over time because I was looking at how one-day, one-location films were effective,” she says. “At no point in the process was I like, ‘this is going to be a funny horror movie’. I was just trying to communicate to my department heads and cast that I wanted this to feel as anxious as possible. It started with cinematography […] and the next stage was the edit and sucking out all of the air. No ‘ums’ or ‘ahs’ or pauses – we didn’t want to give Danielle one chance to breathe.” The final, breakdown-inducing string to her bow? The tongue-in-cheek, heart-racing score by Ariel Marx. “Basically, she just sent me a sound library of violin sounds and I — 26 —

“I think a lot of my self-worth was from my ‘sexual power’, whatever that means” Emma Seligman chose all my favourites and she told me that was a horror score,” Seligman laughs. This pervasive air of nail-biting anxiety is perfectly calculated to speak to the stage of life at which Danielle finds herself. Almost finished with university, adrift and uncertain about her place in the world, Danielle’s experience of life is as frenzied as the audience’s experience of the film, as she attempts to navigate not only her clueless parents’ concern for her future but also her own expectations of what it means to be an adult. “That time in your life feels very chaotic,” Seligman says. “To be more specific, I think I felt chaotic, because I was trying to hold on to control and certainty and there was absolutely none of it. When you’re in university – depending on your level of privilege, of course – it feels like you’re in a bubble of adulthood and independence, but you’re not really at all.”

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Image: Courtesy of MUBI

Film

“There are so many pressures put on young women, whether they’re queer or Jewish or sex workers or not, to be so many different things all at once” Emma Seligman

empowerment angle, whether it was real or not,” Seligman explains. “Because sugaring and sex work are so accessible now through sites like Seeking Arrangement, it changes what sexual power dynamics can be for young people. Hookup culture in college, at least in places like New York, sucks so much and feels so dehumanising and transactional. You’re waiting to know if the person you’re in love with is going to let you like, give them a blowjob in a week or a month. It’s just so demoralising! “The idea of someone who is in an arrangement with you, who is going to continuously validate you even if you’re not attracted to them, even if you don’t enjoy their company, even if you think they’re a bad person, is very appealing. Especially for an older audience that might have a more outdated idea of what sex work is or why one goes into sex work, I wanted to ask the question, ‘why else would a young woman who is lacking control want to be a sugar baby, other than needing the money?’” As Danielle attempts to reconcile her work as a sugar baby with the inquisitive bustle of her family, Shiva Baby becomes not just a tale of early 20s identity formation, but a razor-sharp mediation on how public and private identity clash and coexist. Danielle’s mother awkwardly ignores her daughter’s bisexuality when with family, while her ex Maya (a typically pitch-perfect performance from Molly Gordon) haunts Danielle with a hilariously flirtatious hostility. Elsewhere, Danielle clumsily navigates her Jewish family’s ceremonial condolences and banter all while trying to maintain her seductive position with Max. “I was interested in the idea of a young woman having to confront the eight different versions of herself that she has to keep up for different people and herself,” Seligman says, — 27 —

Emma Seligman

reflecting on the film’s tension between individual and communal identity. “There are so many pressures put on young women, whether they’re queer or Jewish or sex workers or not, to be so many different things all at once. I wanted to have two different versions of her. She’s a nice Jewish girl for whom her parents want a stable career and hopefully a male partner, but then college and hookup culture are telling her to be this independent, sexually empowered young woman who doesn’t care what anyone thinks about her and carves her own path. And those two pressures are completely contradictory.” It may take place in one house over one day, but through these tensions, Shiva Baby speaks to a universal experience of female coming-of-age and the riotous, anarchic ways in which it can unravel. “For me, at least, there was this ecstasy of finding out, ‘Oh my God! I do have some power: people want me and like me and validate me and make me feel strong’,” Seligman laughs. “But at some point, it runs out. The world doesn’t care how much sex you’re having. Are you going to enter the adult world? Are you going to pay your bills?”

Shiva Baby is in cinemas (for one night only) on 9 Jun and on MUBI from 11 Jun

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For Seligman, and thus for Danielle, this divide between control and reality especially manifests in young women’s sexual lives, and the ways in which they maintain, or fail to maintain, agency over them. “I think a lot of my self-worth, or all of it that existed anyway, was from my ‘sexual power’, whatever that means,” Seligman says. “For me, and I know for a lot of other people, it feels like you have no power as a young woman. You’re struggling with all of the reasons the world sucks for women, how you’re not going to have control – all that starts to hit you once you become an adult. And then, if you happen to discover your ‘sexual power’ or the power of your body or your sex appeal, it’s just going to run out. I wanted it to feel like Danielle was trying everything she could to hold on to that power that she thought she had, and to see it slip away in every scene.” In Shiva Baby, the illusory nature of sexual power is magnified through a specific sex work context; Danielle’s unexpected confrontation with the man (the aforementioned sugar daddy, Max) she had neatly compartmentalised adding an extra, engrossing layer of sexual politics onto an already fraught crisis of identity. Seligman’s depiction of Danielle’s sugaring is refreshingly sharp and contemporary, a portrayal of sex work conducted through apps and based not in economic need but in a desire for sexual self-determinism. “My friends and I were interested in sugar baby-sugar daddy relationships through that

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Gettin’ Piggy with It The star of the latest documentary from Russian director Victor Kossakovsky is a giant pig named Gunda. He hopes that you look on her and her offspring with respect and compassion, and not just wonder what she’ll taste like with apple sauce Film

Interview: Philip Concannon

June 2021 — Feature

“We have to eliminate the act of killing from our behaviour if we are to grow as a civilisation” Victor Kossakovsky A committed vegetarian since he was four years old – when he realised a pig he loved had ended up on the family’s dinner table – Kossakovsky is passionate about animals and

deeply frustrated by the way the human race treats them. During our conversation, he is prone to reeling off facts and figures detailing the extraordinary number of animals killed every year, but Gunda is no strident propaganda piece. There is no footage of slaughterhouses to shock us into repentance. Instead, Kossakovsky lets the camera rest on his subjects’ faces and allows us the time and space to connect with them, to see their personalities and emotions emerge. Gunda was filmed on farms and sanctuaries around Europe and the UK where animals are allowed to live longer than normal. “This is why my cows are beautiful: because they are grandmothers,” he explains. “They are over 20 years old, which normally you would never see. That’s why you look at their faces and, just like a normal old person, you see life behind them.” This desire to focus our attention on the animals themselves dictated his decision to shoot Gunda in black-and-white, to avoid any risk of viewers being distracted by the bucolic surroundings. “Pigs have very little eyes, so you would mostly just see pink pigs, green grass and blue sky, but when you see black-and-white you immediately see Gunda’s eyes, right? She is talking to you, especially at the end when she came to the camera. You could not miss what she said to you. She said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’” What are we doing? In Kossakovsky’s view, by destroying animals we are ultimately destroying ourselves. “We have to eliminate the act of killing from our behaviour if we are to grow as a civilisation. We don’t have long nails and we don’t have long teeth to kill. There is no sign that we are predators, but we decided to be predators.” He doesn’t sound particularly confident about — 28 —

Image: Courtesy of NEON

f you’re going to make a movie about a pig, there are a few ground rules to follow. Your porcine protagonist should be cute, it should talk, and it should have some sort of adventure – think of Babe (1995) and its sequel Pig in the City, the 2006 adaptation of Charlotte’s Web or Hayao Miyazaki’s fighter pilot in Porco Rosso (1992). That’s the received wisdom, at least. Without a few anthropomorphising touches and an injection of drama, it’s hard to imagine many producers lining up to back a film about a pig that’s content to be a pig. Enter Gunda, the titular sow in Victor Kossakovsky’s new film. Over the course of Gunda’s 93 minutes, we see this animal give birth, feed her young piglets, stroll around the farmlands, shelter from the rain and wallow happily in some mud. The soundtrack consists of nothing more than the grunts and squeals emitted by Gunda and her offspring, or the moos and clucks of the cows and chickens that Kossakovsky occasionally cuts away to. Gunda simply invites us to spend time contemplating these animals and – the director hopes – to see them as something other than a source of food. “This is something I don’t understand. In the UK you have a lot of pets, right?” the personable and voluble Russian director asks over Zoom. “We love dogs because they understand us, because they love us, because they are our best friend. But why is it so difficult for us to make the link that the animals we eat have the same abilities? They have an inner life. Why is it so difficult to understand?”

humanity at large changing its ways, but he does think the COVID-19 pandemic should be regarded as a wake-up call. “The virus lived here much longer than us,” he says. “It was sleeping but we were able to wake it up. We are dominating, dominating, dominating without even thinking of other creatures, and I always thought nature will not take us any longer. One day nature will say ‘No!’ to these bastards who destroy everything. When you go out to the forest you say, ‘Ah, it’s beautiful,’ but that’s because there are no people around to destroy it.” In fact, the lack of a human presence in Gunda – except for a critical instance towards the end – is one of its most notable aspects, and Kossakovsky will take any opportunity to challenge our fixed notions about human supremacy over all the other creatures with whom we share this planet. “We are proud of the internet, but whales communicate over thousands of miles. We are proud of having GPS, but birds are flying from Russia to Africa with no technology. How are they doing it? Everything we have we learned from animals – we have helicopters because Leonardo was looking at butterflies.” Kossakovsky sits back and wearily shakes his head at the folly of it all. “You see the hypocrisy? We cannot live without them, and yet we just don’t respect them at all.” Gunda is released on 4 Jun by Altitude

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June 2021

FREE

Graduate Showcase 2021 June 2021

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Graduate Showcase 2021

Welcome W

elcome to The Skinny’s preview of The Glasgow School of Art 2021 Graduate Showcase – your chance to explore the diverse work of this year’s graduating students on a unique online platform. GSA students are known for their inquisitive, provocative nature and technical expertise, which is on display across the Schools of Architecture, Fine Art, Design, Innovation, and Simulation and Visualisation. In this supplement, you’ll find previews of each area of the Showcase, written by those with the most intimate knowledge of the GSA’s creative community: the students themselves. Each preview highlights dominant themes pertinent to the work and our lives in 2021, from sustainability and ethical design to connectivity and community. It’s clear throughout that this is a cohort of thoughtful practitioners, looking to implement change and solve problems as they make their way into the world. These unifying threads of inquiry are also highlighted within the Showcase itself: visitors to the online platform can sort work by theme, and find connections between ostensibly disparate disciplines. Of course, this isn’t the first time a major GSA event has been held online. Throughout 2020 and 2021, some events and exhibitions have moved into the digital space – including the annual PhD research presentation, Portfolio Preparation Course exhibition, and even the GSA Fashion Show. Also in this issue, Katie Goh speaks to students, tutors and researchers about the challenges of creating online showcases, and the opportunities of discovering new potential audiences and ways of working. In the Heads Up section, we highlight some upcoming events that

also move between these now-familiar states of online and IRL. This year, the GSA has significantly expanded the Graduate Showcase programme, including more events and guest speakers. These will be held throughout the ten days of the Showcase, and will include discussions, provocations and talks on themes including the appetite for risk in design, and forms of privilege in digital making. Invited speakers include Susan Pui San Lok, Emma Talbot and Travis Alabanza, as well as students and tutors of the GSA. The opening and closing events will be followed by online afterparties, hosted by the GSA’s legendary Students’ Association, and featuring some of their current favourite DJs and performers. Students are also holding their own fringe events alongside the main curated programme – all details can be found on the Showcase website. The Graduate Showcase kicks off with a launch event on Friday 9 June, and runs until 20 June. If you miss these dates, don’t worry – the online platform will stay live until 2022, with students updating and refreshing their pages with new work, so you can follow their journeys post-graduation. Enjoy this exclusive look at the GSA’s class of 2021 – just a tiny fraction of the bold, challenging work available to discover online.

gsa.ac.uk/gsashowcase21 @glasgowschoolart #GSAShowcase21

June 2021

Image: Iain Gallagher Graduate Collection, Gillian Islay, Textile Design

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Contents

Features

32 Students from the Mackintosh School of Architecture explore climate, context and community – three integral themes which influence the built environment.

36 From fantastical multi-player games to performances breaking the stigma of mental illness, School of Fine Art students’ work is enigmatic, esoteric and vital.

Graduate Showcase 2021

34 The School of Design’s wide variety of programmes all focus on inventive, inspirational and critical thinking.

38 Sound for the Moving Image students traverse documentary, sonic art and spoken word in the School of Simulation and Visualisation.

39 In a world in turmoil, how do we imagine the future? Product Design students tackle pertinent societal questions in the Innovation School. 40 In a year where exhibitions, research presentations and even fashion shows have moved online, we look at how students have adapted their work for Online Showcases.

42 Want a Heads Up on the summer ahead? We highlight some of the best exhibitions, talks and cultural events at the GSA June 2021

Cover image: Drive, Yeonsu Ju, Painting and Printmaking

Image Credits: (Left to right, top to bottom) Hamish Niven; Rachel Cannings; Niall McCallum; Kelsey Jones; Calum Ferguson; Mark Rego; Caroline Grape

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Architecture Words: Abby Hopes and Jess Mitchell

Image: Moa Maurex

limate, context, community: integral themes that influence the built environment. The students of the Mackintosh School of Architecture, from Stages 3, 4 and 5, are united in their exploration of these subjects. Developing their ethical stance as future architects, the students are encouraged to design with people and the planet as their priority. The impact of COVID-19 provides the opportunity to engage with the context in which they find themselves – with Glasgow and its surrounding urban landscape as the catalyst for their investigations. The Stage 3 cohort investigate Balloch in their studio project Energy, Landscape, Culture. Their client, Sistema Scotland, is a musical education charity that transforms the lives of young people from some of Scotland’s most challenged communities. Sistema requires the creation of residential accommodation and a performance hall to facilitate their Big Noise programme. The students are encouraged to consider a ‘how low can you go’ approach to the environmental impact of their designs, respecting the idyllic landscape of Loch Lomond. Cara Taggart’s response is informed by her understanding of the young people of Sistema. Her empathetic approach ensures that the children feel safe and comfortable as they occupy the building, and she translates this into a series of adaptable spaces that respond to the users’ needs as they change and grow. Taggart encourages user interaction with the architecture through her playful manipulation of form, encouraging the children to play hide and seek within the structure. Hamish Niven creates architecture with careful attention to every detail. His design concept derives from discovering an abandoned campsite on the site. From this experience, he was inspired to create a range of spaces for young people to gather together, fostering a sense of community throughout the building’s form. Niven explores the idea of temporality within architecture, inspired by the lifecycle of timber in traditional Japanese buildings. His light-touch approach to placemaking respects the landscape and local environment. Ewan Brown’s proposal does not shy away from the challenges of the climate emergency and COVID-19. His performance hall is situated on the water of the River Leven, creating floating architecture as a method of preparing for inevitable

Image: Cara Taggart

Big Noise Barras, Moa Maurex, Stage 4

Image: Martha Duncan

Hide and Seek, Cara Taggart, Stage 3

Image: Timothy Khoo Healing the Wound, Martha Duncan, Stage 5

Image: Maisie Tudge

June 2021

Graduate Showcase 2021

A diverse range of community-driven work emerges this year from the Mackintosh School of Architecture

Commonplace, Timothy Khoo, Stage 5

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Springburn Winter Gardens, Maisie Tudge, Stage 5

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Image: Hamish Niven

Graduate Showcase 2021

providing a more accessible experience of architecture. His approach leads to an exciting and engaging public building that aims for inclusivity for all who interact with it. The diverse explorations of urban interventions from Stage 5 students respond to the question of ‘Glasgow: The Ethical City?’ This acts as a scaffold for the students to formulate their own architectural provocation in their individual thesis projects, resulting in a variety of solutions that seek to tackle a broad range of societal challenges across Glasgow. Maisie Tudge challenges the notion that demolition is synonymous with progress. Her thesis project is a sentimental approach to regeneration, creating a monument that immortalises the lost physical histories of Glasgow’s industrial communities. She restores the derelict Springburn Winter Gardens into a cultural centre that facilitates spaces for public gathering, restoration workshops, exhibitions and other forms of shared experience as a way of inviting Glasgow’s wider community to interact with the people of Springburn. Inspired by the principles of a circular economy, Tudge repurposes fragments from Glasgow demolition sites as part of the restoration – the architecture embodying the past. Timothy Khoo recognises the displacement and disconnect of both asylum seekers and refugees around the city as something in need of urgent change. His thesis project, Commonplace: Terra Firma, is a statement of visibility at the heart of the city: an adaptation of the Customs House in St Enoch as a symbol of integration and celebration. Facilitating a support centre and place of cultural exchange, Khoo creates a welcoming environment for a community that often faces barriers when interacting with the traditional architecture of existing institutions, sensitively negotiating public and private spaces within the site. — 33 —

Balloch Retreat, Hamish Niven, Stage 3

Martha Duncan identifies the disruption that the M8 motorway has created within Glasgow’s urban fabric, which has impacted the city’s community on a number of levels. Her thesis project, Healing the Wound, physically stitches together the road between the Cowcaddens and St George’s Cross subway stations. Through developing accessible social infrastructure, Duncan’s proposal of a community centre aims to serve the needs of everyone in the area, bringing a human presence back into this car-dominated space in the city. These Mackintosh School of Architecture students are just a handful of the exciting graduates who are emerging from the challenges of the academic year with resilience. Each student has demonstrated their own unique take on the design questions asked of them, resulting in a diverse range of thought-provoking and community-driven work. The 46th edition of MacMag – the annual publication of student work from the Mackintosh School of Architecture – is another fantastic display of the student body’s achievements. This student-led publication is available on the Showcase website, and explores the theme of responsibility within architecture via student work, interviews and more.

