Helen Glassford | Encounters by The Scottish Gallery

HELEN GLASSFORD

E N C O U N T E R S

HELEN GLASSFORD E N C O U N T E R S 31 MARCH – 30 APRIL 2022

It is perhaps no surprise that Helen Glassford’s studio looks north. From its hilltop position on the southside of the Tay, she can watch the sweeping changes in weather and light on the river and across the far bank toward the Sidlaw Hills. It is to the north where Helen has been looking for the last few years, and it is the north, or the idea of the north, which has been an inspiration for her as an artist. Glassford is a painter who seeks out the edges of landscape, travelling to the most remote and distant corners in search of subject matter. For this exhibition she travelled to the Outer Hebrides and further, to the outlying archipelago of St Kilda. A trip to Assynt in November provided further opportunity to engage with the ancient landscape of Scotland’s high northwest. Glassford cherishes her time spent in the wilds of Scotland. Each trip in the outdoors, sketchbook in hand, is a journey of personal revelation, her dialogue with the landscape akin to a meditative response as she absorbs the geography and atmosphere of a particular place. Back in the studio, Glassford will begin the lengthy painting process, distilling her experience of the landscape into a visual language. The mastery of her chosen medium of oil allows her to adapt and vary her technique to capture her poetic response to a particular moment. We are delighted to introduce Helen Glassford’s first major solo exhibition with The Scottish Gallery. Encounters is an enthralling body of work capturing the harsh but

TO THE NORTH TOMMY ZYW

beautiful indifference of land to the passing of time, the forces of nature, and human experience. Tommy Zyw, Director, The Scottish Gallery January 2022

Right: Helen Glassford’s sketchbooks

It seems appropriate for me to define the experience of landscape as chance meetings, or encounters, with the influence of that experience going beyond the purely elemental. It is internal and peripheral, time and touch, mood and memory. It imprints its character on the psyche, leaves traces in the memory, and strays far beyond any physical map. I can fully admit that the landscape has a hold over me. Every artist has their muse, and the landscape has infinite stories to tell those who are listening. After a while it seeps under the skin and starts to unveil and reveal the most wondrous of personalities. For me, the landscape is best experienced when alone simply because it both sharpens my senses and allows my mind to wander, yet it is not a solitary experience. Being surrounded by and enveloped in a living landscape where the light can welcome, the hills talk, the seas breathe, and the air excite can be very good company indeed. I am drawn to the remote; searching out places where human presence is absent or at least minimal, where in summer the nights are long in coming, or never too far away in winter. I might be found, or lost, in boundless moorlands infused with the old heavy air of the peat bog, or on bronzed, ancient coasts with long, salt spray winds and where shy mountains become eloquent with the passage of time. Wildness is something to celebrate. I have never really

ENCOUNTERS HELEN GLASSFORD

considered it to be a ‘me and it’ situation, since when we venture to places and spend time getting to know them, we become part of them, and so we are both with them and within them. The cloud-capped distantly disdainful mountain may not immediately welcome you, but it can hold and communicate with

Right: Helen drawing at Scarp, Harris, July 2021

you as you walk. This reciprocity is not new, since we have always had a special relationship with nature, but it is one that I am passionate about conveying in paint. Each moment carries its own atmosphere, and each atmosphere shares its glory or gloom to those who are willing to receive it. It is palpable, yet visceral and intangible. It is this intangibility that entices me to return to paint it again and again. I walk with my sketchbook in hand, making notes and recording observations that might otherwise dissipate over time. My marks change with each place and each mood, searching for the right language. What makes us forget, and remember, is intrinsically linked to our openness to experience. Wildness may be seen in your back garden or local hedgerows, but often for me it is the remote edgelands of the North and West, where the travelling weather and big skies offer a persistence of raw experience. The Western Isles in particular extend this in limitless generosity. There, where white sands luminesce under turquoise water, or mercury skies echo in the shimmering restless rhythm of the ocean, and the light is often described as tissue-paper thin, we are made aware of a wider world around us. My passage to the Western Isles and St Kilda in the golden days of summer was almost a blur of unfettered, exhilarating moments;

