Suppose the world doesn’t revolve round we humans? Maybe we’re just part of a network of relationships, between almost anything – even washed-up seaweed?

My work explores the ‘chain of connection by which all natural forces are linked together and made mutually dependent upon each other,’ an idea which was first mooted by scientist, explorer, naturalist, Alexander Humboldt (1769-1859).

If we accept that we are not separate to the workings of the planet but are deeply entangled then our relationship with the world around us shifts.

I combine copper-covered seaweeds, dried kelp stipes, beach finds and mirror in an intricate dance of contrasting materials and dynamic forms. Like dancers, these entanglements create a new unity. To dance with the natural world by not only taking from it but also giving back to it, offers a possibility of collaborative survival in the face of accelerated change.

References and further reading can be found on Cally’s website here.

Digital artist and coder Tim Murray-Browne reworks AI through glitch, coding, mysticism and personal memory in an exhibition of new work.

The invitation to the preview of this exhibition on Friday 1 December is open to all. Please RSVP here.

SMALL FRAME, INFINITE CANVAS offers an alternative perspective on generative AI through creative coding, glitch and personal memories.

Each image is generated from a single customised AI. I trained the AI to imagine new memories based on my lifetime archive of 25,000 photos. It has only seen what I myself saw at one point and felt moved to record. The images it generates echo my visual world: Scottish landscapes, tree branches criss-crossing under the sky, rock textures from Cornish beaches and the contours of the human body. (I excluded photos of other people’s faces, but kept many close up studies of the human body.)

Yet my photo archives are a more diverse range of images than this AI was designed to handle. It struggles to make its creations ‘lifelike’. Artefacts appear revealing its own endless world of algorithmic creation.

I modified the AI to expand its frame, creating ever larger images that bring these hidden glitches to the foreground. Each image here contains a small square frame near its centre. As we move away from that optimised frame, the image disintegrates into an endless canvas of offcuts and mathematical building blocks.

Our relationship with AI is still fluid. In my mind, it jostles for contradictory roles: a tool, a collaborator, a pathological copycat, a new kind of mind – sometimes all these at once. The technology is racing ahead faster than my intuitions can.

A common approach to training AI is to harvest huge amounts of images off the web, aiming for a monolithic AI. When I began researching AI in 2018, I felt a strong instinct to train my own system using my own data in the safety of my own PC. If we all express ourselves through the same systems handed down from above, we will surely all find the same paths and end up saying the same things. I needed a way to make it my own, to fuse its world with mine.

In 2021, I stepped back from the overwhelming stream of new AI systems to dig deeper into what’s possible with this single AI I trained. In the years since, I’ve developed a relationship with it. As with many AIs, at first everything is overwhelmingly magnetic. Then it all starts looking the same. But then, after some time, some things emerge that resonate more deeply.

In making the leap to the physical world, I wanted to embrace the scale of the images. They combine detail and scale in a way that can be lost in the fluidity of digital display.

SMALL FRAME, INFINITE CANVAS was created with support from Creative Scotland awarding funds from the National Lottery, Wasps Studios and Preverbal Studio. The AI used to create these images is based on StyleGAN3, created by Nvidia.

Tim Murray-Browne is an award-winning digital artist, creative coder and AI engineer based in Glasgow. His work connects AI, dance, image and sound to explore how we are shaped by technology, and how we might build it differently. It includes creating AI systems that translate dance into sound, an ensemble of new musical instruments that is played entirely by its audience, interactive audio-visual sculptures and live performances with real-time AI.

Tim holds a Masters in Maths and Computer Science from Oxford University and a PhD in Electronic Engineering from Queen Mary, University of London. His work has been awarded the Sonic Arts Prize, nominated for the Ars Electronica STARTS Prize and shown at venues including Tate Modern (London), Victoria & Albert Museum (London), Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow) and Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology (Milan).

STATEMENT

My work explores the parts of being human that gets left behind when we interact with technology.