Explore more of the Mackintosh School of Architecture Showcase at gsa.ac.uk/gsashowcase21

June 2021

rising sea levels. Brown considers accessibility to the site, encouraging sustainable modes of travel through large-scale development of foot and cycle paths. His thoughtful creation of outdoor public gathering spaces encourages passive public interaction with the scheme, connecting the communities of Sistema and Balloch. Stage 4 students investigate the impact of domesticity and labour at the urban scale this year. This line of inquiry informed their final projects, which propose the creation of a civic building in the Barras Market in Calton – an area of Glasgow that can feel disconnected from the rest of the city. The brief asks students to explore the significance of performance spaces within communal life and collective experience while encouraging adaptive reuse of the existing buildings on the site. The students consider the challenges faced by the local demographic, and how their intervention could encourage engagement within the community. Coinciding with the Stage 3 projects, Stage 4 student Moa Maurex focuses on the user experience of Sistema Scotland, exploring how their music school would take shape in the city context. She identifies the need to engage the local demographic, creating a space to support young people in their development. Working actively with the current site, Maurex celebrates existing buildings alongside new architecture which utilises sustainable materials. Her intervention completes the urban block, creating an inviting space that allows the community to gather and grow. Sophie Emerson’s proposal is strongly informed by the local demographic of Calton, striving to contribute to the community’s wellbeing. She sees the modern theatre as more than a place for performance: it provides traditional facilities like rehearsal rooms and costume workshops while allowing for local community groups to adapt the spaces to their needs, activating the area throughout the week. Her intervention empowers the users, encouraging shared learning as a liberation tool. Carl Jonsson challenges the democratisation of architecture in his practice. His response to the brief breaks down socio-cultural barriers that many in the local area may experience when engaging with theatre and cinema. He explores a series of open and transparent spaces that demystify the inner workings of the theatre typology,

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June 2021

Graduate Showcase 2021

Image: Josh Kroll

Design Inventive problem-solving runs through this year’s School of Design crop, with stimulating work providing creative solutions to our ever-changing world Words: Sophie Allardyce, Mollie Forsyth, Emma Mackenzie, Blair Stobie, and Jess Wishart — 34 —

Fair Isle Flag, Sasha Delmage, Communication Design

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Graduate Showcase 2021

Image: Klaudia Radlinska

Image: Emma Williamson

he School of Design at The Glasgow communities at GSA this year. With a knitting Textile Design students’ work. Kialy Tihngang School of Art encompasses a wide variety machine that she refurbished herself, Delmage has combines themes of western overconsumption, of programmes, all with a focus on invenproduced a striking knitted flag – a nod to commuplanned obsolescence, and rapidly regenerating tive, inspirational and critical thinking. The nity and cultural identity demonstrated through technologies within her collection. Tihngang has graduating students of symbols and natural dyes used in Fair Isle knitting. created a collection of interlocking laser2021 have overcome many The flag is photocut wooden shapes covered challenges over the past graphed in context by with waste textiles, supported year – minimal access to Josh Kroll, resulting in a by a selection of music videos studios, working remotely series of engaging and fake adverts. Her designs and with limited access to images which appear aim to promote awareness of resources – to create some to suggest a semaphoric the global electronic waste GuidePod™, Emma Williamson, Product Design Engineering truly exciting work. language at use – a dumping crisis. Sustainability Adaptive Living, Klaudia Radlinska, Interior Design “Everything can code used to communiis also the key ethos of change in a moment, and in a world that is changcate at distances. Jessica Turnbull, a knitted textile Interaction Design is an experimental proing so significantly and so rapidly, being adaptable designer who has spent much of this year experigramme within the School of Design that comand open to change is especially important,” says menting with zero-waste design. Turnbull pairs bines technology with visual thinking and invenSilversmithing and Jewellery student Rachel unconventional dead stock and donated yarns tive problem-solving. Graduating student Amber Hetherington. The challenges that this year’s made from recycled plastic bottles, creating a Struthers’ project Teaching Machines Intimacy is students have faced have forced them to adopt juxtaposition of properties within her exploration a speculative exploration of the relationship new approaches and adapt to creative environof Baltic constructivism. between humans and machines, through capaciments outwith the studio. The awareness of the For Interior Design student Eilidh McEwan, tive textiles, machine learning and robotics. The ever-changing world around them has become the experience of loss was imperative to her themes in this mindful work resonate deeply with prominent within their works; some chose to look introspective work. The loss of her grandfather our so-called ‘new way of living’, reflecting the new to the past while others chose to look forward. was the inciting incident that caused her to ways we have had to show affection to each other Silversmithing and Jewellery student Monica challenge the “societal and cultural issues of in isolation, largely through the use of technology. Findlay focused her graduate collection on tactile death” within her project Finale. The interior of Continuing on a similar and emotional engagement. Findlay explores Finale courageously provides a visionary progrestheme, Captured Transition “tangible remains and surface qualities as imporsion for the funeral industry, which is modelled by Marta Palacz delves into tant signifiers of memories both ancient and around empathy, community and compassion. mindfulness and technolmodern,” bringing together storytelling and arAdaptive Living by Klaudia Radlinska also considers the cycle of life through the ogy, considering what chaeology. She uses manipulated design of a modular space that adapts machines ‘see’ when we materials to test the interrelation to the passage of time. Through the meditate or perform yoga in between memory and object, allowpandemic there has been a collective front of them. Her work ing her to test their possibility to shift into the domestic interior, and utilises creative coding and trigger nostalgia. our homes have demanded a unique machine learning to generFor Cara Smith, looking to the Flight Mask, Cara Smith, dynamic. Adaptive Living provides ate impactful imagery of present and the effects of the global Silversmithing & Jewellery flexible sanctuaries that can continue what this may look like, pandemic has been hugely influento evolve. With a consciousness for resulting in a myriad of tial. Smith has created interactive sustainability, Radlinska states: “The surreal and intriguing work, as well as interactive body adornments made from recyproperty can grow and shrink as we and immersive experiences. cled milk bottles, “sculptures intenddo in our lifetime, adapting to our Product Design Engineering student Emma ed to become animated once posineeds and circumstances.” Williamson emphasises this: “this has been a year tioned on the body; to become an “I found myself drawing huge like no other and we have all had to adapt massiveextension of the body.” Smith’s Flight Television Snacks and Tiaras, crowds of people, reminiscing about ly,” she says. The work Williamson has produced Poppy Brooks, Fashion Design Mask is a facial adornment that city life and the things that have demonstrates the power of designers as worldemulates flight through the movedisappeared from our daily lives,” says changers. Her GuidePod™ is a smart device to ment of the jaw. The piece encomCommunication Design student Rachel Cannings promote routine for people living with dementia passes hope for the success of the vaccine to about her risograph-printed book, which features a through sensory prompts. Using auditory and bring freedom. short narrative of arresting illustrations. Sardined olfactory elements, GuidePod™ is a solution that Longing for the familiar is a recurring inspiracrowds, elbow-to-elbow events and the correspond- could really empower and positively impact the tion this year. Fashion Design student Poppy lives of people with dementia, post-diagnosis. The Brooks encapsulates this in her graduate collection ing printed matter and posters are the image and vision expressed across Product Design Television Snacks and Tiaras, which looks to British antithesis of ‘social distancing’ in all its saturated sublimity. This yearning for a ‘before’ is further Engineering is compelling; a testament to the heritage and home comforts. Brooks’ work discusscaptured in a presentation of stirring images change that good design can cause. es reminiscing about memories of loved ones produced through a collaboration between two Graduating students from the School of through the clothmore Communication Design students, Sadbh Design have worked incredibly hard to produce an ing of our past. Her extraordinary and varied body of work encompassoversized garments Grehan and Thomas Ive, who identified the opportunity to work outside of the studio and celebrate ing themes from adaptability, to sustainability, to using statement their fundamental connections to the natural world. cultural identity – and so many more. floral fabrics are a The resulting images bare a surreal mimicry of nod to parties from Explore more the past – and ones nature through clever use of props, and the oddly comforting juxtaposition of summer nostalgia of the School to look forward to captured in a winter context. of Design in the future. Sasha Delmage also felt the disconnect from Showcase at Conscious her peers and from the School due to the pandemic. gsa.ac.uk/ design is at the Her work seems to acknowledge that, and responds gsashowforefront of this USELESS MACHINES, Kialy Tihngang, Textile Design to the distance wedged between the creative case21 year’s graduating Design Discontinuity, Chloe Lefort, Image: Cara Smith

Image: Poppy Brooks

Image: Chloe Lefort

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June 2021

Image: Kialy Tihngang

Interaction Design

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Fine Art Graduate Showcase 2021

The restrictions of the last year have prompted the School of Fine Art to adapt, innovate, collaborate, head outdoors Words: Amy Strzoda and Theodore Wilkins-Lang

Image: Carlos Anguara Jover

Tilly P-M’s multiplayer game deer bus tour invites players to ride on a computer-generated bus journey, to look out of the window and see a man swimming alongside, and a strange creature on the back seat who asks to be left alone. Fantasy has been a vital way to keep students inspired and to allow audiences to be transported Audio Technica, Carlos Anguara Jover, Fine Art Photography into worlds of the imagination. Self-reflection has also been key this year, with students like HUSS using his performances to raise awareness of stigma towards mental health in the Middle East. His latest film BATTLE OF TRANQUILITY will be shown (in person!) along with the rest of the cohort’s work at Sculpture and Environmental Art’s Alternative Degree Show. Many works from the Painting and Printmaking graduates feature faceless figures and lonely landscapes, solo wanderers and hazy scenes. However, it’s not a feeling of isolation that is prompted, but rather one of endearment – tapping into the international psyche of the past year, reminding us of this unique, albeit often unpleasant, time of shared experience. Our personal space has become more important than ever, so it is no surprise to find this present in the works. Sarah Olivia Johnston invites us into a blurred world of colourful non-spaces; objects that are difficult to recognise although comforting in their softness. This warmth is also present in Yeonsu Ju’s paintings of intimate solitude and friendly, dazed faces that melt into their domestic backdrops. Your tears are salty, Yeonsu Ju, Painting and Printmaking Emily Knight constantly strives to reconstruct personal memories in her dynamic and colourful paintings. They echo the fluidity of ‘recalling’, highlighting a similarity between artistic representation and the individual’s creation of their own history. Noemi Conan’s work, somewhere between self-portraiture and performance (while never settling in either), serves as a vibrant declaration of individuality from the lived experience of an Eastern-European immigrant living in post-Brexit Britain. Her visually striking canvases are loaded with a variety of cultural symbolism, which takes on new meaning through her unique

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Image: Yeonsu Ju

June 2021

Image: Niall McCallum

his year’s Fine Art students, while confined to their rooms, have faced great challenges in creating work. A photographer’s tendency for spontaneous shooting, a painter’s love of observational drawing, and a sculptor’s hunt for found objects have had to be interpreted in new ways. Unsurprisingly, we have been reminded that creativity does prevail, and GSA’s class of ‘21 have performed remarkably, showing great resourcefulness in both subject and material. Community has always been a focus of the Sculpture and Environmental Art programme, encouraging students to weave their practices into the local area and engage with the people around them. This year ‘community’ has taken on a new meaning: it has been essential to connect with those that keep our everyday lives running smoothly. Niall McCallum creates spaces for social exchange to thrive and collaboration to grow. His swing sculpture Tandem requires two people to participate for it to work. Giving life to previously forgotten communal Tandem, Niall McCallum, Sculpture and Environmental Art spaces is a crucial part of Edie Preece’s practice (aka the secretgroundsman), attempting to awaken old football pitches and make them playable again. Preece has spent the last three years digging up and restoring grassy wastelands, freshening up the white markings and adding new goalposts, culminating in a series of photographs, but more importantly physical sites to one day visit in real life. Unmistakably, there is an increased inclination to work outside, using the outdoors as a playground where one may have traditionally been restricted to the white walls of the studio. In Bella Geldart’s video and performance work Hit Me Harder, peculiar tennis matches take place along seemingly conventional areas by the Clyde. Ordinary settings have become places of unlimited possibilities. Without indulging too much into the embarrassment of Zoom mishaps and home-studio accidents, it really has been tough for a programme in which students’ work is often largescale. Consequently, physical limitations have nudged many students to look within and materialise their inner desires.

THE SKINNY

Image: Emily Knight

Image: Josie KO Image: HUSS

interacts with the history of ‘things’ as fluid and constantly open to material degradation, challenging narratives of certainty and implied authenticity. The Fine Art Photography programme has always emphasised technical knowledge of traditional photographic processes, the rules of which Michael Skeen upends to create his chemical drawings. Echoing the strange time we find ourselves in, his work dismantles tradition and structure while also committing to the process and craft BATTLE OF TRANQUILITY, HUSS, Sculpture and Environmental Art of photographic art, a balance apparent in the dichotomy of natural brushstrokes and inorganic chemistry of his photographic paintings. Another adherent of the materiality of photography is Andrew MacCrimmon. His filmic colour positive photographs of workers are physical and tactile in their assembly and presentation, and even better yet within the rich images themselves. His photographs are objects in and of themselves, not just representations to be endlessly reproduced through social media and the internet – refreshing in the context of our modern world and its constant inundation of ephemeral virtual media. To complement the work on show, a variety of events are also taking place, including a discussion between the new Head of Fine Art, Rebecca Fortnum, and artists Susan Pui San Lok, Jenkin Van Zyl and Emma Talbot, and three of this year’s graduates. The arts have had to adapt at rapid speed this past year, but not to fear, as GSA’s latest offspring of fine artists have proved that they’re more than equipped to take on the big bad art world.

Untitled, Michael Skeen, Fine Art Photography

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Explore more of the School of Fine Art Showcase at gsa.ac.uk/gsashowcase21 Sculpture and Environmental Art’s Alternative Degree Show takes place in various venues across Glasgow until 3 June, with the Painting and Printmaking and Fine Art Photography editions of the show beginning on 5 July

June 2021

Image: Michael Skeen

and outlandish style, exuding personality and self-determination. After being continuously ignored by the government during the pandemic, Monument, Josie KO, Painting and Printmaking university students deserve some credit to still have found the humour in all of this. Because if you don’t laugh about it, you’ll cry – right? This combination of self-deprecation and the internet’s favourite mode of non-verbal communication is depicted in Sophie Booth’s meme paintings. We see familiar images turned into playful digs at the art world which fulfil every possible definition of meta. Josie KO’s immersive installations of fairytale scenes have a similar kitsch aesthetic, while addressing the experience of a Black British woman in a predominantly white environment. Life-size papier-mâché figures adorned with crochet gowns and Georgian-style hair sit atop grassy mounds and white horses in her installations Monument and My Ladye with the Mekle Lippis. Presence and absence is a recurring theme for this year’s graduating Fine Art Photography students: presence of the photographic object; its materials; a visual absence of the subject of the work. Carlos Anguara Jover’s project One Less in the Middle Row addresses a particular and timely presence: that of big tech in the domestic space. He addresses the uncanny experience of digital technology’s omnipresence in daily life through an interplay of natural and technological forms, with wires wrapping fruit and devices constantly watching, listening. Like Jover, Eirini Kalogera also finds subject matter in the domestic space with her work Imprints Left by Furniture on a Floor. The work turns the traditional concept of photography as a medium of direct representation on its head, with impressions of domestic objects that themselves are not present. Lucas Orozoco also examines things absent. Eight Inches of the Mackintosh refers to the iconic, now gone, Mackintosh building through a displaced object. His work

Graduate Showcase 2021

Home Sweet Home, Emily Knight, Painting and Printmaking

THE SKINNY

Graduate Showcase 2021

Simulation and Visualisation This year’s Sound for the Moving Image class present work demonstrating their adaptability and resilience Words: Duncan Colquhoun

success from Scotland during the 1980s – from the likes of Orange Juice to Strawberry Switchblade, and everything in-between. The film pairs recent shots of locations across Glasgow (such as the acts’ local haunts) side by side with archival footage and images. The piece found its roots in zine-making and Bain-Bramley’s growing familiarity with the sparse production equipment available during lockdown. In some ways this reflects the circumstances in which his subjects would have burgeoned; generating art with integrity, in a creative space that sits comfortably at odds with others of major capital. Image: Kelsey Jones

June 2021

Image: Christy Bain-Bramley

when life gives you lemons, Kelsey Jones

Kelsey Jones’ film when life gives you lemons consists of spoken poetry and original footage. It seeks to illustrate the unpredictable tendency of emotion, as we are admitted a glance of some personal camera roll selections, backed by her own musical composition. Company seems a recurrent strand in this work; the presence of her peers is notable as a motivator and theme during this production and perhaps practice on the whole. Consistently, it is apparent that making in any sense can prove difficult when interpersonal validation is jeopardised. The testament of these graduates indicates as much, but nevertheless, their industrious effort is on display within the Showcase. Where specialities and interests vary, the creators share commonality in that. The students’ works will be displayed in tandem with a committed event, a free-form interactive discussion with Danielle BrathwaiteShirley and Maria Sappho. The topic at hand is Toolkits for Decision Making, regarding forms of privilege in making and its effect upon artistic choices in practice. Image: Rory Green

he School of Simulation and Visualisation’s Sound for the Moving Image programme offers a very particular and specialised lane of teaching at GSA. The programme looks Dragged Up, Christy Bain-Bramley to develop a mixture of practical and conceptual skills in sonic art and audio production. These pair with the making of film, animation or game design, and in ordinary circumstances, students are offered the extent of the School’s tools and facilities. As I’m sure goes without saying, this hasn’t been the case for this graduating class, in view of the past year. It is evident from the varied and complex selection displayed within the Graduate Showcase that these artists’ work is a product of their own adaptable skillset, and no less self-will, as can be said across disciplines. A majority of the works are intrinsically modern in either materiality or subject, drawing from contemporary techniques and cultural references. Areas of interest include neurodiversity, homage to artworks from Dada, and the nature of sound itself. The application of sound is broad. Often students have opted to appropriate images and film – with their artwork moving these into a completely new realm. Panoraia Vitali’s Dada Dress is laced with audio excerpts lifted from feminist speech and poetry, to reinforce its historical precedent. Alternately, some students craft audio sculptures and installations, interactive or definite. Deep Blue by Claude Barnes considers the digital lifestyle which most have been subjected to as of late – naturally a topic shared with a handful of works – in the form of a mixed media web-based installation, its title adopted from the first computer chess program to win against a world champion. Others use dubbing and documentary methods to chronicle different perspectives and eras. Christy Bain-Bramley premieres the short form documentary Dragged Up, which considers the lifestyles and careers of select alternative musical acts who found

Untitled, Rory Green

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Explore more of the School of Simulation and Visualisation Showcase at gsa.ac.uk/gsashowcase21

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Innovation Graduate Showcase 2021

The Innovation School presents a lively array of future thinking, postCOVID ideas and proposed solutions to some of the world’s problems Words: Gabby Morris

Image: Maria Duca Marinesca

Image: Calum Ferguson

Digital Behaviours, Maria Duca Marinesca Image: Holly Thomson

Athurachadh, Calum Ferguson

– while, perversely, increasing their productivity. Calum Ferguson explores the challenges faced by young people who want to work the land and start crofting in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. His Talisman project Athurachadh acts as a point of conversation about the passing on of crofts, and the continuation of the culture between older and young crofters. We all think about the future, but ageing is something we often don’t consider. Culturally, it’s not necessarily something we get excited about, and lots of people have anxiety about what it will mean for them. Holly Thomson has designed an exciting new approach called Third Phase, a service for people coming up to retirement which helps them to look at this later stage with new eyes. There are no slippers or armchairs here! Third Phase takes insights from the user’s skills and shows them options and opportunities for an exciting future. We live our lives online, saving and sharing constantly, but often the digital doesn’t really feel like ours. Cammy Hogg’s project Record is a music collation service designed to give the music fan a heightened sense of ownership over their collection. Acting as a space to gather the user’s physical and digital music, the mission of — 39 —

Record is simple: this is about strengthening and protecting the relationship between collector and collection. Today we are living longer, and increasingly more online, but how will this impact the planet? Digital pollution is growing faster than any other form, but most of us are not aware of this, or we take the simplicity of using the cloud for our data for granted. Maria Duca Marinesca’s project Digital Behaviours explores our digital carbon footprint and proposes a way to break down the complexity of our digital impact. Taking the form of a suite of information and a digital assistant, the project offers a way to achieve increased digital frugality. Based on your digital behaviour and preferences, the assistant curates a list of suggestions that you can follow to decrease your carbon footprint. There is far more to explore within this exciting showcase than this brief synopsis is able to communicate, including a digital event around the appetite for risks in design.