The naturalist James Fisher wrote in 1947 that, “The visitor to St Kilda will be haunted for the rest of his life by this place and tantalised by the impossibility of describing it to those who have not seen it”. St Kilda is indeed unique, quite unlike any other Island I have visited, a place not easily understood, and I was certainly tantalised and most definitely puzzled as to how best to paint my experience of this gentle, strong and distant Isle. As I walked around the tops of Hirta and looked out upon the neighbouring Sea Stack guardians of Boreray, Stac an Armin, and Stac Lee, I realised that the Island’s dangerous remoteness makes it both sanctuary and prison. Precipitous igneous rock cliffs that cut sharply into the deep Atlantic, providing resting places for many thousands of sea birds, contrast with the softer, shelving green bay of the southern harbour, sheltered from the prevailing winds. St Kilda’s complex character is defined by not only its distant location, endless horizons, tumultuous skies and rolling mists, but also by human history. This seemingly desolate place has a soul and heart filled with stories of the islanders’ enjoyment of a simple, almost utopian existence, and of families supporting one another through hard living conditions. Yet once connections grew with the outside world, the delicate balance of survival became more difficult to sustain. Ultimately, St Kilda was evacuated. As with St Kilda, other locations I visit are imbued with their

a collection of experiences never to be forgotten. Usually when you leave a place it disappears out of sight within minutes, if not seconds, but St Kilda stays with you. I felt the same privilege as many travellers before me to this mysterious island, yet I had not realised the effect it would have on me once there, and thereafter.

own histories and characters, felt and heard in the motion of the seas or the winds singing in the crags. Assynt is another of these places that holds a piece of my heart. Rugged and raw, it has charms that entice and entrap the unsuspecting visitor, unlocking a sense of belonging that is almost primal. 6

Above: Helen drawing, Barra, July 2021

November is a month of great change; procrastination is not known here in daylight hours, since time is of the essence, yet the hours of darkness pass slowly despite the fast energies from strong south westerly winds. On a calm day, the air is ice-fresh and ice-thin, but in a storm salt-laden and thick. This is a battered and bruised, solitary landscape of fragmented lochans and low brittle heather overlooked by the monumental hills of Quinag, Suilven and Canisp which carry the devastation of the Clearances on their broad shoulders. A landscape that speaks of emptiness, yet is steeped in the past as well as the present, rich peaty layer upon

I paint the landscape and its multiple personalities, I paint its impalpable atmospheres, I paint the looming shadowy presence of twilight, and the fast and playful movements of air currents on the silent seas, or the veiled and mystical floating Islands just out of reach. Paint poured and dripped, glazes of pigment applied to float and obscure, to enhance, to disclose the unfolding dramas and vistas suggesting both the ethereal and the real. Paint, in tone, mass, colour, and texture, mixed with the sensory and visual world to recreate new encounters.

rich peaty layer. The weather systems that readily flow through seem to carry these histories and deposit them like onshore winds to the Lewisian shoreline, onto us, changing how we perceive them. It is the moulding together of the sensory and visual world with these fleeting, intangible moments that finds a form in my work.

Helen Glassford January 2022

Sometimes, Helen Glassford will walk during the night-time. Invariably, she will choose to undertake these nocturnal rambles in wild places. Hill-top ridges, moorland and machair, animal trails and rugged pathways; all will help guide her speculative footstep. These night-time excursions constitute a kind of searching. Not for challenge, nor adventure, but in order that she, as an artist, might intuit the landscape. In the moonlight, in the crepuscular glow, the landscape might be felt. Experienced as something contingent, something probable. This sense of feeling the natural world, of recognising the landscape as ambient and inscrutable, becomes the fulcrum of her sensibility as a landscape painter. Always, her landscape painting carries the sense of a world in process, of something ‘becoming’, of something immanent. In these nocturnal rambles Glassford will take her sketchbook. In this, she will notate the feelings and the emotions that the dark nightscape allows. These sketches might be washes of colour, deep blues and greys. Here, the allusion to a liquid moon. There, the suggestion of a ridge of hills. Always, the presence of the sea and the sky. Others, in pencil, may denote the dark mass of a headland with a scrubbed sensation of sky, complete with striations that signify a meteor shower falling from the voluminous Milky Way. Yet others are purely linear marks, the loose sense of an outline that hints at humps and hollows, land and sky.