An interactive system constructs a world. It defines not only what you experience but what actions you can take and what consequences ensue. **What dynamics of power are implied by an interaction? How does this shape the intuitions and implicit assumptions of our embodied minds?** Most digital interaction today is built around bureaucratic processes of data entry. My work aims to reveal how it could be so different in the future.

My background is in computer science and coding is my primary means of creation. I value this closeness to the craft of technology and what it reveals, while remaining attentive to how it can distort my perspective.

Much of my work speculates on how different our relationship with technology might be. I create interactive works that celebrates the wildness of being human and amplifies our capacity for empathy, compassion and self-organisation. I also create technology that exposes its own problematic nature: its tendancy to homogenise human identity, to divorce us from our bodies, to invisibly reinforce power dynamics, to impose discrete structures onto an ambiguous reality, to isolate those who diverge from its norms.

A group of artists based out of Langstane Place in Aberdeen are welcoming you into their studio spaces for a look into their creative practice.

Stop by this former printworks – now artist studios – to meet the makers including weavers, painters, puppeteers and ceramicists.

The artists based at Perth Creative Exchange are pleased to announce their annual winter exhibition.

The artists of Inverness Creative Academy have announced their annual winter exhibition.

You are warmly invited to the private view of the exhibition on Thursday 23 November, 6pm–8pm. Visit the beautiful restored Midmills building to see the dynamics range of works spanning glass, painting, photography and print.

Help us celebrate The Briggait’s 150th birthday. Join us at The Briggait on the evening of Thursday 7 December for refreshments and to see an exhibition of works by artists that call The Briggait their creative home.

Opened in 1873 as Glasgow’s fish market, The Briggait was a bustling centre for trade across the West of Scotland for over a century until the fish market relocated to Blochairn in the 1970s.

For a time the building lay derelict, slated for demolition, before the Bridgegate Preservation Trust (now known as the Glasgow Building Preservation Trust) ensured its survival. In 2009, Wasps Studios, the UK’s largest provider of creative spaces, transformed The Briggait, reopening it as a creative hub for artists and creative industries.

Please join us at The Briggait to celebrate the first 150 years of this iconic venue’s rich history as we embark on the next step in its renovation: launching the Clydeside Market Halls.

I deal with fragments of everyday life and am suggesting that a fragmentary view is all we’ve got. – Susan Hiller

A world within a world….

My nomadic practice is of site specific linking exhibitions, each includes a part of the previous work as a continuum. A personal history that folds the situation I am in into the work like a personal atlas. A human geography.

This exhibition is a collective experiment with varying forms of scaffolding. The thread that interconnects the people and objects past and present is the building, the container of people, a symbiotic relationship, the objects are connected to lives lived, deeds done and the Briggait acts as a microcosm within the eco system of Glasgow.

This site specific immersive installation (a place) is a container of objects, people, and is made up of (small human hand sized objects, donated by the people who presently work in the building, artists, tenants, curators, marketers, administrators, maintenance, security, cleaners as well as contractors refurbishing the former Glasgow fish market). The contribution of materials from different orders (people and the systems that form and inform their lives ). Each represent a symbolic fragment of lives lived and future possibilities as they come together in a moment of time and join with others of earlier historical times (also included are part of the wall of the original building, bamboo poles from a school of trapeze artists who trained in the building some years back and photographs taken before these same walls, the bamboo poles join for a “Last [ fish ] Supper”, with items from previous exhibitions).

The work is a world of self-perpetuating, complex, yet humorous childlike structures that coexist yet are interdependent. The process of rescuing and elevating the excluded from commodity circulation, trigger hidden forces within them. We, like the silent(?) objects are on the threshold of perpetual crisis or redemption.

Several paintings and collages included in this exhibition will act as a means to personally reflect. Each exhibition is an experiment.