Explore more of the Innovation School Showcase at gsa.ac.uk/gsashowcase21

June 2021

n a world in turmoil, how do we imagine the future? Luckily for us, we don’t have to. In a year like no other, from bedrooms, living rooms and dining room tables, around the UK and internationally, innovation has taken place. Do you ever imagine a world where our work is not the dominating factor in society? Or where upon reaching retirement age, we don’t just stop, but we play an active role in our communities? Have you ever considered your digital resources or your impact on the planet? Students of Product Design do, with the results on display at the Graduate Showcase. The future of work is in flux, and many of our traditional ways of working have changed. Looking ten years into the future, Sian Mackay designs for healthcare workers within cancer care, creating a way for them to interact and connect remotely. Teabreak is a physical tea tray that is specific to the user, connecting them to other remote workers for that much-needed relief and chat in challenging circumstances. Andrew Smith’s project High Time takes a satirical and critical look at traditional working culture and our working time’s value in a capitalist society. It is a set of artefacts used in psychedelic microdosing to subvert working time, affording the user reflection on their place within such a culture

Third Phase, Holly Thomson

Graduate Showcase 2021

THE SKINNY

Storytelling, Showreels and the Expanded Studio GSA students, tutors and researchers discuss the challenges and opportunities of creating online showcases, and bringing their work to these new spaces Interview: Katie Goh

PhD Showcase – all exemplify this adaptation from in-person to online, with some surprisingly positive results for both students and tutors. “We knew the course and the showcase would have to be online from the get-go,” explains Joanie Jack, who runs the GSA’s Portfolio Preparation Course alongside Deborah Holland. “Throughout the year, we created teaching videos that demonstrated different techniques from our virtual studios at home. Our course is very handson so we wanted the students to be able to watch us work in conjunction with the exercises we were giving them over Zoom.” “Our classes became really interactive,” adds Holland. “The students became more confident with the online nature of them. We’d have classes where you’d come as your favourite colour or shape or form. Because everything was so new, we weren’t sure it would work – but it did!” Innovation and experimentation with the online nature of the Portfolio Preparation Course extended to the end-of-year showcase too. The course’s students were tasked with curating and self-selecting their work in the context of a scrollable website page, rather than the typical physical exhibition space. “I had to be quite careful with ordering the slides because there wasn’t the sense of travelling through my Image: Rosie Ridley

June 2021

he last year could be summed up with just one word: adapt. At The Glasgow School of Art, the need to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic has predominantly meant moving online, for tutors, students and staff. The studio has become both smaller and bigger, with students working in their bedrooms in different spaces, some even in different time zones, while their tutors wrestle with the challenge of recreating the studio experience on Zoom. The exhibition space has also been reduced and expanded: rather than hanging work in one physical space, the GSA’s Degree Shows and showcases have moved online, with students photographing their individual work before ‘hanging’ it on a scrollable website for viewers to peruse. Three recent showcases – the Fashion Showreel, the Portfolio Preparation Course Showcase and the

Rosie Ridley, Fashion Design

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work that you would have with an exhibition,” explains Aoife Hogan, one of the students on the course. “I had to story tell through sequential slides and lay out how I wanted the viewer to experience my work through this visual, rather than physical, process.” Photographing became a key skill in order for the showcase to convey the feel of the artwork. For one of Hogan’s slides, she enlisted her siblings to hold up a piece of work that’s all about hands so that the work’s environment becomes part of the viewer’s experience. “I wanted to show what the work would be like in a space and how you would interact with it.” The end-of-year Fashion Showreel faced a similar challenge: how do you bring the experience of the catwalk to the viewer online while working remotely? Professor Jimmy Stephen-Cran, Head of Fashion and Textiles, looked at what the global fashion industry was doing and asked third year Fashion and Textile Design students to devise a new kind of catwalk. “We know what a GSA fashion show looks like,” explains Professor Stephen-Cran. “The students’ collective and individual task was to outdo the conventions of a GSA fashion show. I asked them to act as designer, artist, curator, exhibition maker, collaborator, musician, filmmaker, inventor…” Rather than simply ask the students to make their collection and model it themselves, they were encouraged to play with form for their 30-second showreel videos, expanding their practice to stop motion, collage and abstract animation, time lapse, motion capture, digital puppetry and projection. “And if they didn’t want to show their end product, they could show their process – for example instead of focusing on a knitted garment, they could make the knitting the focus itself,” adds Professor Stephen-Cran. One student, Rosie Ridley, used stop motion animation to show her collection, a technique that

THE SKINNY Image: Jenny Hyde Jenny Hyde, Portfolio Preparation

Graduate Showcase 2021

Image: Susan Roan Susan Roan, PhD

Image: Mark Rego

seminar to follow the PhD showcase, which would enable the responses and discussion of an in-person conference. Claire Eaglesham, one of the PhD students who took part in the showcase and seminar, says that the online format allowed for more experimentation than a live event. Rather than presenting a paper, accompanied by some powerpoint slides at a conference, Eaglesham instead created an online, animated version of herself to do the talking. “For my presentation I tried out some new software. I wouldn’t necessarily say this was any more or less challenging than if it was a live event – just different!” As well as a more innovative approach to presenting research, the online PhD showcase had major benefits for disseminating research and it reached a far wider audience than a live symposium would have. “The website is an easily accessible resource for me to share with others,” says Eaglesham. “Since the showcase went live, I have shared it with other researchers and individuals who have been interested in my project.” This is a benefit Professor Thompson has noted too. “I think there is something you can’t replicate about being in a room with people and that energy isn’t quite the same, but on the other hand, more people were able to attend the online seminar – people with caring responsibilities or in different time zones who wouldn’t have been able to make it in person.” Professor Thompson is strongly considering continuing with a version of an online showcase and seminar even when in-person events return. — 41 —

Mark Rego, PhD

Across all three showcases, the increased accessibility of moving online was undoubtedly the biggest asset, for teachers and students. For Aoife Hogan who is currently applying to universities and colleges, her online Portfolio Preparation showcase has become a vital tool for displaying her work during the application process – as well as something to send family and friends overseas. “It’s also made me think more about how people engage with art,” she says. “I think it’ll impact my practice going forward, even when physical exhibitions return. It’s made me more appreciative of the texture of work and the sensory experience of art. That’s been lost over the last year with moving online but trying to recreate those experiences has been a really fun challenge.”

gsafashionshow2021.com gsaopenstudioshowcase.net gsaphdshowcase.net

June 2021

she hadn’t used in years. Her collection is modelled on paper dolls who walk across Abbey Road, after The Beatles. “I’d been using a lot of 1970s materials in my collection,” she explains. “I came up with the idea quite last minute but I thought it would be funny and whimsical and fitting for my work.” The Fashion and Textiles department was substantially impacted by the stay-at-home mandate, cutting many of the students off from essential machinery that lives in the GSA studio. But while these processes were impacted, other skills were prioritised, such as digital illustration and portfolio curation. “I’ve always struggled with illustration in fashion,” explains Ridley. “But because I had more time to play around with digital software this year, I managed to develop an illustration style that I really like that I’ll use in the future. I think the way I present work developed too; I’m used to presenting in sketchbooks which wasn’t viable this year – so I learned how to put a digital portfolio together much earlier.” Similarly, for the first-year candidates taking part in the GSA’s PhD programme, the online nature of their showcase opened the door to more innovative ways of presenting work. Normally an in-person conference, the annual PhD Research Methods Symposium was adapted into an online showcase and seminar by Head of Doctoral Studies, Professor Susannah Thompson. “The PhD showcase is from first-year students who have only been on the programme for three months,” explains Professor Thompson. “They’re at the start of their journey so it highlights tentative and speculative research; it’s more of a snapshot of research to come with the aim of sharing with other PhD students and GSA staff.” Normally the students present a 20-minute paper, followed by a Q&A session with the audience. Because that wasn’t possible this year, Professor Thompson instead arranged for a

THE SKINNY

Heads Up

We’ve got events throughout the summer in person and online, from exhibitions to open days Image: Courtesy of artist

It seems fitting that after a year of introspection, the theme of the 2021 edition of Glasgow International is Attention. The visual art festival’s vast programme of exhibitions takes place both online and in venues around Glasgow, and includes work by a huge number of GSA graduates. There’s also a presentation of new work by Kameelah Janan Rasheed at 5 Florence Street, curated by GSA Exhibitions.

Image: Courtesy of artist

GSA Graduate Showcase 2021

Glasgow International Across Glasgow and online, 11-27 Jun

Musa, Khidr, and Borges, Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Portfolio Preparation Course, Sketchbook by Emma Ralph

Image: Caroline Grape

Image: Courtesy of workshop participant A Thread is a Journey Workshop

A Thread is a Journey Glasgow, 15 Jun

KHICHDI/KEDGEREE: Food Culture in Transnational Identities at Kinning Park Complex

June 2021

Printmaking workshops at the GSA

Want to learn a new skill this summer, or level up your creative practice? The GSA’s Open Studio short courses take place online and cover a multitude of disciplines – from one-day linocut workshops to intensive week-long sketchbook exploration courses. There are courses for all levels, and a discount available for full-time students.

If you’re thinking of embarking on a creative degree programme, or want some advice on a specific aspect of art school life, then GSA OPEN is the place to start. This year-long programme encompasses virtual open days, Q&A sessions, student-led campus tours and more, for whatever stage of the application process you are at. Open Studio Summer School, Painting by Amy Walkingshaw

Architecture Fringe Across Scotland and online, 4-20 Jun

Mackintosh School of Architecture Vertical Project

Merchant City Festival Glasgow and online, 8-11 Jul Photo: Callum Rice

Image: Alan Dimmick

Tales from the Barrow: Graduate Award Winners Exhibition Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, Glasgow, 19 Jun-10 Jul

GSA OPEN Glasgow and online, throughout the year

Image: Courtesy of GSA student group

Image: Courtesy of artist The Elixir of Quietude by Charlotte Elizabeth Roberts

Race, Rights and Sovereignty is an ongoing series of lectures, workshops and events curated by the team behind the GSA’s Public Lecture Series in partnership with the Students’ Association. The series seeks to celebrate, challenge, inform and inspire the next generation of artists, designers and architects about race and empower them to have a creative voice. Image: Alan McAteer

Open Studio Summer School Online, 5 Jul-4 Aug

Are you working on an application to art school? The GSA’s Portfolio Preparation Course provides the time and space to work on your portfolio in a supportive, dynamic studio environment. The course is structured to help you select a specialist area of study, and has a track record of getting students places at top art schools in Scotland, the UK and beyond.

Race, Rights and Sovereignty Glasgow and online, throughout the year

Image: Courtesy of artist

The GSA have partnered with Central and West Integration Network (CWIN) on this ten-week creative project exploring textiles, fabric and patterns, culminating in an exhibition at Refugee Festival Scotland. Working with designer Christopher McEvoy, a group of CWIN service users have developed their own fabric designs inspired by each person’s culture.

Portfolio Preparation Course Glasgow, from August

Now, At The Latest, Karla Black

Karla Black Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, from 7 Jul

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Merchant City Festival

THE SKINNY

June 2021

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June 2021

Graduate Showcase 2021

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THE SKINNY

Lost Time As lockdown eases and we start seeing friends in groups again, it’s natural to feel a bit on edge. We speak to psychologists about managing anxiety while socialising in the new normal, healthy boundaries and if friendship has changed over the last year Words: Tomiwa Folorunso Illustrations: AJ Higgins

As we start to be physically close to people again, we cannot minimise the effects of having not been close for such a long period of time. As Dash says, over the past year, we’ve had to enforce boundaries for our own health and safety – but also for the wellbeing of those we live with and the general public. It’s forced me to consider the boundaries in my own life, especially as we reemerge into public space in larger groups of friends. Dr Laura Williams, a Scottish clinical psychologist who works with people with anxiety disorders, also highlights the importance of boundaries: figuring them out, setting them and then following through with them. “We’re likely to be a bit more discerning about how we spend our time. Your time is valuable and precious,” she tells me. I had always considered my love language – how I give and receive love – to be gift-exchanging, but over the past 14 months, which for me has

Anxiety UK included moving to another country, I’m certain that this language has changed to spending quality time. Friends reaching out, wanting to check in with me and make plans has shown me who really cares for and values me. In turn, this has reminded me of my own value and what I bring to my friendships and relationships, as well as what I need from them. Making new friendships in your 20s, in a new city, is terrifying enough without the effects of a global pandemic, but this is also a moment to consider past and future relationships. “For some people, it could be that they don’t want a wider social network; they want an intimate, meaningful network. Or, it could be that they just want to meet as many people as possible!” explains Dash. She tells me that we also have to think about “how we negotiate those lanes of our friendship and try to be aware of our needs, but also somebody else’s.” This can be a challenge, especially if we have experienced loneliness over the last year or have just spent more time alone. It might be strange to go back to thinking about what other people need, and how to fulfil the needs of the people you care about without compromising your own wellbeing. It might also take some time. “I am kind of hopeful that [lockdown and COVID-19] doesn’t change things too much,” says Dr Williams. “I think it’s much more about boundaries and who you’re spending your time with, as opposed to the idea that friendships will change in terms of how they look.” Boundaries are the overwhelming takeaway from my conversations with Dash and Dr Williams. As the experts say, it takes time to figure them out, to understand why you need them and why it can feel hard to enforce them, particularly when worried about the feelings of others. But moving forward, boundaries will be key to sustain healthy relationships on all sides. As we are finally able to explore our cities more, see our friends in the physical world and make up for lost time, I will be enforcing my own boundaries, so that I can give and receive the most in friendships that have survived this pandemic.

June 2021 — Feature

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“46% of people concerned about restrictions lifting cited the pressures of socialising as their biggest worry”

Intersections

e’re free! Okay, almost free. Lockdown is easing, slowly, carefully and (hopefully) safely. We can go for dinner, drinks, grab a coffee and finally hug our friends. For a lot of us this marks the end of over a year of having to be physically apart from loved ones, friends and communities; over a year of sustaining or forging relationships through video calls, voice messages and texts. It’s exciting – but it’s also nerve-wracking. When lockdown was first announced in early 2020, I wasn’t scared or worried about the relationships and friendships outside of my family home. I have always had a few friends that didn’t live geographically close to me, and through trial and error, I had always found ways to keep in touch and communicate online. But now, I’m starting to feel the impact of the past year on my friendships. The few, small social interactions I have had left me exhausted, and the thought of socialising with more than a couple of people or meeting new people feels overwhelming. And it seems like I’m not the only one: Anxiety UK found that 46% of people who are concerned about restrictions lifting cited the pressures of socialising as their biggest worry. Amrita Dash is a Glasgow-based integrated therapist and clinical supervisor. She explains to me that it is incredibly normal to feel apprehensive about moving out of lockdown and establishing, or re-establishing, friendships in the same way as we did pre-COVID. For 14 months we have been taught that the world is an unsafe place. “That feeling of 14 months is not going to disappear overnight,” says Dash. “We could somatically store that. Is it safe? Is it unsafe? What are my boundaries? Because so many boundaries were put in place [over lockdown].”

THE SKINNY

From The Ground Up Dardishi Festival goes online for its first digital festival at the end of June. We catch up with Dardishi’s founder Samar Ziadat to discuss the project’s origins, zine culture and building something new

Illustration: Nour Elshamy

Intersections

Interview: Katie Goh

June 2021 — Feature

hen Samar Ziadat was at university and her sister was finishing school, they decided to start a small online platform called Dardishi, where Arab and North African women and non-binary people could publish their art, writing and films. “We started it because we felt like we weren’t being represented as Arab women in the media,” explains Ziadat. “Or, when we were, a certain narrative was being mediated through the lens of white people or men, both in the Arab and Western media.” The small project suddenly began to snowball in popularity and reach as Arab and North African women and non-binary people across the world began contributing to Dardishi’s zines and community projects. Funding and a DIY ethos enabled an annual festival and year-round events as well as taking on a designer-in-residence. At the end of June, Dardishi Festival goes online, with events, films and workshops that seem especially important given the global context of when the festival is taking place. This year’s programme was locked in before the most recent wave of violence in Palestine, but Ziadat hopes the festival’s free community care workshops can offer some comfort and a talk by the Palestinian Feminist Collective can provide education and action points. While every day brings a constantly changing climate, one thing that remains steadfast is the need for community and solidarity, something Dardishi has stood for since its origins in 2016. The Skinny: How has the move from in-person to online events been over the last year? Samar Ziadat: It’s actually been really rewarding because I feel like Dardishi has come full circle. We started out as an online platform and our connection to our community was digital before we started putting on events in person. Even though Dardishi is a Scottish-based project, from its inception we’ve had an international reach. So going online means we can connect with that audience that has always existed but has maybe been left out, particularly in the Middle East where 45% of our online following is based. The festival is primarily for Arab and North African women, and to connect with all of us – whether it’s diasporic communities spread across the world or people in our homelands – that’s been really rewarding.

Dardishi is rooted in DIY, zine culture. Why has that ethos been important to the project? Zine and pamphlet making has always been about exploring niche topics, but from their inception, a central part of zines has been about sharing human experience and using them to talk about race, sexism, class and disability. Creating zines of my own and then putting together Dardishi zine was about putting forth an idea and trying to connect with people. Zines are traditionally given out for free or for a really affordable price and information is demographically disseminated. The internet felt like a perfect place for Dardishi zine and this year we made our zine available digitally to keep costs low so people could access it affordably. This year’s festival programme feels like it really reflects Dardishi’s many communities, interests and ethos. How was putting together that programme? Normally, we can’t afford to bring in international talent so this year’s programme is really exciting because we’ve got people based everywhere who are showcasing their work. The premise of the festival and the zine is the same: to connect with each other as Arab and North African women and non-binary people. There are so many layers to what it means to be a person and, while being Arab and North African is central to our community and who we are, some of us are disabled, some of us are queer, some of us are asylum seekers, some of us are in exile, some of us are in our homelands, some of us are immigrants. There’s so much to every person and sometimes it can feel isolating even within your own community. Dardishi is about reaching out to one another and saying, “Hey I’m kinda weird too!” It feels like, within Scotland, there’s been a recent surge in grassroots arts initiatives that — 46 —

have been set up apart from traditional institutions and led by the communities they serve. Is that something you’ve noticed over the last five years of organising Dardishi? When the zine started it was about putting forth thoughts and ideas that we didn’t feel were out there in the void, whether that’s in television or journalism or mainstream publishing. Of course every community group, organisation and grassroots initiative is very different, but, for me, setting up Dardishi was a matter of necessity. Before I was running Dardishi, I worked at several art institutions in Scotland and, personally, I didn’t think I could survive working in traditional institutions or that I was really valued. And it’s not just me; people of colour in Scotland have been talking about this for a long time. Starting Dardishi was about bringing together people who work in the arts and were treated in a similar way, and trying to do something different – and not just something that is defined by being the opposite of white institutions, but building something new from the ground up. This isn’t something we’ve just invented, it comes from a long history of grassroots organising that for generations has focused on the question of what if we burn it down and start again. That’s what I really hope people feel when they attend the festival. Dardishi Festival takes place online 18-27 Jun Tickets are available on a sliding scale, between £0-12. Find out more by going to dardishi.com/2021festival

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Intersections

June 2021 — Feature

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Photo: Melanie Letoré

Photo: Michael Barr

June 2021 – Feature

Showcase

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Song Dynasty ○○ (2018)

Song Dynasty ○ (2017)

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Photo: Anna Arca

Photo: Michael Pollard

Showcase

Happy Happy Leaf (2018)

✵may-may songuu✵ (installation view, 2020)

orn in Edinburgh in 1993, Rae-Yen Song lives and works in Glasgow. Song’s work explores the position of Other within our tangled reality, and speaks broadly and politically about foreignness, identity, survival and what it means to belong – or not. It draws first and foremost on personal and familial experiences, then uses fantasy and fabulation to fill in the gaps – inflating and embellishing these narrative source materials, elevating them to the level of parable, visualising them, and finally plotting them as points and histories in a slowly-developing

alternate dimension, saturated with affect, absurdity and incongruity. The work finds form via drawing, sculpture, costume, props, video, animation, family collaboration, online content and performative actions in public. Increasingly, any or all of these elements coalesce as installations that form coherent, singular environments, and we, as viewers, are granted occasional glimpses of Song’s alternate dimension, via the medium of exhibitions and other artworks, which collectively come to form an archive of the Song family’s past, present and future. — 49 —