A SENSE OF OTHERNESS TOM NORMAND

Often Glassford’s night-time walks will follow the coastline. Most recently she has journeyed in the Western Isles, and on the mainland in Sutherland. In the latter, this awe-inspiring northwestern county of Scotland, she spent time in the fabled area of Assynt. For a while, Glassford stayed in the coastal village of 8

Sketchbooks, night-time scenes

Clachtoll. This fishing village is famed for its rocky headlands, and especially for its ‘toll’; a deep cavity in the rocks where the sea crashes into the precipitous cliff. On her first evening in Clachtoll Glassford began to explore this coastline. It was dusk, and the weather was wild. The walking was hard. As she began to return to the village she was assailed by a crashing roar from the sea as the waters battered into the sea cavity. This was followed by a huge burst of salt-spray sea-spill. The water was sucked into the cavity and blew back as a spouting torrent of sea and wind. The very ground shook with the force of the tempest. Undaunted, and now having reconnoitred the pathway, Glassford ventured on a night-time ramble along the same coastal trail, this time with sketchbook in hand. She stayed close to her twilight route but gave due respect to the sea cave with its crashing cascades. Her intentions, she has noted, was to ‘record the sensations of the night’. And she was intrigued to understand that ‘edges weren’t visible, just shapes, and changes in form created by the clouds moving overhead’. In this darkness some sights were recognisable, both natural and manmade: the vast cosmos with its spectacular light show and, more commonly, the beacon of the Stoer Lighthouse tapping its lodestar rhythm to the north. These night-time journeys, intuiting the landscape, feeling and

existence. Indeed, that these painted landscapes reach out to an ethereal and intangible mystery. In searching for this elusive and transcendent quality in nature Glassford has journeyed not only in the north-west of mainland Scotland, but over to the isles. This ‘pilgrimage’ has involved travels to the Outer Hebrides; specifically, to Harris, Berneray, North Uist, South Uist, and Barra. And, also, to the westernmost extreme of the isles, to Hirta in the archipelago of St Kilda. It is these travels that have become evidenced in her current painting. The choice of these island locations is significant. In some senses they represent ‘edges’; places where life and culture have an acute relationship with existential being. Perhaps more importantly, these islands are rooted in nature. They reveal an elemental and even a primordial connection to fundamental aspects of the natural world. In doing this these locales offer insight. They afford some sense of the enigma, even the mystery, of human perceptions of the landscape. In these littoral places near the sea, on these tracks and cliffs, in the pathways near the machair and the peat banks, and besides the lochans and heathered moorlands, are the spaces where Glassford has sketched and prepared her landscape paintings. The locations are vigilant. In a contemporary esotericism they are often named ‘thin places’. They provide a sense of ‘otherness’. They intimate a point at which the ordinary world comes close to

sensing the natural world, are essential to the broader paradigm of Glassford’s art. Her landscape painting is loaded with anticipation and expectation such that the images become a kind of divination. This kind of presentiment, captured within the imagery, generates the sense that the landscape is something other than its material

the metaphysical realm. Where the natural becomes supernatural. This is not to be overly, or indeed, overtly, mystical. But these ‘thin places’ afford the imaginative appreciation of a world that is at once tangible and nebulous. A place where the senses may attach to a numen; and so, reveal a portent, a vision, that is inviolable. 10

Most often, when the idea of ‘thin places’ is explored, individuals will reach for the metaphor of the ‘veil’. The idea that the esoteric or phantom realm may be glimpsed, darkly, just beyond a gossamer web. It might be argued that Glassford’s painting is sensitive to such a perception. Indeed, that this is fundamental to her technique as a landscape painter. In a landscape painting by Glassford the paint is laid on to the primed board in thin layers. In fact, the process proceeds by staining the surface in blocks of delicate colour. These are most usually shades of blue and grey, but sometimes also deep, dark masses of a near midnight hue. In some circumstances these melancholy shades may be leavened by a softly edged block of sunset pink or a seashore coral. These floating bands of colour are developed and intensified in the process of painting. In time, they combine to create tonal correlations and shapes that recover the mood of the landscape.