Salli’s website / Salli’s Instagram / Studio no. 203 at The Briggait

This exhibition of new work by artist Jack Brindley (Pavilion Pavilion) attempts to bring specificity and value to architecture through the objects which inhabit it.

Whenever you look at light, basically it’s just air. It has no tactile-ness, it’s totally without density – Robert Irwin

For the last few years Brindley has been working almost exclusively with ‘architectural-glass’ (stained-glass). As a site specific intervention, his work attempts to re-address the role of ornamentation in architecture, and to give back specificity and value to spaces by the objects that inhabit them. Art to live with, rather than art to look at. Brindley’s stained glass work explores how we can be sensitive to the quality of light present and available in a space, and how we might enhance it with glass.

Sunlight can seem timeless, like a momentary glimpse of possibility. This exhibition; Slow Light (a Window for November), brings together works that explore our perceptions of light. How materials, surfaces and pigments can be drawn so thin that they become an optical sensation rather than a purely physical one. As windows are the means to bring light into spaces, Brindley would like to proposition these artworks as apertures of ‘opticality’, experiments that explore our relationship between light and physicality.

Often working under the alias ‘Pavilion Pavilion’, Brindley’s practice explores the relationship between art and architecture. A pavilion is often described as a temporary site, an architecture that gives shape to an idea. Pavilions have been used in world fairs and expos as a means to explore new advances in technology, art or science. Brindley is interested in how we can utilise architecture as a vessel to communicate hypothetical, utopian ideas. The experimentation of space through pavilions investigates the components of the language with which architecture defines itself; windows and glass are a core tenant of this, yet somehow over-looked by contemporary building practices.

Artworks to slow down an instant, Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees – Robert Irwin

‘I Remember’ by Rick Holland

I remember the tone the sunlight made Reflecting as it did That first breath of late night morning air The feeling that here was anywhere And anywhere was kind Plumes of smoke funnel overland and meet us there As though, our late night tales joined to feed our breathing And each breath kept golden remnants of a fireside tale inside Safe but boundless To hang like bubbles over us with each completed breath

Not born or dying, but reassembling the very air A ceiling to our meaning, or spring for new sounds to bound from No essential measure of beginning or belief No escape and no relief, but safe Safe as shapeless Shapeless on a turning wheel of casting possibilities that change the wheel The tick becomes imagined and steel to silk I remember the tone the sunlight made And each time it comes to visit, I remember And taste and scent, and sense released from sense

The sense of everything as golden and remembered Even as it slips into the course of these events And this is my friend is home Right here and in this tone of sun and fire and form Where listening is a birth each time And feeling creeps to embers Notes suggest in emblems reminiscent of a nascent form of wealth From long before gold could be held When cold was felt and breath was celebrated for that very rearrangement Of the air which placed us here

Jack Brindley’s website / Pavilion Pavilion / Jack’s Instagram / Pavilion Pavilion Instagram

Melanie O’Donnell and Onya Attridge are influenced by similar things, and their work shares many of the same elements, reaching very different visual conclusions, hence the title – the same but different.

Working from the Glasgow Ceramics Studio, Onya wheel throws in stoneware clay. Each piece is functional but also unique. For this exhibition the influences are wide and varied, from religion and mythology to William Blake and Blindboy Boatclub, there are many threads binding the pieces together. They are all about being human in some way, our mental health, the physical connection of emotions to our bodies and the stories we tell each other and ourselves to feel better or to understand our feelings. Onya is influenced by the tradition of using ceramics as a vehicle for story telling using a wide range of decoration techniques, slips, modelling, spring moulds, drawing, sgraffito, underglaze transfers and stock overglaze transfers to collage imagery and motifs on her pieces.

This exhibition shows for the first time a series of 20 small urns, inspired by a collection of 20 statues of Queens in the Jardin de Luxembourg, Paris. It is unusual and refreshing to see a whole collection of female statuary in a public space. These urns, which are influenced by the shape of Egyptian canopic jars, are a tribute to these Queens. Each of them has developed their own character and style during the making and decorating process.