June 2021 – Feature

Rae-Yen Song Song’s work can be seen in Fabric of Society, a group exhibition alongside Rabiya Choudhry, Jasleen Kaur and Raisa Kabir as part of Glasgow International’s Across the City programme (The Deep End, G41 2PZ). It can also be seen in a nascent but growing online repository, songdynasty.life, and at rae-yen-song.com

Instagram: @raeyensong

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Community Building Art

In the fourth in our series platforming emergent writers, produced in partnership with Edinburgh International Festival, we meet participants and organisers at WHALE Arts, NEMO Arts and Birds of Paradise to learn about their use of the arts to build community and support marginalised people Interviews: Kate Ireland Illustrations: Rachael Hood vital social purpose of the arts, particularly in Scotland. Groups, charities and organisations ploughed ahead with their community and engagement work amid the pandemic, pushing forward their commitment to elevate and empower the creative skills of individuals who face multiple, complex barriers to equality and accessibility in the arts and the wider world. NEMO Arts One such organisation is NEMO Arts. A Glasgow-based charity set up in 1998 by Hugh and Isabelle McCue, NEMO is committed to using the arts to improve the mental health and wellbeing of its participants as well as reduce the stigma and isolation associated with mental illness. Through drama, visual art and music workshops, NEMO engages with a diverse network of individuals who have been referred through various mental health services, encouraging them to explore their innate creativity in a safe, judgment-free environment. Paul Griffin is a regular participant in NEMO Arts’ weekly drama workshops. “I hide an

enormous amount of myself,” Paul tells us, “unless it comes to this sort of stuff – that’s when I can let it out. I feel like a very unconventional person to try and work with, but always when you’re in the arts, everybody’s a bit unconventional, so it feels more comfortable. “When you’re working with arts groups, it does become like a family that you’re part of. I’ve never felt weird in NEMO, it’s the first place I’ve been in that I feel I owe something back to.” — 50 —

In the wake of the first lockdown announcement in March 2020, NEMO was quick to move its workshops online, recognising the intensified state of isolation their participants would face. But moving an arts organisation geared towards accessibility into the digital sphere comes with its challenges, and invites questions of access in online spaces, as NEMO Arts CEO Hugh McCue describes. “There were a lot of (participants) that were not technically literate or even had access to the internet,” Hugh says, “so we had to find a way to support those people. We made the decision to buy tablets and phones with mobile data and deliver them to people, as well as provide full NEMO Arts support to be able to help people through. “We’d never done anything like that as we hadn’t ever considered digital literacy, although I’m really proud of the way we’ve done it. We will look to include that in our offerings in the future because it’s so important as we’ve seen in the past year; if you don’t have access to the internet, you’re very limited.” “It was literally the next week they got their digital workshops up and running,” Paul says, “they didn’t leave us hanging at all. You’ve seen plenty of that with the government, but this wee charity managed to look after us as best they could. It gave me something to hold on to throughout and look forward to, because I don’t really speak to anybody outside of the workshops. During the pandemic I’ve just been getting more and more cut off from people and not really wanting to be involved, but NEMO keeps me talking to people.” When the restrictions allowed, as well as workshops, one-to-one singing sessions with vocal coach Greg Muir were arranged for members of NEMO to find their singing voices and increase their confidence. Paul, like many others, considered this continued connection to others and the opportunity to express himself to be a vital lifeline. “When we started working on character development that really got me going,” he says. “that started everything to do with the play I’m trying to write now, that Image: courtesy of NEMO Arts

June 2021 — Feature

n future discussions about the arts in the COVID era, we might reflect on the sense of dread we experienced as our summer festival plans dried up, or the lump in our throats as Instagram feeds were intermittently punctuated by our favourite venues announcing temporary closures. By all accounts, the dominant narrative of the arts and culture industries, during those dark early days when the full extent of the pandemic was becoming clear to us, was one of an eerie, mass shutdown. It was also during this time that elite theatrical A-listers, including the likes of Phoebe WallerBridge and James McAvoy, banded together and penned open letters to the government, campaigning for the UK theatre scene to be recognised as a lucrative and worthy cultural export, deserving of subsidy until the virus was under control. This fight for the arts’ credibility was spurred on when the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, suggested that those that work in the arts should consider re-training in order to financially support themselves. It was a return of the rightwing idea that the arts are an expendable pastime, a mere distraction as the rest of society knuckles down and does the ‘real work’. The result of this widely publicised tension was that the conversation surrounding the arts became centred on commercial viability. Ticket sales, proven monetary value, stable career paths. A conversation steered by those in positions of power, who are no stranger to large crowds listening intently. While the cultural, economic and emotional value of the arts is abundantly clear, this narrative obscures the

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Image: courtesy of WHALE Arts

Art

Photo: Alison Johnston

totally came from NEMO, looking at the different pursuing her own as making regular ways of creating characters that I hadn’t thought of Reiki business. She ‘Friendship Calls’.” before. The singing has also been a huge, huge says: “It makes me WHALE have also thing. To be singing again, there’s something about feel that I’m doing provided “art and Staff preparing wellbeing packs to send out to the community, still from WHALE Arts Covid Response film by Arms & Legs that that’s been a release. I recorded my song something towards wellbeing packs for yesterday, and I was shaken after it.” my own personal adults and families With lockdown reducing face-to-face interac- which were posted or hand delivered locally, development while being part of a group which is tion and disrupting routines, combined with really important when the world has been on hold outdoor creative sessions in our community financial insecurity and a plethora of other unand I have felt very lost.” garden and supported participants to return to precedented anxieties, the severity of mental IIi Rawalai, another of the group’s members, in-person groups.” health issues across the UK agrees. “It’s a way of expressing who I am through The organisation also has been exacerbated. Around my work and it’s something that I love to do,” she runs a Mums into Business a fifth of all respondents in a says. “I feel like I’m home when I’m doing it. It’s a group, a place for women to UK-wide tracking study space where I can just let my creative mind flow. I meet and develop their skills conducted last June reported am a believer that you don’t have to be academias aspiring creative entrepresymptoms of anxiety or cally good to be great and to make a change in neurs. Spinning off from the depression at a level that Friday Mums group created by today’s world. This is where art comes in.” IIi has might require intervention, Kirsty Frankland, MIB is led by recently launched her own company that sells with young adults, women and unique hand-painted decorative cushions and freelance journalist and bespoke earrings. those with pre-existing health facilitator Sindy Santos. The As the pandemic placed huge socio-economor economic barriers reporting group offers a practical and ic strain on communities such as Wester Hailes, the highest levels of difficulty. supporting environment to We ask Hugh about the promote the women’s business groups like Mums into Business provided an anchor and network of support to these women. potential of the arts to impact ideas, while taking into Yvonne Bostock, a WHALE Arts coach and mentor, the mental health of its consideration the childcare says: “The members of the group have been a participants: “I think one of needs of its members. “The group has massively great support for one another over lockdown the main things is that they’ve benefited from the Zoom – especially in terms of building self-confidence. been connected with other workshops during the past year, As we come out of lockdown, we plan to extend human beings, regardless of Painting the Community Garden Shed, WHALE Arts as we explored different ways that to include the children of our members.” what the artform is. That is to keep celebrating the sesalways one of the most sions online with all sorts of events and business Birds of Paradise important things that people feed back, that workshops,” Sindy explains. Birds of Paradise are another arts organisation they’re not alone anymore.” For Sumaira Mirza, the group gave her the whose priorities are structured around the people motivation to turn her passion for cooking into a they work with. Founded in 1993, it is the only WHALE Arts business. “In lockdown I kept in touch with the professional disability-led theatre company in Connecting participants with the community is group and that helped with the boredom, and I am Scotland, creating world-class touring productions also at the heart of WHALE Arts’ work. Set up in always happy when I see the ladies. I gained as well as pioneering development programmes 1992 by residents of Wester Hailes in Edinburgh, confidence and spent the pandemic time very busy and strategic plans to work with young disabled WHALE Arts are a charity and social enterprise cooking and creating new recipes and menus.” artists and set a precedent of accessibility and committed to fostering supportive networks and structural representation for the wider industry. providing creative opportunities in the area. Callum Madge, the company’s Engagement The 2020 SIMD (Scottish Index of Multiple Manager, describes Birds of Paradise’s ethos as Deprivation) report found Wester Hailes to be in developing “future generations of disabled artists”, the top 5% of Scotland’s most deprived areas. As and one of the company’s main development the reality of the COVID crisis became clear, strands is BOP Young Artists initiative. The proWHALE Arts were actively responding to the ject, which began in 2019, brings together a shifting needs of the locals, offering weekly free selected cohort of young Scottish talent who meals and delivering food provisions to residents. identify as disabled, and supports them over an Despite the unprecedented challenges the intensive period of mentorship and collaboration. community was facing, the organisation remained The programme was heavily impacted by the committed to keeping people connected through pandemic, with its pilot cohort of artists staying in creativity, as WHALE Arts CEO Leah Black explace for a year longer than planned and a new plains. “Our response back in March 2020 was to Ili Rawaili, Mums into group getting involved online, as Development move our groups online,” Leah tells us, “however Officer Morna McGeogh explains: “We had a over the last 14 months we have grown and develBusiness participant funding report that said we would recruit a new oped as a team and worked out different ways to “Arts is very important in my family,” Sumaira cohort and there would be graduating artists and I keep contact and creativity going between us, our adds. “I have two daughters who love WHALE Arts’ was just like ‘I can’t do that right now’, and the rest freelance artists and our participants. groups. There is always something going on.” of the company was absolutely behind me. “We kept all our regular freelance artists on “We now have a second cohort who are The value of staying connected through the and they have continued to work with participants working with us digitally which is allowing us to be MIB group during the past year was a huge bonus in a range of ways, including creating online able to work with people from all across Scotland, classes with groups of adults and children, as well for Verity Combe, a recent member who has been — 51 —

June 2021 — Feature

“You don’t have to be academically good to be great and to make a change in today's world. This is where art comes in"

June 2021 — Feature

Art

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which is really cool. So some of our young artists we’re working with are based in Inverness, another is in Fife, so there’s a good spread. It’s been cool to [say] ‘you know what, we’re not going to let this pandemic hold back the work that we’re doing because it is important’.” The 2019 group of young artists have been continuing to work together to devise a performance installation that relays their broad and nuanced responses to the concept of a ‘Locked World’; a term that derived from one of the artists describing their experience of being autistic and evolved into a reflexive and exploratory project. The digital cohort of artists have been honing their writing skills, receiving workshops from industry professionals and exploring the various facets of writing for performance. This group is soon to receive mentoring and collaboration with poets, theatre-makers and film-makers. Karis Williamson, a poet, scriptwriter and creative based in the Highlands, says: “The Zoom platform has made it much more accessible to me, because the physical aspects of workshops, like travelling to Glasgow, all these challenges have been removed.” Rebecca Hogan, an aspiring playwright and screenwriter, found the workshops a vital tool for honing her craft. “They’ve been so interesting and insightful and I feel like it’s given me such a good foundation to help me develop my own writing abilities,” she says. “I am just so impressed with everything we’ve been able to do.” Emily Ingram, a writer, director and set maker who joined the pilot scheme of the Young Artists in 2019, also described the group as being a safe space. Emily says: “The term disabled was something I was only just coming to terms with using, so it felt like quite a scary thing almost to apply to be part of the Young Artists when it was still quite a new part of my identity in many ways, but it was such a secure space to begin to understand what disability means to me. “We all face different, but in some ways similar challenges. Having people to be able to go, ‘oh, are you experiencing this?’ or ‘how do I navigate this?’ is really wonderful. Having that shared sense of community, that shared language, that shared experience is so valuable.” Emily is quick to point out, however, that the digital medium isn’t accessible for everyone, as two of her fellow young artists left the cohort due to not being able to use online platforms. “There’s so many people who are being left behind for digital access reasons or other access reasons,”

Emily says, “but Birds of Paradise are doing wonderful things to combat that. It’s a tricky time to be disabled.” A meeting of the BOP Young Artists digital cohort We asked each of the young artists, from their experience, for ways the arts could be made more accessible and inclusive for disabled people. Karis highlights the importance of embedding access to the arts for disabled creatives. Karis says: “It ensures the audiences are aware that disability is just another kind of difference, that all people in theatre can relate to in their own way, and that all people, in all performances, have a level of differences, and it’s not just accepted but celebrated.” Rebecca agrees: “I feel like when you just add access at the very last minute it’s not that effective. But I feel like it’s so much Morna McGeogh, more interesting and creative when you think about it from the beginning and you realize that there are so many things that you can actually do, the way you can incorporate the sign language interpreter, for example, or the captions or the audio description.” On the other hand, Emily feels that venues and organisations’ process of granting opportunities needs to be more transparent and democratic, starting with offering meaningful paid placements for early-career

artists. “You apply to a large venue,” Emily says, “and they go ‘oh, you’re great, but you don’t have the experience’, but they’re not going to give you a way to get the experience. And the way to get the experience is to take on hours and hours and years of unpaid work, which only a very specific section of society are able to do. If you’re disabled, if you’re working class, if you’ve got childcare commitments, it’s impossible to get the experience just to get on the ground floor.” At the dawn of the pandemic, politicians and social commentators proclaimed that the COVID-19 crisis was a great equaliser, an omnipotent force that grouped everyone together under a homogenous, shared experience. It wasn’t, and the prospect of losing everything the arts has to offer was a far more serious issue for those already marginalised in society. Yet organisations like NEMO, WHALE and Birds of Paradise have shown that their work – connecting Birds of Paradise and empowering people in their communities through arts – can continue in even the most severe circumstances. Anyone in doubt over the future of the arts in a post-COVID landscape should look to what organisations like these have achieved, and realise the power, impact and necessity of grassroots community art.

“It's been cool to [say] ‘you know what, we're not going to let this pandemic hold back the work that we're doing because it is important’”

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This is the fourth of six extended features exploring the arts in 2021, produced with support from Edinburgh International Festival

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I Feel Love Ahead of releasing her debut album via her own record label, DJ and producer Rebecca Vasmant gives us a track-by-track rundown of With Love, From Glasgow

Words: Rebecca Vasmant

Rebecca Vasmant plays Riverside by Night, SWG3, Glasgow, 4 Sep rebeccasrecords. bandcamp.com

Timing’s End Timing’s End is a soundscape that I wanted to give a feeling of being comfortable with [one’s] inner peace and vulnerability in modern-day life. We all feel things, we often deny them and cover them up, and I wanted this to be a place in which we could all feel the things that modern-day life does not allow us to feel in our everyday lives. Vulnerability is beautiful, and we should all feel strong enough within ourselves to show this. Freefall (ft. Nadya Albertsson) Freefall is a love story about a soul who is afraid to fall, and to ‘freefall’ into that space where there’s no turning back. Nadya does emotion so perfectly in this track, and Cameron-Thompson Duncan on trumpet along with the bass soundscape [helps] form the feelings that make the track [come to life]. I really love this track thanks to the amazing musicianship and singing from the musicians who have become my musical family. Jewels of Thought (ft. Paix and Harry Weir) We wanted to pay homage to our favourite ever musician and musical hero, Pharoah Sanders. This is a bit of a modern take on his record Jewels of Thought, and we hope that if Pharoah ever heard this track it would do him proud. Harry Weir plays perfectly on this – and does Pharoah’s sound so well – as does Paix who ties the whole thing together with her beautiful vocals

floating in and out. We hope you like this one, Pharoah, and we love you very much. Autumn Leaves (ft. Emilie Boyd) Autumn Leaves is a little walk through a rainy autumn morning. Myself and Emilie Boyd put this little poem together inspired by autumn, the changes in the seasons, and our love for nature. Morning (Mourning) This track was written about the feeling of mourning when leaving someone you know you won’t be able to see for a while, and the feeling of mourning the loss of that person. Imagine being at the airport and dropping someone off who is going far away from the place you need to be – it’s really all about that feeling. Sitting back in your chair and feeling the loss of someone you love. Pride of Winter Pride of Winter is a song about the dark cloud black dog making everything a bit muddy inside of yourself. It’s about pride, loss, love and everything in-between. Internal Dispute (ft. Paix) This track is really personal to me and is really about the internal dispute inside my head. It is a letter to all of you who have this same battle, and it’s about making peace with that inner battle, winning the war, and experiencing true self-love. Universal Code Universal Code is about us all being united and equal, and living by a universal code and loving each other.

Idealists (Outro) This little outro skit is about the admiration and respect that I have for all of the musicians who have dedicated their whole lives to perfecting their craft. I respect and have such admiration for those in the world who have done this in order to give us amazing music.

June 2021 — Feature

Photo: Steven McLaren

Revolution (ft. Paix) Revolution is all about thinking and feeling empathy for others, looking outside of yourself, and thinking about more than yourself. If we all did and acted like that in our everyday lives, then that would be very powerful indeed.

Music really is a privilege, and I can honestly say that deep within my heart I am totally grateful for every piece of amazing music that I have been lucky enough to have been able to hear. I realise that even if we spent every waking minute of every day searching for music, we would not have enough time to discover it all, and this thought is overwhelming. I thank every musician, composer, maestro and producer for every piece of music, whether it has been noticed or unnoticed, and wake up every day happy to be able to just take the time to listen and appreciate music. — 53 —

Music

With Love, From Glasgow is released on 4 Jun via Rebecca’s Records; read our review on p60

tart of Time Start of Time is exactly as the track title describes – it’s a homage to the concept of time. How we as humans perceive time and space, the concept that time dictates how we feel at any given moment, to any given situation, and that leads to us feeling emotions towards people and things. It’s about feelings, and feeling connected to the universe, space, people, time, and love, because we should always feel love.

