3 minute read
ARTISTS UNLOCKING THE EXTRAORDINARY
Bel is interested in the everyday art we make to survive hostile times. They try to respond to injustice through small acts of accessible protest, often by adding overtly political details to everyday objects. Bel’s practice is fatigue informed and ground in the queer, mad and chronically ill communities they live in.
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Cliff Andrade’s work draws on personal and social histories, referencing migrant and particularly Portuguese disapora experiences, to explore notions that dominate his lived experience: belonging & unbelonging, place & memory, displacement, labour & poverty, hope & hopelessness... and especially the idea of ‘home’ and its importance to our sense of personal identity. He is interested in how walking as an art practice intersects with those concerns and their potential implications for mental (ill) health. Through the summer of 2021, and living with the consequences of surgery for bowel cancer, he walked from John O’Groats to Lands End to put his research into practice.
I live and work in Glasgow but was raised on the Isle of Arran. I practice at Project Ability, a Glasgow based arts charity. My work explores my mental ill health and my special interests of dolls, superheroes and anime. I use popular culture influences in the custom dolls and costumes I make. I primarily work in print making using all the various processes and have recently been combining text with photographic imagery.
I identify as an artist but for a long time the thought of being an artist felt very alien to me, it was, after all, another culture. Artists were confident, sophisticated, well-educated people. That’s not how I saw myself even though being creative was important to me. Over time I have been able to overcome many personal, cultural, and social barriers and making art is central to who I am not. As an Outside In Ambassador the journey of exploring and interpreting the Art Extraordinary collection with other artists has been incredible and profound.
Grant Glennie
I’m a neurodivergent artist based in Glasgow. I am influenced by a wide variety of things, sometimes subjective and personal. My work often involves exploring the system continuum between highly ordered and highly disordered. I have ben part of Project Ability since 2010, when I was first referred there by a community psychiatric nurse. I make art because it can help give me structure, purpose and improve my mental wellbeing. I enjoy learning through art about everything and anything. I work in a number of mediums but retain a computational, rule based and systems approach.
KIN (AKA CULTURA PLASMIC INC)
Kin (aka Cultura Plasmic INC) is a multi-pseudonymous new media artist and essayist working with video, sound, installation and digital technologies. Her core areas of interest include how power and control operate in different environments, along with how behaviours and psychologies are shaped in relation to these. Since 2020, she has been part of the cohort on Autograph ABP and Shape’s Transforming Leadership programme, an initiative supporting artists who have experienced disadvantage. Over the last few years, she has also produced several radio shows broadcast by Radiophrenia at CCA, Glasgow.
Stuart Low
I was born in Glasgow in the 1970s and I like most artwork. I like to make drawings and paintings that are inspired by my written work. My art explores movement within the constricts of gravity; the changing seasons and the changing skyscapes inspire me. I have my own style taken from nature and I use mostly paint and acrylic pen in bold, bright colours. I have not much formal art education and have accessed Project Ability studio for ten years or so to make and explore my creativity.
Ornaidigh Thompson
Research is central to my practice: a flux of thought, research, making; each part overlapping the other, informing each other. This body of work was made in response to investigating concepts of inside / outside in the world of art and beyond. Through concluding that our human instinct is to classify ourselves into social structures, organizations, movements, eliciting questions: What is Art? Inside/Outside; a space in between, a merging of all creativity?
“The New Dialogues project enabled me to unpick what art means to me, including its connection to life. It encouraged us to take the plunge and grow in confidence, to believe in our own creative processes and get creating.”
New Dialogues participant