Onya Attridge graduated in 2000 from Edinburgh College of Art with a BA (Hons) in Ceramics.

Also based at Glasgow Ceramics Studio, Melanie makes figurative ceramics. She draws inspiration from many sources including religious iconography, Mexican and European domestic “shrines” and the adornment of women living through various times and cultures. She has travelled extensively throughout Europe gaining inspiration from architecture, statuary and culture.

Melanie O’Donnell works with earthenware clay and hand builds pieces, describing the making process as akin to a meditation, where she gets lost in the process. She places a lot of emphasis on the surface decoration, using under glazes, slips, Japanese rice paper transfers and gold lustre. Melanie endeavours to always bring joy with her work. Melanie graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1986 with a BA (Hons) in Ceramics. She went on to travel and work in Europe before completing a post graduate teaching qualification. She currently teaches art to children with special needs and is constantly inspired by their expressive, naïve art work.

tit-bits…..an exhibition of drawing and sculpture made from the detritus of everyday, half-forgotten conversations, malformed impressions, shards of clothing, and broken mobile phones.

tit-bits… a pleasing bit of something, a morsel, this and that; a title borrowed from the infamous, though short-lived British magazine of the 1880s, which collated for her readers a selection of informative snippets, jokes, and stories. To the millions who read them each week, these tit-bits were a source of light entertainment. To the generation of modernist writers who reached adolescence during the magazine’s peak, they were the epitome of low culture, a sure sign of the degradation of society at the hands of the masses….tit-bits…the rag that Joyce’s Leopold Bloom paws over while squatting at his privy.

tit-bits… the stuff from which these drawings and sculptures are made: the detritus of the everyday; half-forgotten conversations, malformed impressions, shards of clothing, broken mobile phones. Here is the ugliness of the mundane; the farce of modern consumer culture. Ugliness binds the work to a long lineage of the grotesque in art, a lineage that, Mikhail Bakhtin observed, possesses a critical dimension wherever it appears. In its ability to parody and debase, the grotesque can reverse hierarchical structures and subvert the value systems of the society from which it emerges – a process that Bakhtin saw at work in the carnivalesque, where the grotesque was employed by popular culture – or where, perhaps, popular culture was employed by the grotesque.

tit-bits… amusing, perhaps absurd, glimpses at life. For all their apparent horror these figures are nonetheless funny, always retaining the ability to provoke laughter. This humour flows from a preoccupation with the body’s margins, where the base functions and vulnerabilities of our physiques emerge, avoided but inevasible. Mouths, noses, breasts, and stomachs are variously amplified, distorted, twisted out of, or into, shape – yet the sum of the artifice reveals a more fundamental truth. What appears from the fragments and the mockery and the degradation are ragile, singular beings, conceits, pretensions and indignities laid bare.

Fiona Robertson is a Glasgow-based artist and has lectured Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art since the mid nineties. Her practice is multifaceted and spans a range of media including drawing, painting, sculpture and experimental film. Fiona’s research and work are centrally concerned with the uses of memory, both in the formation of identity (collective and personal) and the way art, repurposing memory, can subvert and reimagine identity in turn. Her work could be seen as following a lineage of artists who challenged artistic and political norms through the primitive, the childish and the surreal – in particular, Dada and Expressionism. Fiona’s work has been selected for international film competitions at acclaimed festivals such as Oberhausen and Go Short. She also exhibits locally – most recently ‘The cook, the cupboard and Joan of Arc’ was shown at the RSA in Edinburgh. She active in the local arts community and has curated exhibitions and events (https://beggarsteeth.com). Her site-specific sculpture ‘Green Man’ is located in Glasgow’s Necropolis. Fiona regularly collaborates with, and is commissioned by, performance and theatre makers. In 2017, her site-specific sculpture and film ‘Bad Sheep’ was screened as part of a touring performance promenade.