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A World So New As Australia’s The Avalanches celebrate 20 years of Since I Left You, we take a fond trip down memory lane and relish in an album that made us think differently about music

Music

Words: Tallah Brash

June 2021 — Feature

inety-nine percent of the music purchases I made in a pre-streaming world were on a total whim. Decisions to part with what little money I had were often based on one, or a combination of the following reasons: a friend had recommended it; I liked one/all of the singles; I liked the artwork. There was no try before you buy. I remember so vividly the day I bought The Avalanches’ debut album, Since I Left You. I hadn’t gone record shopping specifically to buy that album, but when I saw it on the shelf in the Cockburn Street Fopp (RIP), I knew almost immediately that I had to have it in my collection. I knew it featured the incredibly fun Frontier Psychiatrist, which I loved, but I didn’t know much else about it. On the day it was the striking artwork and CD case that sealed the deal for me, making me hurriedly hand over a crumpled note to the cashier. Since I Left You wasn’t in the usual prone-to-cracking plastic jewel case I’d become so tired of, but rather it was in a thick papery case, and the rich blue waves of its artwork both looked and felt amazing. This month, Since I Left You celebrates the 20th anniversary of its UK release with a deluxe edition reissue, its gorgeous blue cover art now embellished with a warm smear of paint in summery hues of yellow, pink and orange. This streak of sunshine further exemplifies how much of a perfect summer record Since I Left You is; for years it’s been the first I’ve reached for when the sun suddenly feels warm on my skin. And although there hasn’t been much sun to report thus far in 2021, when the sun has shone Since I Left You has been the first thing on my mind. ‘Get a drink, have a good time now, welcome to paradise’,

the opening track invites within its first minute, before the Everyday by The Main Attraction sample gloriously bursts into view: ‘Since I met you, I found a world so new.’ When I first heard Since I Left You I don’t think I’d ever heard anything quite like it, and I’m honestly not sure I’ve heard anything like it since. In their Top Albums of 2001 list, where it placed third, Pitchfork summed it up as “a party mix you can sink your teeth into without ever having to worry about hitting something stale or sour.” From the welcoming Tony Mottolasampled guitar on the opening title track, to the Holiday bass line borrowed from Madonna on Stay Another Season (which also gets a reprise later on Little Journey), to the sample from John Waters’ 1981 comedy Polyester on Frontier Psychiatrist, Since I Left You is the best party mix I’ve ever tasted, and an absolute ride of a listen from start to end. Made up of an insane number of samples – some sources say there are over 3,500 while others claim it’s more like 900 – it’s still astonishing to me now how well this album of plunderphonics flows; samples glide in and out of focus effortlessly, always exactly where they’re meant to be, nothing out of place. How one song (Two Hearts in 3/4 Time) can so seamlessly go from a sample of Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey from Cabaret’s Money, Money, to a swirl of oohs and aahs from a Tony Motolla cover of The Beatles’ With a Little Help from My Friends, into tumbling Marlena Shaw vocals lifted from her 1977 single Yu-Ma, all within its first 30 seconds is, quite honestly, beyond comprehension. Even more so when you notice those aren’t the only three things going on in that half-a-minute. It’s then nothing short of mindblowing that by the end of the song – as with almost every song on this album, we find ourselves somewhere completely different – a sample from John Cale’s Ghost Story sits neatly alongside another from Raekwon’s Glaciers of Ice. As well as a reissue of the album’s much-loved 18 tracks, the 20th anniversary deluxe edition also boasts a stack of bonus tracks, including original demos of Pablo’s Cruise and the Blowflysampling Electricity. Several Avalanches remixes also feature, including a jubilant take on Belle & Sebastian’s I’m a Cuckoo as well as a sparse 90-second reimagining of Franz Ferdinand’s understated Fade Together. Plus there are a number of remixes from the likes of Leon Vynehall, Sinkane, Stereolab and the late, great MF DOOM, whose remix of Tonight May Have to Last Me All My Life features a gripping previously unheard vocal contribution. Almost two decades ago The Avalanches taught me that it’s always worth taking a chance on something you don’t know much about, and every year when the sun is warm and there isn’t a cloud in the sky I can’t wait to jump back into their world: ‘Get a drink, have a good time now, welcome to paradise.’ Since I Left You: 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition is released on 4 Jun via XL Recordings theavalanches.com

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Culture Club Having worked together on elements of V&A Dundee’s current Night Fever exhibition, British photographer and artist Vinca Petersen and Dundee-based artist Scott Duncan discuss creating, collaborating and clubbing Interview: Nadia Younes

Clubs

VP: I don’t go clubbing that much anymore because it’s exhausting, but I love dancing and I love dancing with other people. I love the silliness that comes about and the collective joy, the collective experience of being with other human beings and throwing your body around. That’s what clubbing always was to me. In my work now I’m exploring ways of taking those very important human things out of the club… just the age-old need for us humans to gather and celebrate the ritual around those simple needs and wants and joys. SD: I suppose one thing for me, when I first got into raving and clubbing, was a sense of identity and belonging, and a community. That was something that appealed to me. It was something that was ours, rather than something that was secondhand. I was into some of the music before, like the first kind of dance music I was into was breakbeat, early jungle and drum and bass, but before that I was into heavy metal and hip-hop. And, although I enjoyed them, I somehow didn’t really feel like it was our type of thing. VP: Well, also, in those situations you’re definitely the audience. Whereas with dance music, you’re essential to it; you’re essential to the music. But that community thing, that’s a massive thing. I think if we drew a graph we could probably almost see the sort of destruction of society and community, thanks to Thatcher etc, and the rise of our desire to create our own communities. To this day, it’s one thing that worries me. Although, when I talked about my experiences of clubbing it was all very cheesy and joyful, and then you were telling me that some of the Scottish clubs were pretty hardcore. It wasn’t always a fun, joyful experience. It could be quite intense. SD: I suppose, thinking about that, when I first started going to clubs, you were confronted by real violence... There was a mixture of people that went… It was a wee bit dodgy, but it gave it a wee bit of an edge maybe when you were younger. I wouldn’t like it now, of course. VP: It was exciting, definitely. In all the illegal raves I went to there was always a dark undercurrent... It was kind of like the heady mixture of a free, unpoliced environment that anyone could come into, and then I guess on the dodgier side, people making money. And whenever there’s money, there’s trouble.

“[I love] the collective joy, the collective experience of being with other human beings and throwing your body around” Vinca Petersen — 55 —

Night Fever: Designing Club Culture, V&A Dundee, until 9 Jan 2022

June 2021 — Feature

Scott Duncan: I think I added you just because I was interested in your books. Then, during the first lockdown, I made a zine that was about Dundee – maybe some of the less salubrious, kind of undercurrents of Dundee – and you asked me to send you one. Vinca Petersen: Basically, I was imagining coming to Dundee and putting up this great big thing on the wall that I’ve made and thinking I want to reflect that somehow in the local area, and you became my kind of way into Dundee. SD: I’m really glad that you did decide to look locally to see what kind of things were happening or had happened... It’s interesting how it came together, obviously with both of us being collectors of things. I suppose the zine was about putting out some of those types of things, but also about preserving things and trying to gather other people’s things as well. VP: It’s always interesting how little value some of this has, but it’s the social history of the last 20/30 years. So much has been digitalised, but I still love something you can hold in your hand. The sugar paper we use for the cover, which was your idea, just feels great and that’s important, too. It was this two-way idea of us wanting to give beyond the walls of the museum, but also inviting others to participate and come in somehow. SD: This ties in with a lot of the themes in your work about democratising things and bringing in outsiders. It’s good to be able to bring people’s voices into a space like the V&A, where they might not traditionally go or be that comfortable. VP: I think in the art world things can become dehumanised quite easily, like the size of the buildings, the sort of cleanness... everything that people associate with a big gallery: big, white, wide-open spaces with often quite monolithic artworks in there. That’s all slightly terrifying for an animal, the animal in us. It’s much easier for me to work on a different level.

Image: Mark Agacan

On clubbing and community

Image: Hardcore Collage

On creating and collaborating

THE SKINNY

Quiet Garden Ahead of the unveiling of her installation Quiet Garden at the London Design Biennale, Naomi Mcintosh talks to Local Heroes about participating in one of this year’s most important international design events

Art

Interview: Stacey Hunter

he London Design Biennale, set within the historic architecture of Somerset House, presents work from 28 countries, territories and cities in a global gathering of design. Some of the world’s most ambitious and imaginative designers and curators have responded to Artistic Director Es Devlin’s theme of Resonance in the context of climate emergency. Quiet Garden is a collaboration between Ruup & Form and Naomi Mcintosh, an interdisciplinary designer based in Crathie, Aberdeenshire. It is a contemplative installation consisting of suspended wooden sculptures drawing inspiration from natural elements. The installation has been developed with sustainability at its core and responds to nature’s resonance engaging in a quiet conversation with the viewer.

“It’s a reflection and personal project that has evolved over the last year” says Mcintosh. An early conversation with the project curator Varuna Kaur Kollanethu prompted me to advance the project. I was spending less time making work in 2020 and much more time in my garden, running and drawing. I gave myself permission to think of these things as interconnected.” The sculptures are boundaryless columns, allowing the viewer to see into and through the pieces, playing with the internal and external structure and using light to play with shadows. The materials can be skeuomorphic, looking heavy and solid at times, and light and lace-like at others. The installation is an interpretation of space, pattern, and movement through the relationship between the body and object. Mcintosh uses wood

June 2021 — Feature

Image: Courtesy of artist

as a material to prompt an emotional response to resonance of space and specifically the feeling and sensation of being within green landscapes. “Design, loosely, is about problem solving and design can create change. For me, this is currently about preciousness and well-being. Preciousness of materials and using design to tell a story about the sanctity of landscape and nature,” she explains. Mcintosh captures the changing feeling of space, scale and light when among the trees. This sensation can have a powerful and lasting impact, and she captures the vibrating and oscillating energy by exploring visual noise. With a background in architecture, she creates spaces by using techniques similar to an architectural model maker. “I’m really interested in the interpretation of this year’s theme of ‘Resonance’ and the storytelling and sharing of experiences from around the world. A physical exhibition now is so uplifting and exciting. In Quiet Garden we are responding to nature’s resonance and have considered transporting the viewer by the experience of visual, sound and scent within the installation. It is the immersive qualities of the pavilions that really interests me.” Mcintosh is a designer, maker and educator and a graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture and Central Saint Martins. She takes inspiration from movement, patterns, architecture, landscape and the natural world. Using qualities found in her jewellery she works on different scales, from sculptural objects to installations. With precise geometry, the pieces explore the relationship between the body and objects, and how volumes, patterns, planes and forms are seen. Ruup & Form is a contemporary crafts and applied art gallery furthering the blurring lines between art and craft, and presenting carefully curated collections of unique, contemporary crafted objects. See the installation at Somerset House, 1-27 Jun, Room 24, East Wing Quiet Garden was curated by Varuna Kaur Kollanethu for Ruup & Form Gallery

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THE SKINNY

Shop Talk Lockdown star Ania Magliano on her new podcast, work anxiety as a form of material, and her hopes for the future of live comedy Interview: Louis Cammell

Really, it’s in these moments – when she can unpack a small observation for maximum laughs – that Magliano is most on-brand. She’s recently stacked up millions of views on TikTok with sketches like “What your email signature says

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Ania Magliano co-hosts The Weekly Shop podcast alongside Harry Monaghan, and it’s available to listen to on Apple Podcasts You can follow Magliano on Twitter @AniaMags, Instagram @aniamagliano, Facebook @aniamaglianocomedy and TikTok @aniamagliano

June 2021 — Feature

Ania Magliano

funding, so if the comedy industry isn’t thinking about them then we’re just going to end up with such a boring industry,” she explains. “It’s not going to be funny, it’s not going to be good and it’s not going to be fair.” As for Magliano’s work-in-progress show, Absolutely No Worries if Not, she’s not sure that the story she had at her first preview in February 2020 is the one she wants to tell anymore. “That show was all about my teenage years as a YouTuber,” but now she just wants to “find the stuff that’s funny and figure out the theme afterwards.” “Maybe it’ll be about email signatures,” she adds, cynically. “That seems to go down well.”

Comedy

“I was very lucky in that I went to Cambridge and was very enamoured with the comedy scene there, but it was so male-heavy at the time”

about you.” It’s her most viewed video, but also the most reflective of her own work anxiety. “A lot of material can come out of those [things] that seem very trivial but take up so much of your headspace,” says Magliano. “I have a full-time job alongside doing comedy, and I find that with every email I have to go back and delete about three exclamation marks.” I ask Magliano how she feels about the future of live standup. While she doesn’t mind her current setup – “it’s nice to have the structure of a day job, and I think it’s probably done good things for my mental health” – she does admit to having to taper her ambitions. “It would be the dream to be able to just be like, ‘comedy is secure enough that it can be a full-time thing,’ but it’s kind of like an on-and-off relationship we’ve had. I’m like, ‘I can’t go back to you yet until you promise you’ll behave.’” Magliano’s attention is on those from marginalised groups, whose prospects are most at risk. It’s been reported that for standups who are people of colour, 60% have had to seriously consider leaving comedy this past year, “and I think that’s unacceptable – it can’t happen.” She recommends Ken Cheng, Erika Ehler, Bella Hull, Kemah Bob and Sukh Ojla as fantastic acts of colour if you’re looking to diversify your lineups. She was one of the many recent voices to champion the #SaveLiveComedy fund from which that statistic comes, an initiative set up to provide hardship grants to those in the industry, and it’s not the first time she’s taken action to help ensure comedy’s accessibility. “I was very lucky in that I went to Cambridge and was very enamoured with the comedy scene there, but it was so male-heavy at the time. A lot of the conversations that were being had were with other women who felt the same, and so we set up Stockings Comedy as an open-mic night space outside of Footlights’ established ways. You know, those real old school sensibilities.” The Stockings Comedy collective continues to provide a space for anyone who doesn’t fit the “Mitchell and Webb” mould. Many performers are “already falling through the cracks of government

Image: James Deacon

nia Magliano has had a productive lockdown. “I was not one of those people who was able to take a break,” she says. “You know that meme that was going around where it was like, ‘King Lear was written during the Plague’? I was like, ‘I need to write King Lear!’, which I haven’t done, but I have done a podcast.” The Weekly Shop, which she co-hosts with fellow comic Harry Monaghan, is an ode to the humble supermarket. Lazily put, it’s the everyman’s answer to a certain ubiquitous restaurantthemed podcast. “It’s a podcast for the people,” says Magliano. “I love Off Menu [Ed Gamble and James Acaster’s restaurant podcast] but I always want to eat the food they’re talking about. With this, if you want to [do that], it’ll be, like, an Oreo.” In short, guests – starting with Mock the Week’s Maisie Adam – divulge their staple purchases, often reflecting on how the pandemic has changed their habits. The joy of the show is as much in the guests’ admissions of their idiosyncrasies as it is in hearing the good friends discover each other’s long-held habits. For example, when Monaghan mentions that he rarely tries on clothes before buying them, preferring to eyeball it. “Can I just say,” replies his co-host, “I did not know that before we agreed to do this podcast. That’s absolutely mental.”

May 2021 — Review

Books

THE SKINNY

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THE SKINNY

Music Now We offer a snapshot of the Scottish releases on offer for Record Store Day this month, and hone in on what else June has in store with releases from HYYTS and Ace City Racers among others

HYYTS

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Ace City Racers

it’s nice they’re finally getting a proper release. Experimental and truly cacophonous at points, PopUpOcalypse starts in an almost klezmer vein on Sound of Muesli, while the end of Planet Carousel could soundtrack a dance scene in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge. The second half of the record is particularly beautiful where Thing King and VeLo satisfyingly arrive one after the other; it’s on these two tracks that the impressive falsetto of Tim Vincent-Smith truly gets to shine. Elsewhere, The Ninth Wave return with their exquisite single Maybe You Didn’t Know on 3 June, Haydn Park-Patterson and Millie Kidd’s vocals sounding more beautiful than ever. Adam Stafford releases his new single Threnody for February Swallows on 11 June; described as “a lament for the environment,” it’s taken from his new album, Trophic Asynchrony, due next month on Song, by Toad. Relative newcomers Amy Papiransky releases the emotive-fueled, piano-led Summertime Blues (4 Jun); DAHLIA’s Spiralling (4 Jun), inspired by 90s trance synths, trip-hop beats and witch house, is full-bodied and soaring; and Edinburgh/Glasgow band waverley. release the “quietly contemplative” Missing Thing (11 Jun), where droning EBows, jangling guitars and heartfelt vocals combine for a euphoric crescendo.

June 2021 — Review

Photo: Cian McKenzie

madly in love Intro. Across its seven tracks, you can really hear that lived experience; the EP was written while Adam was falling in love and bandmate Sam Hunter was going through a breakup. Set for release on 11 June via Warner Brothers, helluvatime further cements HYYTS as ones to watch and features some of the most gleaming pop we’ve heard this year; the choruses on Bad Tattoo and Kinda Need You Here Tonight are festival-singalong-ready – perfect pop for belting out at the top of your lungs. A song called Living It, Loving It, Larging It is the sort of thing we’d usually avoid – it reads as very #LadsLadsLads – but in the hands of Glasgow band Ace City Racers, it’s about as far away from that hashtag as you can get. Living It... is such an addictive 80s-indebted earworm, and a great snapshot of the band’s new album Citalodisco (Last Night from Glasgow, 6 Jun). We’re inclined to agree with the band’s own side smirk description of the track – “like Vince Clarke and New Order attending a party organised by Soccer AM that’s just been gatecrashed by the Happy Mondays.” Recorded at Glasgow’s Green Door Studio, elements of no wave, art-rock and post-disco can be found all over Citalodisco, Ace City Racers at times bringing to mind the likes of Devo, A Certain Ratio, 80s New Yorkers ESG and Liquid Liquid, and, from a bit closer to home, Franz Ferdinand. Additional vocals throughout the album from Grace Barrett (whose backing singer credits include Little Boots and Deaf Havana) are a stroke of genius, as her soulful stylings beautifully complement those of the band’s James Barker. Across its ten tracks, Citalodisco rarely lets up and is awash with pleasing electronics, an abundance of disco drums, cowbells aplenty, and has us pining for an indie disco. In Edinburgh, S!nk – the band behind the playable sculpture and performance space Pianodrome – release their latest album PopUpOcalypse on 25 June. All songs found on the record were part of the band’s 2018 and 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe show, so

Photo: Stephanie Black-Daniels

t’s set to be a big month for music lovers all across the UK as the first of two Record Store Day drops lands on 12 June. Drop one includes a smattering of Scottish releases from Primal Scream, Mogwai, Garbage, Baby Strange, Django Django, Belle & Sebastian and Texas, whose Wu-Tang Clan collaboration Hi gets a 12” release with a B-side remix from Unkle. Sadly RSD won’t be the usual day of in-stores and street parties that we’re become accustomed to in a pre-pandemic world, but with Scottish shops having recently reopened, they’re looking forward to welcoming you back – read our extensive Record Store Day feature on page 16, where stores from across Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee give us their top #RSD21 picks. But there’s a lot more going on this month besides Record Store Day. Producer and DJ Rebecca Vasmant recently launched her own label – Rebecca’s Records – and this month she releases her debut record, With Love, From Glasgow. Vasmant talks us through the album track-by-track on page 53 and you can read our review on page 60. On the same page you’ll also find our thoughts on the beautiful Swallow Me, singer-songwriter Rachel Sermanni’s latest EP. “Love is absolutely fucking mental,” says Adam Hunter, one half of Glasgow pop duo HYYTS. “When it’s good, it’s a hell of a time and when it’s bad it’s hell.” Their new EP, helluvatime, reverse-charts the heartbreak and euphoria of a relationship, unexpectedly starting on postbreakup song Outro, and ending on the falling

Music

Words: Tallah Brash

Albums

THE SKINNY

Squirrel Flower Planet (i) Full Time Hobby, 25 Jun

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June 2021 — Review

Listen to: I’ll Go Running, Roadkill

John Grant Boy from Michigan Bella Union, 25 Jun rrrrr isten to: County Fair, Rhetorical L Figure, Just So You Know

I’ll Go Running – the opening track on Ella Williams’ second album as Squirrel Flower – is a statement of intent. ‘I’ll tell you everything / I’ll give away every part’ she sings, and she stands by her word. Planet (i) is not only the title of the album, but also the name given to Williams’ musical universe. It’s a world in which she is forced to battle through constant chaos, where the natural world both amazes and terrifies her. It feels like a cathartic release, where she faces her fear of disasters head-on – through floods, tornadoes and burning cars – and she firmly places us within that world right alongside her. On Deluge In The South, she’s ‘stuck in chiffon shining’ during a flood in Texas; on Flames and Flat Tires, she uses the image of a car on fire speeding down streets at 4am as a metaphor for her broken body rebuilding. By Desert Wildflowers, though, Williams is in control: ‘I’m not scared of the water / The rain is my parent and I am the daughter’. Her fears have been faced, and her mind is at ease. [Nadia Younes]

John Grant has always been something of an open book, but on Boy from Michigan, the ostentatious trappings of the past are mostly eschewed for straightforward arrangements and clear-eyed storytelling (give or take the lashings of horndog irony in Your Portfolio). That doesn’t mean there isn’t any moody sax, sophistipop woodwind or bouncy, cybernetic post-punk, but the carefully curated figure of past album covers has shed the poses and feathers to reveal the man underneath (though he hasn’t lost the twinkle in his eye). The opening three songs paint a vivid picture of Rust Belt America, both alluring and intoxicating, but with ominous undertones, laid out implicitly with eerie synths and explicitly in the encapsulating lyrics of the title track: ‘The American Dream is not for weak soft-hearted fools’. Boy from Michigan is an unhurried, loping listen; sprawling over 75 minutes with sumptuous synth and a ten-minute tirade on Trump’s America (The Only Baby). Sometimes the laconic style feels repetitive, but there are plenty of perfectly formed moments to bring the album back into focus. And it’s capped off with an indictment of machismo, disguised as a tender ballad (Billy), counteracting with the bile of The Only Baby while reinforcing its rage. [Lewis Wade]

Japanese Breakfast Jubilee Dead Oceans, 4 Jun rrrrr Listen to: Paprika, Be Sweet, Sit

Greentea Peng Man Made AMF Records, 4 Jun rrrrr isten to: Kali V2, Nah It Ain’t the L Same, Meditation

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The late anime filmmaker Satoshi Kon’s final feature Paprika followed characters as they slipped in and out of dreams, stories melding into one another, the line between what is reality and what is imagined blurred beyond comprehension. ‘It’s a rush!,’ sings Michelle Zauner on the opening track – also called Paprika – of Jubilee, her third album as Japanese Breakfast. It sets up a collection of songs that dip in and out of worlds, weaving the personal and the fictionalised with literary flair dressed up in celebratory, rousing pop songs. In this way, Jubilee skews towards her music video direction where the band’s previous two records hued close to the soul-dredging of her work as a now-published memoirist. Even when touching on social commentary or heartbreak, this record is breezy and freeform – the album begins with triumphant horns and ends with a soaring guitar solo. Blanketed in a warm and positively exuberant aura, it’s a far cry from the sci-fi shoegaze of her last album, more buoyed by the city pop of Zauner’s side project Bumper. The least conceptually bound Zauner has been, she moves confidently through a space befitting of the multi-hyphenate artist she has become. [Tony Inglis]

Recorded against the backdrop of 2020’s turbulent summer, Greentea Peng’s debut album captures a central paradox from the past year: the compulsion to turn inward, and the need to look outward at the inequalities that have been brought into sharp focus. For Greentea Peng, the psychological and tangible need not be mutually exclusive. On Man Made she invites us to broaden the psyche, from her soporific blend of neo soul, jazz and hip-hop to the album’s visual iconography, which evokes the 1960s counterculture movement. The record’s lo-fi scratchiness exaggerates this retro feel, lulling the listener between the synth echoes on Make Noise, the smoky layers of improvised vocals on Mataji Freestyle, and the sinewy flute on Be Careful. Yet even as you succumb to the record’s psychedelic textures, you hear a call to arms in its pointed lyrics. ‘May Kali’s fire bun ya down’, she sings on Kali V2, inciting the Hindu goddess Kali Ma who, in Greentea Peng’s hands, becomes an emblem of a different kind of consciousness raising – the push to resist oppressive forces like racism and sexism, and the healing that can begin when we are rid of both. [Becca Inglis]

THE SKINNY

Rachel Sermanni Swallow Me Self-released, 2 Jun rrrrr isten to: Swallow Me, Brighton L House

Relinquishing control is something we’ve all had to learn to do in the past year, but it’s an act Rachel Sermanni has been practising for some time. “The thread that weaves most clearly throughout this collection is one of letting go,” she says of her new EP, the quietly majestic Swallow Me, her most cohesive collection of songs to date. Written predominantly during her pregnancy, the EP finds Sermanni – who is wisely introspective at the calmest of times – exploring a period of growth like no other, stumbling into the unknown. Even the format seems urgent – a four-song EP from an artist with three full-length albums – as though this music has spilt from her, needing to be heard. Anchored by Sermanni’s sweet, guiding vocals, we’re ushered in by the title track: a soothing and airy ode to surrendering; a firm but reassuring letter to herself. At the dark heart of the EP is Travelled, a jazz-folk lament through which Sermanni begins to let go of past freedoms, accepting the new path her life is taking. And going full circle, the closing track has the dream-like quality of a U.F.O.F.-era Big Thief song, where Sermanni simply proclaims ‘Let go, let go.’ [Katie Cutforth]

isten to: Lipstick on the Glass, L Play the Greatest Hits, How Can I Make It OK?

Lucy Dacus Home Video Matador, 25 Jun rrrrr isten to: Hot & Heavy, Thumbs, L Brando

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Any suggestion that the wider audience to whom Lucy Dacus is releasing this third record might cause her to clam up is proven unfounded within the opening seconds of Home Video. Hot & Heavy, the lead single and opening track, sets the tone; it’s a profoundly personal postcard both to a childhood friend and, by way of proxy, to Dacus’ younger self, as evidenced by an accompanying video made up of old camcorder footage of the artist as a child. Christine paints a gorgeous portrait in barely two-and-a-half minutes, while the incisive storytelling of Thumbs, a track on which she relays in deadpan style a tale of chaperoning a friend to a meeting with their estranged father, is almost disarming in how coldly it depicts her broiling rage. Sonically speaking, Dacus sticks to what she knows; a minimal palette, informed chiefly by barely-there guitar and piano. It’s understandable; her cutting lyricism works best against a bare-bones backdrop. Home Video is intimate, occasionally discomfiting, and, most of all, brave – the sound of an artist choosing to be at her most vulnerable, in front of a bigger following than she’s ever had before. [Joe Goggins]

June 2021 — Review

isten to: Freefall (ft. Nadya L Albertsson), Iternal Dispute (ft. Paix)

Wolf Alice Blue Weekend Dirty Hit, 4 Jun rrrrr

Over a decade as a band and two albums in, Wolf Alice continue to transcend a singular definition – a characteristic that grows ever more true with each new release. Their third effort sees the London lot – and particularly vocalist Ellie Rowsell – embracing a side of vulnerability that previous records have only dared to tease. Born from reflection of personal experiences and candidly exploring relationships, intimacy and love, Rowsell is as open and honest here as she’s ever been. From the sheltered acoustic ballad Safe from Heartbreak (if you never fall in love), acclamations of self-love on Feeling Myself, or the painful pleas of How Can I Make It OK?, at times Blue Weekend feels like a personal diary written in poetry. Befitting of its theme of openness, Blue Weekend is also the band’s most sonically varied album yet. Oozing adventure in its variety, the record flits between atmosphere and grandeur (The Last Man on Earth), shimmering shoegaze (Lipstick on the Glass, Delicious Things), and, of course, the trademark dialling up of attitude with some face-slapping fuzz (Smile, Play the Greatest Hits). This record, like the band behind it, repeatedly and successfully refuses genrefication in its ambitiousness. [Dylan Tuck]

Albums

Rebecca Vasmant With Love, From Glasgow Rebecca’s Records, 4 Jun rrrrr

Rebecca Vasmant has been a pivotal figure within Glasgow’s burgeoning jazz scene over recent years. On her debut album With Love, From Glasgow, she brings the scene’s myriad of musical talents together like never before. “During the time spent working on this music an amazing family formed,” she says in a press release. Eighteen musicians – including Graham Costello, Harry Weir and Gillian Katungi, aka Paix – feature on the album, but what’s even more extraordinary is that everything was recorded and mixed by Vasmant in her Stanmore Road flat. Themes of time, love and introspection flow among the sonically expansive tracks that make up With Love, From Glasgow. Peppering sax lines and distant vocals set the album’s textural tone in the opening time-themed tracks. Meditative mantras of love resonate in Nadya Albertsson’s vocals on Freefall while Paix’s pertinent spoken-word exposé on womanhood takes the forefront on Internal Dispute. There’s no rigidity to this album; every track opens a new portal into Vasmant’s psyche. It captures jazz’s core principles: freedom, collaboration and expression. But most of all, it captures the spiritual depths of Glasgow’s jazz scene. A loving testament to a richly cultural city. [Jamie Wilde]

THE SKINNY

Film Shiva Baby Director: Emma Seligman

Starring: Rachel Sennott, Molly Gordon, Dianna Agron

Film

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Emma Seligman’s feature directorial debut, Shiva Baby, is a cream cheese-slathered, anxiety-inducing ride that offers a sympathetic, if not at all comforting, look at young womanhood. Rachel Sennott stars in this Jewish, claustrophobic comedy as Danielle, a New York City college student making money as a sugar baby. Things get complicated when she bumps into her married sugar daddy, Max (Danny Deferrari), at a post-funeral service — the titular shiva — with their extended families and friends in attendance. With a tight 77-minute runtime, the film proceeds swiftly through one

of the most perilous environments for a young woman: a house filled with prying Gen Xers and Baby Boomers. Mourning the loss of a distant relative, Danielle has to dribble past her parents (the perfectly paired Polly Draper and Fred Melamed) and relatives’ skewering words on her appearance, prospects and bisexuality. Seligman builds on her 2018 short of the same name, presenting Danielle with someone who both challenges and sees her in put-together childhood bestie and ex-girlfriend Maya (Molly Gordon). It is an explosive potion. Shiva Baby feels like a delightfully twisted escape game, with the audience rooting for Danielle to get out in one piece. Served by a sharp sound design and a screechy horror score by Ariel Marx, this quick-fire social nightmare is fun as hell but not entirely a laughing matter. [Stefania Sarrubba] Released 11 Jun by MUBI; certificate PG

Freaky Director: Christopher Landon

Starring: Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran

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After the nifty melding of the slasher genre with a Groundhog Day-esque time loop in Happy Death Day, writer-director Christopher Landon has come up with another deliciously high-concept premise. What if a brute like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees were to swap bodies with their ‘final girl’ victim, Freaky Friday-style? That’s what happens to the Blissfield Butcher (Vaughn) when he stabs goofball high-schooler Millie (Newton) with an enchanted Aztec dagger he pilfered from a previous victim – she wakes up in his hulking body while the Butcher finds his consciousness transferred to her petite frame. As with every body-swap movie, much learning is done while walking in another’s shoes. The put-upon

Millie develops newfound confidence when she now has the power to throw her classmates across the room. There’s rich, cathartic pleasure too in watching as the school’s bullies and fuckboys discover that Millie is less of a punching bag when she’s possessed by a psycho killer. Gorehounds should be sated by Freaky’s brutally inventive death scenes and sly nods to slasher films of old. But most of the fun emanates from Newton and Vaughn’s game comic turns once roles are reversed. The 6’5”, 51-year-old Vaughn is particularly wry as he hams it up as a shrieking teen girl but it’s not all caricature: Freaky has a sentimental streak that requires some surprising moments of vulnerability from this actor not known for his tenderness. The blend of gory murders, goofy laughs and teen longing is a winning combination. [Jamie Dunn] Released 25 Jun by Universal; certificate 15 Image: BFI Distribution

Shiva Baby

The Father Director: Florian Zeller

Starring: Anthony Hopkins June 2021 — Review

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With French playwright Florian Zeller helming the adaptation of his own stage play, it is unsurprising that theatrical pedigree colours his dialogue-driven first feature. However, this largely and refreshingly works in The Father’s favour; the film’s stylings never seek to outshine or enliven its world-class performances. The plot unfolds around the housebound life of Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), as his daughter Anne (Olivia Coleman) searches for a carer and seeks to move her own life forward. Gaps and jumps in conversations mirror Anthony’s declining memory, as he panics about missing watches, manipulates prospective carers with charismatic, fanciful tales, and does not understand condolences relating to his second daughter.

The Father

Despite a mere 97-minute run time, The Father doesn’t rush its revelations. Its commitment to Anthony’s perception of the world allows each jump in time and piece of information to land, filling in the audience and heightening the ageing man’s fractured understanding of place and time. In a multifaceted performance, Hopkins is as comfortable portraying Anthony’s struggles as he is the character’s joy, petty outrage and witty pride. Dignity and vulnerability combine for a holistic view of dementia as an illness rather than an all-consuming identity. As Anne, Coleman never lets the exhaustion of caring veer into self-sacrificing melodrama. The Father is no cinematic event, but its empathetic, unflinching, deeply humanising look at dementia marks a high point in Hopkins’ storied career and suggests a bright future for Zeller. [Carmen Paddock]

After Love

Freaky

After Love Director: Aleem Khan

Starring: Joanna Scanlan

rrrrr

In writer-director Aleem Khan’s debut feature, the great Joanna Scanlan is Mary/Fahima, a British Muslim convert residing in Dover with her husband Ahmed (Nasser Memarzia), a ferry captain to whom she’s been happily married for many years. In the film’s pre-credits sequence, their gentle domestic harmony is horribly disrupted, however, when Ahmed abruptly passes away in his armchair. Following his funeral, an examination of Ahmed’s belongings reveals a number of text messages and the identification card of a French woman, suggesting Ahmed led a secret life with another partner in Calais, just over the water. After travelling across to find answers, the stage is set for Mary to confront the mysterious Genevieve (Nathalie Richard). But an immediate

Released 11 Jun by Lionsgate; certificate 12A — 62 —

misunderstanding upon introduction, partly driven by her Muslim attire, presents an opportunity for Mary to get to know Genevieve, and subsequently a hidden aspect of her late husband, before dropping the bombshell of her true identity. While Scanlan has had supporting roles in various dramas, her lead or central ensemble roles, largely on television, have tended to be in an explicitly comedic mode – see The Thick of It and Getting On. In After Love, however, she’s given a pure star vehicle that allows a showcase of her more dramatic chops, though with a character and predicament that encourages introversion. In a film that walks a very fine balance between naturalism and a type of melodrama that requires a certain suspension of belief from the viewer, it’s crucial that there’s such an emotionally intelligent performance at its centre. [Josh Slater-Williams] Released 4 Jun by BFI; certificate 12A

THE SKINNY

Books

May 2021 — Review

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THE SKINNY

Books

Book Reviews

Malibu Rising

Absorbed

Heaven

Resistance

By Taylor Jenkins Reid

By Kylie Whitehead

By Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd

By Val McDermid, illustrated by Kathryn Briggs

June 2021 – Review

rrrrr

Nina Riva – surfer, model, and oldest child of legendary rockstar Mick Riva – is dreading her annual end of summer party. Her husband left her, she doesn’t care for the Hollywood elite, and she’s never wanted to be the centre of attention. Her brothers are keeping huge secrets that may well shatter their relationship. The baby of the family, Kit, is ready to dive into adulthood, no matter what her family think. The party is the night that will change everything for the siblings, sending them over the precipice of secrets and questions they’ve held for years. By midnight, everything will spiral out of control. By morning, Nina’s mansion and the Malibu coastline will be in flames. Malibu Rising is both about one hedonistic, destructive party, and also the turbulent love story of Mick and June Riva – a man too selfish to care for his family and a woman whose dreams slowly slipped away. In the hands of a less talented writer, a story exploring whether we’re destined to repeat our parents’ mistakes could easily slip into saccharine cliché, but Reid’s storytelling is evocative and sensitive, and the novel’s strengths lie in the emotional complexities of characters whom we can’t help but love, for all their flaws and misguided intentions. A gorgeous, sun-soaked novel that delves into the glamour and desperate hope of 1980s Malibu, and the saga of a family that will never be the same again. [Sim Bajwa]

Absorbed by Kylie Whitehead is the eerie, genre-bending story of Allison who is so scared of losing Owen, her long term boyfriend, that she inadvertently absorbs him. Through this unsettling premise, Absorbed shines light on pertinent issues like female insecurity, modern relationship issues and childhood trauma. The crux of the story revolves around Allison trying to make sense of the situation and go about her life. She also reflects on her traumatic childhood and ten-year relationship which involves an unhealthy dose of insecurity, anxiety and lingering communication issues. At one point, she notices that she and Owen had been together for ten years, immediately followed by her pondering whether that made them safer or not. However, at other times Allison muses that being Owen’s girlfriend was her most stable identity. She in turn makes the disturbing confession that after absorbing her partner, she now “possessed love”. Being emancipated from this bond and identity is a major life change for Allison and she struggles finding her centre with this newfound freedom of hers. There are elements of supernatural and body horror in the narrative, shrewdly woven into the plotline. The writing is visceral and engrossing, and hooks the reader until its startling conclusion. This is a disorienting but thoroughly engaging read that makes one contemplate the difference between love and possession. [Rabeea Saleem]

In a Japanese school on a spring day, a teenage boy receives a strange note in his pencil case. It reads: “We should be friends.” At first the boy - called “Eyes” by classmates because of a lazy eye – believes the note is a prank, one more act of cruelty to endure from his bullies. He’s surprised to learn its sender is Kojima, a quiet, female classmate who is similarly tormented by girls in their class for her appearance. The two outcasts bond over their shared victimhood, striking up a carefully coordinated, clandestine friendship through passed notes. Brought together by their circumstances, the two teenagers wrestle with the pain and fear of their seemingly inescapable situation. They search for meaning – some kind of heaven that will make the bullying worthwhile or, at least, endurable. Like how in her bestselling novel, Breasts and Eggs, readers are buried under the weight of how it feels to be a woman in a patriarchal society, in Heaven Kawakami is similarly relentless in reminding us of the claustrophobia of adolescence. Heaven’s exploration of casual cruelty won’t be for everyone – there are passages which rival Stephen King in their depiction of young characters’ depravity – but the short novel is a poignant and unsettling look at what makes a friendship and, on a macro level, what makes an unequal society. Kawakami’s writing is meticulous and assured, and Heaven leaves a bruise. [Katie Goh]

“We had no idea at the time, but this was where the end began…” So opens Val McDermid and Kathryn Briggs’ graphic novel from Northumberland, where for one weekend 150,000 people descend for the Solstice Festival. ‘The end’ is a bug dismissed as food poisoning that instead takes the world down at an alarming rate. Sounds familiar, though it’s a tale whose life began years prior, making it eerily prescient. Briggs’ monochrome palate aptly captures the impending darkness, enveloping a vast array of disaster, and even vaster array of emotions, in an artful visual articulation. We track the root of contamination, follow scientists hunting a cure as the disease becomes increasingly resistant to antibiotics, and root for protagonist Zoe Meadows – a journalist determined to share the truth no matter the cost. It’s a bleak graphic novel, complex on blame, grief, accountability, survival and rebuilding. Though evidently well researched, it’s quite text heavy for expectations, but remains a shrewd and heart-racing exploration of the trajectory of catastrophe. When reading of pandemics during pandemics, the reader waits for the turning point from the darkness, as we do while sitting through our own. Instead of light, Resistance spirals continuously. Maybe it’s our own search for a finite endpoint that enhances the discomfort and tension, but in true apocalyptic fiction fashion, sometimes you can give everything, and still lose it all. An unsettling and realistic thriller. [Heather McDaid]

Hutchinson, out now, £14.99

New Ruins, out now, £9.99

Picador, 10 Jun, £14.99

Wellcome Collection, out now, £18.99

penguin.co.uk

newruins.co.uk

panmacmillan.com

profilebooks.com

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THE SKINNY

Cooking Through the Storm Words: Eleanor Bally Illustration: Seb Westcott

ome cooking is kind of a new thing in the UK. People with money used to have cooks, and those without used to have things called ‘ordinaries’ – communal eating houses where you could sit at a giant table and get a set meal at a set time for mega-cheap. I read about one place, Simpson’s Fish Dinner House in London, where in the early 1700s you could get ‘a dozen oysters, soup, roast partridge, three more first courses, mutton and cheese’ for two shillings. Which, according to the National Archives’ handy historical currency converter, is about £11.61 in today’s peanuts. When you think about it, it makes sense. It’s much more efficient to cook one huge pot of stew to share, than for everyone to take lamb, carrots and onions back to their own little kitchens, where they each have to spend an hour chopping, frying and boiling up a Lancashire hotpot. During the first lockdown I helped out with a group called Food for Good. The team were cooking 3,275 meals a week for people who needed them all across Edinburgh. They were feeding families of four with chicken pies, leek and potato soup, haggis, dahl, and apple crumble for a week for just £20.

When I first read those numbers I couldn’t quite believe them. But cooking and eating as a collective has a whole lot of benefits. Lockdown exposed so many inequalities in the way we grow, share and eat food. Some people made their own sourdough starters and learned to bake bread; others were unable to access furlough or work to feed their kids. Chefs innovated and created pop-ups or special lockdown food events; but lots of hospitality and retail workers were laid off, or forced back to work in unsafe environments before they had been vaccinated. As for me, cooking was the thing that got me through it all – the one thing every day that I could control. I perfected the roast chicken (thanks Samin Nosrat). I missed my family back in Australia, so I made a ridiculously complicated Massaman curry

“Food is complicated and simple. It is nourishment and creativity.”

June 2021 – Review

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from my favourite restaurant in Melbourne. On one notable occasion, I made a veggie ramen that literally took my partner and I 48 hours. We stewed shiitakes, marinated eggs in soy and caster sugar, hand-made noodles and whizzed mushroom butter together into a delicious, earthy glob. I didn’t even feel like eating it when we were done, because the eating wasn’t the point really. It was a side benefit. The real aim was to lose myself in the step-by-step. It’s like a meditation – breathe in, breath out, chop a carrot, have a cry – even in a global pandemic. In July last year, I had a falling out with a friend. I didn’t understand what was happening or why. Some days I felt furious, other days I was overwhelmed with guilt. The worst days I was sure I was fundamentally unlikeable – that all my friends were just being polite, and secretly thought that I was spineless; thoughtless; weak. Therapy helped. My ramen-making partner (bless him) helped even more. But cooking gave me the structured, predictable, delicious space I needed to actually work through the hurt and move on. Food is complicated and simple. It is nourishment and creativity. It unifies and divides us. As we move out of lockdown, maybe we have an opportunity to rethink the way we make and share food. We obviously need to be more mindful of hygiene and social distancing now – but what else could we change? We could pool our resources, cook and eat together, share our recipes and create new ones. We could make sure that we all have access to good, affordable food – not just those of us with the time, space and money to cook at home. Before COVID, just after I first moved to Edinburgh, I went to a Syrian Supper Club at Cyrenians. Recently-arrived Syrian refugees made a feast for everyone lucky enough to get a ticket. We all sat around a big wooden table, scoffing giant salads, stuffed courgettes, aubergine dips and these amazing crispy pita things whose name I never found out. That dinner felt... right. Everything cooked and eaten together. It’s harder then, to draw lines between rich and poor. Food ceases to be a marker of social difference, and becomes an opportunity to share – both creativity and sustenance. That meal was a modern ‘ordinary’, and I wish that way of sharing food was more ordinary.

Food & Drink

During lockdown, food has offered comfort, therapy and connection, while simultaneously revealing stark inequalities in our society

THE SKINNY

ICYMI Edinburgh Best Newcomer nominee Helen Bauer shares the joys of the relentlessly positive Parks and Recreation

June 2021 — Review

Comedy

Illustration: Edith Ault

t was 2012, I was working in a cafe and bar in central London, the Olympics were on and spirits were high. Instead of having the time of my life, I spent most of my shifts trying to figure out how to pour a pint so it didn’t spill over while simultaneously making a gin and tonic. Between spilling a lot of drinks, I was listening to my colleagues quote Parks and Recreation. There were lots of other twenty-somethings screaming ‘Treat Yourself!’ as they ate crisps behind the kegs and ‘Bye Bye Lil’ Sebastian’ as they left for the night. Never one to be left out, I would laugh along and try and join in despite having never seen an episode. To me, it sounded like a copy of The Office and despite loving sitcoms I was going through a bit of a snob phase: “Why would I watch a copy? What’s wrong with original thought?” Oh young Helen, so foolish. I’d watched a couple of bits and pieces before but have only got around to watching it fully during the pandemic. Wow! I could not have been more wrong. Sure it’s a mockumentary but the pure silly fun joy that pours from all the characters makes it entirely its own show. Set in the Parks and Recreation department in Pawnee, Indiana, Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) manage their team through building parks, running political campaigns and office romances. What makes Parks and Rec such a delightful watch is the love the characters have for each other and the fun they share. There is no villain. Sure Tammy One and Two are not great and some of the older council members aren’t the best lads but altogether they make a cast of characters that you want to jump into the world with, and go to Ron’s cabin for a night with the Pawnee goddesses. The ensemble cast doesn’t have a weak link among it. I could write an essay on every character, even Gerry/Garry, but let’s just take a moment to celebrate Leslie Knope. She’s not your classic lead. Not everyone knows a Leslie, but my word, what a wonderful world it would be if we all did. Leslie is fearlessly ambitious; a trait often portrayed by women on TV

with the caveat that they have no social life and are cold and ruthless. Leslie is not. She works hard and plays hard, men come and go but they don’t run her life. She’s warm and compassionate and no one would function without her endless enthusiasm. What a joy to see a successful and fun woman living her life. I mean, how can Leslie be so positive when her surname is literally ‘Knope’. Her relationships tie everything together so neatly. The blossoming friendship between Leslie and Ron is a real highlight, particularly when Ron gets married last minute in City Hall and Leslie’s desperate to make it special by handing the bride a bouquet of highlighters. In classic modern sitcom form, P+R isn’t afraid to take on bigger issues, something difficult to do in episodes lasting 22 minutes. The topics of sexism, privilege and homosexuality are all explored in the show, unerringly with sensitivity and wit. It makes Parks and Rec a big hug full of heart. Its classic sitcom formula of setup, mishap and resolution is comforting but never shy of pulling out a big comedy moment, and in classic American style, a celebrity cameo. We see a lot of regular SNL faces and some of Hollywood’s finest dropping in alongside some of the highest profile names in US politics. Michelle Obama makes a particularly memorable appearance in a later episode as Leslie gets closer and closer to Washington. I wish I had watched it sooner. Instead of laughing along with my colleagues pretending to know what was happening, I could have joined in with ‘10,000 Candles In the Wind.’ What is life without some regrets though? Also SPOILER ALERT. Probably should have started with this. At least I didn’t mention that Ben and Leslie have triplets.

Hear more from Helen on her podcast Daddy Look At Me, co-hosted by Rosie Jones, or catch Helen on Instagram and Twitter @HelenBaBauer

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THE SKINNY

Listings Looking for something to do? Well you’re in the right place! Here's a rundown of what's on in art galleries across Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee this month. To find out how to submit listings, head to theskinny.co.uk/listings

Art Glasgow Art Barrowlands

DUNCAN CAMPBELL

11-25 JUN, 9:00AM – 5:00PM, TBC

This extraordinary, playful installation by Turner Prize-winning artist Duncan Campbell uses electromagnetic technology to create a message board of intricate images, blurring the lines between animation, film and drawing.

CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art

KATE DAVIS, CHARLIE HAMMOND, HAYLEY TOMPKINS: TERMITE TAPEWORM FUNGUS MOSS 11-26 JUN, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

Three very different artists work across a range of media, from painting to film, bringing together their diverse creative practices to consider the importance of the domestic, the commonplace, and the everyday. DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA + ARJUNA NEUMAN: SOOT BREATH / CORPUS INFINITUM 11 JUN-24 JUL, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, FREE

Celine

DONALD RODNEY

11-27 JUN, 12:00PM – 6:00PM, TBC

The first ever solo exhibition in Scotland dedicated to the late Donald Rodney, this show platforms Rodney’s cutting-edge examination of race and politics in the 1980s through radical play with new technologies and the rise of mass media.

Civic Room

CHRISTIAN NOELLE CHARLES, LIV FONTAINE, WILLIAM JOYS + WASSILI WIDMER: HUBRIS

11-31 JUN, 1:00PM – 6:00PM, TBC

Exploring ideas of transgression and subversion, this group exhibition takes on the idea of hubris as an act of possibility and productive chaos, deconstructing everything from the patriarchy to desire in its wake.

DAN WALWIN: LIKE CLOCK

11 JUN-17 JUL, 12:00PM – 5:00PM, TBC

Amsterdam artist David Walwin explores embodiment, subjectivity and the relationship between the internal and external in this arresting new show.

Glasgow Print Studio JOHN BYRNE AT 80 1 JUN, 11:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

A retrospective exhibition of works in print by the revered Scottish playwright, writer and artist who turned 80 this year, these works were all produced at Glasgow Print Studio and are characterised by Byrne’s classic humour and warmth. ARRANGE WHATEVER PIECES COME YOUR WAY 11-27 JUN, 10:30AM – 5:30PM, TBC

The first major exhibition in Scotland of large-scale quilts, this collaboration by Annabelle Harty and Sheelagh Boyce is a physical expression of their friendship, a mediation on how intimacy can be performed through the material.

Glasgow Sculpture Studios

CANAL PROGRAMME 11-27 JUN, 9:00AM – 5:00PM, TBC

Exploring the colonial history of the Forth and Clyde canal, this body of work by Alberta Whittle comprises a new film and a series of audio works to accompany a walk along Glasgow’s canal ways.

Glasgow Women’s Library

INGRID POLLARD: NO COVER UP 1 JUN-23 JUL, TIMES VARY, FREE

This solo exhibition spotlights artist Ingrid Pollard’s responses to materials held at Glasgow Women’s Library’s Lesbian Archive, posing an unflinching act of resistance to the marginalisation and erasure of queer culture.

GoMA

NEP SIDHU: AN IMMEASURABLE MELODY, MEDICINE FOR A NIGHTMARE

11 JUN-5 SEP, 11:00AM – 4:00PM, FREE

Canadian artist Nep Sidhu’s work is embedded in Sikh metaphysics and histories, exploring relationships between memory, memorial and the divine in his very first European show.

Govan Project Space JACQUELINE DONACHIE: STEP

11-27 JUN, 12:00PM – 4:00PM, TBC

Jacqueline Donachie’s new work for Glasgow International is based on the simple structure of a step, exploring how our identities are shaped by the spaces we are given access to.

Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery JIMMY ROBERT: TOBACCO FLOWER

11 JUN-8 AUG, TIMES VARY, FREE

Created especially for Glasgow International, Jimmy Robert’s delicate botanical and mixed media work explores the relationship between Scotland and the Caribbean, tracing the lingering marks of colonialism on Glasgow’s cultural landscape.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum CAROL RHODES: SEE THE WORLD

10 JUN-4 JUL, 11:00AM – 4:00PM, FREE

This first posthumous solo exhibition of Glasgowbased artist Carol Rhodes focuses on Rhodes’ rarely exhibited drawings exploring topographic blind spots, peripheries, and ‘non-places’. FRANCE-LISE MCGURN: ALOUD

11 JUN-1 JUN 22, 11:00AM – 4:00PM, FREE

France-Lise McGurn’s newly commissioned installation draws on her personal experiences of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, creating bewitching, almost sculptural forms that fill the museum’s gallery.

Kendall Koppe LAURA ALDRIDGE, LEANNE ROSS + JUDITH SCOTT: THE OUTSIDE IS INSIDE EVERYTHING WE MAKE

11-26 JUN, 12:00PM – 6:00PM, TBC

Exploring collaborative ways of working to challenge the systems of value placed on creativity, this group show encompasses everything from sculpture to textile work to consider how to think beyond accepted structures of power.

Market Gallery CATALINA BARROSOLUQUE + DANIELLA VALZ GEN: DESLICES

11-27 JUN, 11:00AM – 5:00PM, TBC

A collaborative pieces that takes in voices, bodies and geographies, Deslices is told through a series of correspondences between artists Catalina BarrosoLuque and Daniella Valz Gen, moving between Mexico City, London and Glasgow.

Maryhill Burgh Halls SARAH FORREST

11-27 JUN, 9:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

This new work by Glasgowbased artist Sarah Forrest plays with the detective novel format in order to explore how attention shifts and fluctuates in the face of a sleuthing mystery.

Patricia Fleming

Street Level Photoworks

NICKY BIRD: LEGACY 3-6 JUN, 12:00PM – 5:00PM, TBC

Exploring ideas of land, heritage, and collective memory, this exhibition by photographer Nicky Bird explores how photography can be a collaborative process, and how “found” photographs can keep us rooted to our history. SEKAI MACHACHE + AWUOR ONYANGO: BODY OF LAND

11-27 JUN, 12:00PM – 5:00PM, TBC

Body of Land is an intimate exploration of African diaspora in Scotland and Kenya, delving into photography, body art, and mixed media work to consider ideas of femininity, the body, and queerness.

Studio Pavilion at House for an Art Lover

TAKO TAAL: HALO NEVUS

SOUFIANE ABABRI: SUB!

Halo Nevus is a beautifully urgent film whose protagonist is the artist’s birthmark, a striking metaphor that draws from Gambian folklore to explore yearning for home and the shifting tides of civic rupture.

Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri’s bold, colourful work explores the world of intimacy and sexuality, critiquing gender roles and the legacy of colonialism particularly in queer life.

Project Ability

11-27 JUN, 11:00AM – 4:00PM, FREE

1 JUN-1 AUG, 11:00AM – 4:00PM, TBC

NILS MCDIARMID, LESLIE THOMPSON + ROBIN WISE: IT’S IN THE DETAIL

11-27 JUN, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, TBC

Spotlighting the work of three unique artists working in black ink on paper, their practice shares a love of intricate pattern and line, creating works that give new energy and life to the familiar.

Queens Park Railway Club

GRAHAM FAGEN: PING PONG CLUB 11-27 JUN, 12:00PM – 6:00PM, TBC

Letters, notes, name tags and other ephemera come together in this exhibition by Scotland’s representative at the 2015 Venice Biennale Graham Fagen, offering a wry consideration of the processes of modern identity formation.

Skypark 1

LIV FONTAINE, PAUL KINDERSLEY + HUHTAMAKI WAB: DON’T LET THE BASTARDS GRIND YOU DOWN

11-27 JUN, 11:00AM – 4:00PM, FREE

KATIE WATCHORN: ZERO-GRAZING

Rooted in the agricultural and rural motifs of Ireland, Katie Watchorn’s sculptures use specific found materials such as fats and plastics in combination with common farming objects in order to explore the often chaotic nature of her environments. SULAÏMAN MAJALI: FALSE DAWN

11-27 JUN, 11:00AM – 4:00PM, FREE

Taking place on the site of the 1938 Empire Exhibition, acclaimed artist Sulaïman Majali’s new exhibition explores the palimpsestic nature of the legacies of colonialism, and the ways in which trauma, grief, and memory are accumulated and disrupted. SEKAI MACHACHE + THULANI RACHIA: THESE STORIES…

11-27 JUN, 11:00AM – 4:00PM, FREE

This pair of solo exhibitions - The Divine Sky by Sekai Machache and Wathint’ Abafazi, Wathint’ Imbokodo by Thulani Rachia - work in tandem to explore ideas of diaspora and simultaneity.

11-27 JUN, 9:00AM – 5:00PM, TBC

An exhibition dedicated to exhibitionists, this show encompasses everything from painting to performance, using intricately crafted personae and heightened caricature to explore the surrealism of our current social and political realities.

— 67 —

The Deep End

RABIYA CHOUDHRY, RAISA KABIR, JASLEEN KAUR + RAEYEN SONG: FABRIC OF SOCIETY 11-27 JUN, 12:00PM – 5:00PM, TBC

A self-organising collective of four UK-based artists of colour, this resulting group exhibition weaves together responses to the cultural history of fabric and textiles, exploring narratives of womanhood and identity.

The Glasgow Art Club

MEMBERS’ SPRING EXHIBITION

1-5 JUN, 11:00AM – 6:00PM, TBC

Private members club Glasgow Art Club’s inaugural Spring exhibition brings together a range of figurative and experimental pieces created in the past year, available to view both in the club’s main gallery and online.

The Modern Institute LUKE FOWLER

11-27 JUN, TIMES VARY, TBC

This series of two 16mm films by acclaimed experimental documentarian Luke Fowler take a more personal tone than his previous works, turning to and interpreting an archive of letters built up by his parents.

The Modern Institute @ Aird’s Lane EVA ROTHSCHILD 11-27 JUN, TIMES VARY, TBC

A new exhibition by Ireland’s representative at the 2019 Venice Biennale, this exhibition of striking sculptures spills out of The Modern Institute’s gallery and onto its outside space.

The Pearce Institute

MARGARET SALMON: SURPLUS 11-27 JUN, TIMES VARY, TBC

Centred around Icarus (after Amelia), a new 35mm film by Glasgow-based artist Margaret Salmon, this exhibition draws on ideas from feminist economic theory, reflecting on the lives of women at work in Govan, both before and during COVID-19.

The Pipe Factory

ANA MAZZEI: DRAMA O’RAMA: OTHER SCENES

11-27 JUN, 12:00PM – 6:00PM, FREE

These striking, large-scale installations by Brazilian artist Ana Mazzei draw on innovative plays with form and structure to evoke a mythic, ethereal state of mind.

YUKO MOHRI

11-27 JUN, 12:00PM – 6:00PM, TBC

Employing the tiniest tremors of sound and vibration, Japanese artist Yuko Mohri’s delicate video installation mediates sound between pianos and microphones, converting vibrations into new compositions.

Tramway

MARTINE SYMS: S1:E4 11 JUN-25 JUL, 12:00PM – 6:00PM, FREE

This innovative exhibition plays with the oh-sofamiliar television sitcom format to consider ideas of Blackness in the public imagination. JENKIN VAN ZYL: MACHINES OF LOVE

11-26 JUN, 12:00PM – 6:00PM, FREE

Taking on the dungeon-like qualities of Tramway’s T4 Theatre, this surreal, immersive installation draws on claustrophobia, sexual ecstasy, hysteria and ‘folk horror’ to create an audacious subversion of pleasure and transgression. GEORGINA STARR: QUARANTAINE

11-26 JUN, 12:00PM – 6:00PM, FREE

Playing with now familiar ideas of quarantine, this ambitious new film follows two new recruits to a clandestine sisterhood, continuing artist Georgina Starr’s preoccupation with the otherworldly, occult, and the visionary aspects of experimental cinema.

Trongate 103

AIDEEN DORAN, BETH DYNOWSKI + SUSANNAH STARK: SONGS FOR WORK 11-27 JUN, TIMES VARY, TBC

Bringing together sound installation and sculpture, poetry and performance by three Glasgow-based artists, this exhibition examines how labour affects and shapes subjectivity, community and broader political and ethical landscapes.

Edinburgh Art &Gallery

REBECCA APPLEBY: INFRASTRUCTURE

5-30 JUN, TIMES VARY, TBC

Rebecca Appleby’s strange, distorted sculptures subvert traditional standards of artistic merit, incorporating fractures and disfiguration to think through the relationship between artificial structures and bodily decay.

Arusha Gallery MARY HERBERT AND JAMES OWENS: BLOODROOT

7-27 JUN, TIMES VARY, TBC

A gesture of love and healing, Bloodroot is an exhibition that is rooted in radical empathy. Through dreamy, ethereal landscapes and folkloric elements, this collection explores how we can react to trauma with compassion and grace.

City Art Centre BRIGHT SHADOWS: SCOTTISH ART IN THE 1920S

1-27 JUN, TIMES VARY, FREE

Marking 100 years since the roaring twenties, this exhibition showcases the cutting edge painting that took place in post-war Scotland, including works by D.Y. Cameron and Dorothy Johnstone, and S.J. Peploe. CHARLES H. MACKIE: COLOUR AND LIGHT 1 JUN-10 OCT, TIMES VARY, FREE

This major retrospective of Scottish painter and printmaker Charles H. Mackie brings together over 50 artworks, exploring his dynamic experimentation with French Symbolism, Japanese art, and the Celtic Revival movement. DONALD SMITH: ISLANDER

1 JUN-26 SEP, TIMES VARY, FREE

Donald Smith’s paintings drew on large artistic movements across America and Europe, while remaining dedicated to exploring Lewis’ local fishing communities, his intense, lyrical images celebrating the indomitable human spirit of Scottish island life. IAN HAMILTON FINLAY: MARINE

1 JUN-3 OCT, TIMES VARY, FREE

Exploring maritime themes in internationally renowned Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay’s oeuvre, this exhibition pulls work across decades and media, from stone, wood and neon sculptures to tapestry and postcards.

Collective Gallery

CHRISTIAN NEWBY: BOREDOM> MISCHIEF>FANTASY >RADICALISM> FANTASY

1 JUN-29 AUG, 10:00AM – 4:00PM, TBC

Featuring a brand new tapestry commission responding to the gallery’s unique astronomical history, this exhibition by Christian Newby explores how textile making straddles both art and craft, interrogating ideas of labour and materiality.

June 2021 — Listings

Thinking through the violent histories embedded in the earth, and the radical new futures that can be imagined from it, this specially commissioned film installation is a gorgeous meditation on our collective interdependency.

David Dale Gallery and Studios

THE SKINNY

Dovecot Studios

ARCHIE BRENNAN: TAPESTRY GOES POP!

1 JUN-30 AUG, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, £8.50 £9.50

Centring on pop artist, weaver, and former Mr Scotland Archie Brennan, this exhibition shines a light on one of Scotland’s most neglected contemporary artists, bringing decades of vibrant tapestry to the fore. JOCK MCFADYEN: LOST BOAT PARTY

11 JUN-25 SEP, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

Celebrating Jock McFadyen’s 70th birthday, Lost Boat Party is an enigmatic, almost print-like exploration of the magnificence of Scotland’s landscape, juxtaposed and complemented by the artists’s signature urban dystopia.

Ingleby Gallery JONATHAN OWEN

2 JUN-17 JUL, 11:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

Jonathan Owen’s sculpting take pre-existing classical busts and statues and subverts them to radical, striking ends, carving away and adding new marble to examine ideas of destruction and recreation.

Jupiter Artland RACHEL MACLEAN: SOLO EXHIBITION

1 JUN-18 JUL, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, £0 - £9

Alongside brand new commission upside mimi ᴉɯᴉɯ uʍop, this expansive exhibition draws from work previously shown at the Venice Biennale and across Scotland, showcasing Rachel Maclean’s darkly comic, audaciously imaginative oeuvre.

Open Eye Gallery SUSIE LEIPER: REOPENING

1-19 JUN, TIMES VARY, TBC

This exhibition of artist’s books by Susie Leiper thinks through the importance of print and accessibility to books over the past year, playing with the abstraction and obliteration of text as a mode of expression. ALEX MALCOLMSON: MAGNETIC NORTH

1-19 JUN, TIMES VARY, TBC

Working with driftwood, old sea charts, and found objects, Alex Malcolmson’s charming creations explore Scotland’s relationship with the seascape, playing with the boundary between art and craft.

Out of the Blue Drill Hall GORDON SHAW: GRAPHIC TREATMENT 1-26 JUN, 10:00AM – 4:00PM, FREE

Comic artist Gordon Shaw turns his gentle, curious eye to the now familiar world of healthcare, exploring issues of care and cancer through compassionate, gorgeously detailed riso prints and an interactive MRI sound system.

Royal Scottish Academy RSA

PANDEMIC: A PERSONAL RESPONSE TO COVID-19

3-20 JUN, TIMES VARY, FREE

Featuring a selection of work from eight winners of the RSA Pandemic Award, assisting artists with the creation of new work in these challenging times, this exhibition brings together photography, painting and sculpture for a snapshot of a bizarre year.

WILLIE RODGER: ACROSS THE BOARD

1-20 JUN, TIMES VARY, FREE

The first posthumous exhibition in Scotland devoted to Willie Rodger RSA, this exhibition features screenprints, woodcuts and linocuts from the artist’s studio, offering a brilliant insight into one of Scotland’s most acclaimed printmakers.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Talbot Rice Gallery THE NORMAL

1 JUN-29 AUG, TIMES VARY, FREE

This group exhibition showcases numerous international artists responding to the global event of the pandemic, exploring how we can rethink our relationship to community and the environment, and affirming the urgent need for whole scale change.

The Scottish Gallery

KATE DOWNIE: BETWEEN SEASONS

3-26 JUN, TIMES VARY, TBC

An astonishing collection of paintings, drawings and prints inspired by the cyclical nature of the seasons artist Kate Downie witnessed throughout lockdown.

The Queen’s Gallery

RAY HARRYHAUSEN: TITAN OF CINEMA

VICTORIA & ALBERT: OUR LIVES IN WATERCOLOUR

This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition brings together the life work of a giant of cinematic history and the grandfather of modern special effects, showcasing some of his most iconic designs and achievements.

Featuring 80 watercolours collected by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, this exhibition is a celebration of Scottish watercolour painting in the post-Romantic, industrial age, a glimpse of the wonders of the Scottish landscape 200 years ago.

1 JUN-20 FEB 22, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, £5 - £14

3 JUN-3 OCT, 9:30AM – 5:00PM, £0 - £7.80

Stills

Dundee Art DCA: Dundee Contemporary Arts

EMMA TALBOT: GHOST CALLS

The McManus

A LOVE LETTER TO DUNDEE: JOSEPH MCKENZIE PHOTOGRAPHS 19641987 1 JUN-1 MAR 22, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

Turning to black and white photography from the 1960s-1980s, this exhibition charts the changing landscape of Dundee’s waterfront and the evolution of the City’s fortunes and its people.

TIME AND TIDE: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE TAY 1 JUN-3 OCT, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

This exhibition looks at the influence the Tay has had on the city of Dundee, and the ways in which its various faces, from early settlement to industrial giant, continue to reinvent its iconic waterfront.

V&A Dundee NIGHT FEVER: DESIGNING CLUB CULTURE

3 JUN-9 JAN 22, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, £5 - £10

The perfect exhibition in the light of the last year, Night Fever explores the relationship between vibrant global club culture and fashion, architecture, and graphic design, giving an intoxicating glimpse into the art that informs our nights out.

WHAT IF…?/SCOTLAND 3 JUN-21 NOV, 10:00AM – 5:00PM, FREE

Designed to be staged at the Venice Biennale, this exhibition responds to the festival’s theme “How will we live together?” by collaborating with and involving local communities, highlighting and seeking to return to the civic responsibility of design.

1 JUN-8 AUG, TIMES VARY, FREE

This major new exhibition brings together a series of works created specifically for the DCA by renowned British artist Emma Talbot, whose artistic practice spans the breadth of the visual arts, from drawing and painting to animation and modelling.

IMAN TAJIK: PROJECTS 20 1-19 JUN, 12:00PM – 5:00PM, TBC

Glasgow-based Iranian photographer Iman Tajik presents new work exploring the Highland Clearance land disputes and modern land ownership as part of the ongoing Projects 20.

Venues

Glasgow Venues Compiled by Tara Hepburn

Photo: Courtesy of Glasgow Beer Works Glasgow Beer Works Beer Garden

June 2021 — Listings

Photo: Courtesy of Wee Paree Wee Paree

Wee Paree

240 CROW ROAD, G11 7PZ 0141 334 6171 WEEPAREE.CO.UK

Wee Paree is a neat and chic bistro on Crow Road which opened at the beginning of August 2020. It quickly built up a strong reputation locally at a time when that was hard to do. Their lazy indulgent brunches are as good as it gets: high quality ingredients are the order of the day here, cooked simply and effectively. The room itself is beautiful: a pleasing mix of tiles, marble, and dark wood, making Wee Paree a lovely place to spend a few hours. A transporting slice of Parisian style in the West End of Glasgow.

Glasgow Beer Works Beer Garden

Glasvegan

118 OSBORNE STREET, G1 5RP

0141 774 9930 GLASGOWBEERWORKS.COM/BEER-GARDEN

The Glasgow Beer Works Beer Garden sits under John Byrne’s Billy Connolly mural just behind the St Enoch centre. The drinking spot feels makeshift in a charming way, effectively consisting of picnic tables surrounded by drinks trucks serving up a changing selection of draft and bottled beers from Glasgow Beer Works themselves, as well as wines and spirits. A taco truck is also on hand from local favourite Rafa’s dishing up Arizona-style Mexican tacos and nachos. A large and necessary gazebo can also be deployed overhead when the weather doesn’t play ball.

Slice Glasgow

50 ST ENOCH SQUARE, G1 4DH

15 JOHN STREET, MERCHANT CITY, G1 1HP

0141 226 3075 FACEBOOK.COM/THEGLASVEGAN

0141 552 4433 SLICEGLASGOW.CO.UK

Glasvegan on St Enoch Square is an all-vegan breakfast and sandwich spot. It’s the type of place that is perfectly appointed to deliver high-quality grab-and-go lunches to city centre workers on their lunch break – if there were any in this pandemic year. It’s no mean feat, then, that over the past 12 months the team at Glasvegan successfully established themselves as a popular takeaway spot, selling delicious breakfast rolls (maple glazed vegan bacon anyone?), indulgent 16oz plant-based milkshakes and sandwiches throughout the pandemic. Open for real now, this modest but accomplished vegan cafe is well worth a proper sit-down visit.

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Slice pops up at night-time in the Merchant City branch of Singl-End. Claiming to be the city’s first dedicated pizza and cocktail bar, the menu really is pretty much pizza and cocktails. A selection of eight different bubbly squares of focaccia slices are available at £4 each (the veggie haggis, mushroom and spinach is particularly good), while the cocktails are colourful camp creations. The Solero Blizzard, for example, includes a whole blended Solero. Their espresso martini is rebranded Disco Juice, and arrives served in a small disco ball. Or, at least it did before the popular drinking cups began to go missing at an alarming rate!

THE SKINNY

Photo: Michael Burch Photography

Edinburgh Venues

Dundee Venues

Compiled by Izzy Gray

Compiled by Jamie Wilde

Casa Dundee

158 NETHERGATE, DD1 4DY CASA-DUNDEE.CO.UK

Down the Hatch

13 ANTIGUA STREET, EH1 3NH 0131 374 5566 DOWNTHEHATCHCAFE.COM

If you listened closely in December 2020, you might have heard the roar of several thousand Leithers celebrating the news that Down the Hatch were soon to be setting up shop at the Top of the Walk. Friend to foodies, foe to waistbands, the Canadian diner proved a massive success down in South Queensferry. Now, they’ve added a central location to their arsenal and it comes nicely decked-out too, with exposed brickwork, chunky wood and clever maple-leaf nods giving it a far-from-Scotland feel. Expect the same legendary skillets, piled high with stalwarts from across the North American foodmap; poutine, burgers, buffalo wings, fries as dirty as they come? 'Scuse us while we wipe away the drool.

Fin and Grape

The Walrus

0131 452 8453 FINANDGRAPE.COM

INSTAGRAM.COM/THEWALRUSLEITH

19 COLINTON ROAD, EH10 5DP

Forget fish ’n chips, fish ’n wine is our new favourite combo! The focus at Bruntsfield’s Fin and Grape lies on gorgeously-crafted seafood creations, straight from Scotland’s shores. From wee nippers like the salt cod mousse to large lashings of trout served with radicchio, it’s safe to say you'll not be needing your salt and sauce here. What's more, the menus are nicely shaped for sharing, so nae guilt if you fancy sampling a bit of everything, and veggies are well-provided for too, with plenty of tasty alternatives to the saltwater fare. Wash it all down with some expertly-chosen plonk in their cosy wine basement, sail away with the nautical interior and enjoy a breather from the city centre.

Courtyard Bar Holyrood Distillery

With Dundee Rep and DCA on its doorstep, the latest hospitality addition to the Nethergate in Dundee has been working up a bit of a stir. Casa Dundee officially opened with the lifting of lockdown restrictions back in April. The bar and restaurant’s large, stylish outside bar has been in high demand with live music and a range of classic pub grub enticing punters. With two gardens and two floors of dining also set to open in the former landmark bank building, demand looks only set to rise. Try the Casa Mac Attack Burger – a filthy fan favourite.

Nola Dundee

39 UNION STREET, DD1 4BS 01382 225135 FACEBOOK.COM/NOLADUNDEE

Nola Dundee is a subterranean cocktail bar based in Union Street, Dundee’s new hip locale. Run by the same people behind Bird and Bear and Abandon Ship, the bar opened briefly in the summer months of 2020 before temporarily shutting its doors once more due to Covid-19 restrictions. Now back again, the bar has been whipping up its moreish cocktails to customers at its outside tables. Pornstar Martinis are a popular classic while their own unique range of smoke infused cocktails are also proving a big hit. Vibrant, friendly atmospheres and luscious drinks make Nola Dundee well worth a visit.

ST LEONARDS LANE, EH8 9SH

126-130 EASTER ROAD, EH7 5RJ

One of the latest cafes to grace Easter Road before you-know-what hit, The Walrus offers an eclectic mix of mysticism and modern street food. With hints of 1960s Haight-Ashbury, it’s as much a place for getting your laidback fix as it is some decent scran. The team did a great job at keeping the locals fed throughout lockdown with their hand-stretched pizzas and grocery boxes, and look set to continue with their dine-in fare, ranging from hearty breakfasts to light lunches, vegan stews and hangover-busting smoothies. With later hours, cocktails and music nights looming on the post-lockdown horizon, we’re predicting great things for this quirky haven.

0131 285 8977 HOLYROODDISTILLERY.CO.UK

Is it just us, or has the pandemic knocked our socialising habits a bit off-kilter? Scrabbling to book a table, outdoors, in Scotland? Strange, aye, but al fresco is here to stay. Thankfully the Holyrood Distillery are on hand to help us out with their summer sun-trap. The Courtyard Bar is returning to the Old Town following a successful stint in 2020. Offering their eponymous malts, menagerie of gins, pints from Pilot and Campervan and scran supplied by the award-winning Hickory, temperatures cannot be guaranteed but the good times can. With some strategically-placed covers and heaters on hand too, they’ll even do their best to keep you dry. Roofs are overrated anyway.

Photo: Courtesy of Slice Slice

22-26 EXCHANGE STREET, DD1 3DL 07359 073171 VANDALCO.ORG

Now residing in the former Castlehill Restaurant, Vandal & Co is one of Dundee’s newest restaurants to join the foodie haven fare in Exchange Street alongside the likes of Flame Tree Cafe and The Cheesery. Refusing to pigeonhole themselves to one specific type of cuisine, Vandal & Co cater to all sorts of dietary requirements, including vegetarian, gluten free, dairy free and vegan. They currently offer bites, bowls and plates over brunch, lunch and dinner. A selection of wines, beers and cocktails are also available and kids can also tuck in with their specially curated Wee Vandals menu.

Jannettas Gelateria Dundee S CRICHTON ST, DD1 3AZ

01334 473285 JANNETTAS.CO.UK/DUNDEE-WATERFRONT

Jannettas Gelateria in St. Andrews is loved by thousands across Scotland. But no longer do you need to venture to the home of golf to sample their sweet deliciousness – you can get your kick here in Dundee. Located seconds away from the V&A in the city’s Slessor Gardens, queues have already been stretching to obscene proportions. They currently have a brand-new gelato flavour made especially for Dundee – Marmalade & Ginger Gelato – and they’ve also teamed up with local Italian food catering business Mezzaluna to offer ciabattas and extra special cannoli which has been flying off the shelves.

Photo: Courtesy of Glasvegan

Photo: Grant Anderson

Glasvegan

Nola Dundee

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June 2021 — Listings

Photo: Courtesy of Vandal & Co Vandal & Co

Vandal & Co

THE SKINNY

K-Foundation’s Jimmy Cauty brings his new work ESTATE, a dystopian model village experience featuring four abandoned concrete tower blocks at 1:24 scale housed in a 40-foot shipping container, to Scotland this month

What’s your favourite place to visit and why? I like to visit Brenda, the teenage Queen of the Iceni Tribe who lives in Iceni Heights. All the other kids are scared of her but she gives me advice and sometimes a swig of her lemonade. Favourite food to cook in lockdown and why? During the lockdown Brenda showed us how to hot-wire a microwave to the National Grid, we would roast wild bats (just for fun, they were not edible).

Who was your hero growing up? Brenda because she was older than the rest of us and she had a scooter and fluorescent green eyes.

What three people would you invite to your virtual dinner party and what are you cooking? What is a dinner party? I would invite Brenda and her twin cousins Flora and Fauna. The shop has still not been re-built so not sure what we would eat. I heard there were still some crisps left in Watch Tower 4. What’s your all-time favourite album? What is an album? What’s the worst film you’ve ever seen? I saw the news once, they were saying Brenda was a bad person. I hated that.

Who’s the worst? I am the worst, that’s why I’m locked up in Camp Delta-Zulu. When did you last cry? 7.59 pm, crying is not allowed after 8 o’clock. What are you most scared of? Brenda says one day the Children of the Aftermath will rise up and overthrow the state, but what if we fail? When did you last vomit and why? I haven’t tried that yet.

Image: L-13 Light Industrial Workshop

June 2021 — Chat

What book would you take to a seemingly endless period of government-enforced isolation? Harry Potter and the Tower Block Revolution.

Image: L-13 Light Industrial Workshop

Favourite colour and why? Blue because that’s the colour we paint ourselves when we go on a tower block raid.

Whose work inspires you now? Brenda because she draws spiral patterns and maths equations on the concrete walls.

Image: L-13 Light Industrial Workshop

The Skinny On...

The Skinny On... Jimmy Cauty

Tell us a secret? Brenda says that some kids in Iceni Heights killed a pensioner in Roman Point and hid the body in the water tank but she definitely wasn’t involved. Which celebrity could you take in a fight? Amber Rudd says the Iceni Tribe will be wiped out in the coming battle for ESTATE but Brenda says we will win; I’m not so sure. Rudd has the Chinooks and sonic weapons. Brenda says she found a cave where Jesus lives and he will help us. If you could be reincarnated as an animal, which animal would it be? A radioactive fire-breathing pangolin/bat mutation. How do you stay inspired by the world when you are isolated from it? Our motto in Camp Delta-Zulu is ‘PLAY TO OBEY’. That inspired me on long months of solitary confinement.

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Jimmy Cauty’s ESTATE, North Edinburgh Arts, Edinburgh, 28 May-26 Jun, Thu-Fri, 10am-4pm, Sat, 10am-1pm. Bookings essential at northedinburgharts.co.uk Platform, The Bridge, Easterhouse, Glasgow, 28 Jun-30 Jul platform-online.co.uk. A programme for ESTATE Edinburgh, SPECTACLE, is available at societyofspectacles.co.uk. l-13.org/projects/jimmy-cauty/estate

THE SKINNY

October 2020

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June 2021 — Chat

The Skinny On...

THE SKINNY

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