Invisible Sea (cat. 7)

They present the prospect of land-mass and seascape, of sky and cloud, of light and weather. More than this, they explore the very character of an evanescent world. Of nature as it changes, dissolves, and modulates. With these subtle changes each landscape offers not only a different kind of energy, but a transfigured sense of aura. They become the space where the perceptible and the ethereal combine. This is their profound nuance. The sense of a melancholy but enlightening anticipation of nature’s abstract, disinterested dominion. This insight, this perception, is the fundamental promise of Glassford’s landscape painting. Glassford’s journeys through the Outer Hebrides began on the mainland, in Assynt. In the western part of this wild area the habitat is heathland and grassland, filigreed with lochans. The copious rocky outcrops are, famously, of Torridonian Sandstone, that lies

Ballerina Dawn (cat. 14)

across a foundation of Gneiss; the hard stone that constitutes the bedrock of the Western Isles. This landscape was created in the ice age where the rub and flow of layers of ice carved the distinctive mountains of the locality. In ‘A Man in Assynt’ the poet Norman MacCaig has written a paean to this land: Glaciers, grinding West, gouged out/these valleys, rasping the brown sandstone/and left, on the hard rock below – the/ruffled foreland – /this frieze of mountains, filed/on the blue air – Stac Polly/Cul Beag, Cul Mor, Suilven/Canisp – a frieze and/a litany. These mountains, and most particularly the singular peak of Suilven, stand as totems to the unique character of Assynt. Naturally, Glassford was drawn to this signal peak. In the painting Aloof (cat. 35) she sites Suilven in a winter mist, spectral against a grey sky. In the foreground the land is rough and runs with water. The lochans and the river, the Inver, spreading through the moorland in silver bands of colour, while the wet terrain remains

Aloof (cat. 35)

grounded in patches of black and umber. The paint, like the landscape, has a liquid and loose quality. It echoes the intangible, uncertain, aspect of the mountain, the sky and the land in flux. In a sympathetic harmony the flowing paint and the grained surface marks a profound iteration of the capricious nature of this world. One of the artist’s journeys occurred in the late autumn and early winter of the year. It is invidious to conceptualise these paintings as records of the seasons, but their mood reflects something of the fall and rise of climactic patterns. Still in Clachtoll Snow Promise (cat. 37) is an audacious expressionistic study of rough weather. Wind and rain moving towards a snowstorm. The blue-grey sky, the softer tones of the distant hills contrasting with the deep blue of the foreground heath, and the slow curve of the grey, watery bay all combine to create a portent of torrent and hardship. As a mindscape it falls towards the dark side of the spirit.

Snow Promise (cat. 37)

Rich (cat. 32)

Watershed (cat. 44)

Good Fortune (cat. 1)

Rich (cat. 32), in contrast, offers a vision of silver sea and pink shoreline. It is a painting leavened by promise of change and the sense of a natural movement towards light. Indeed, so much of Glassford’s work may be read as an engagement with not only landscape but also weatherscape. An engagement that reverberates with the most human of intellectual and emotional experience. It is unsurprising, then, that the subject of a watershed might appeal to this sensibility. In practical terms this signifies the mountain or ridge that separates two valleys, each with a flowing river. The watershed, of course, is the high divide that feeds both

sky, the green patches of land divided by a dark caesura, the silver gleam of waters flowing across the land all combine to present a vivid adventure in nature. Equally, the push and pull of conflicting weather systems accent the notion of a dramatic and liberating experience that might realise both awe and expectation. Evidently, Assynt provided Glassford with a deluge of subjects and themes, but the aspiration of her odyssey was shaped by a yearning for the islands of the Outer Hebrides. Her journey was from the mainland to Harris, on the ‘Long Island’ of Lewis and Harris. Here, in Harris, the fine weather is evidenced in her painting Good Fortune (cat. 1). The physical location for this work was

rivers with rainwater. In geographical terms the mountain ridge of Cul Mor, in Assynt, is the principal watershed running north and south through Scotland. It feeds rivers flowing east to the North Sea and west to The Minch, and so to the Atlantic. Glassford’s painting on this subject is subtly animated. The sense of a bursting

Luskentyre beach in the south-west of the island. The beach is renowned for its white sands and intensely blue waters, and this vision Glassford has captured in her painting. Floating bands of blue colour sit above a pale, sand beach, and all underneath a sky flecked with delicate cirrus cloud. 13

The lightened mood of the landscape in Harris is further developed in Glassford’s painting Morning Ritual (Sound of Harris) (cat. 19). An epic panorama of The Sound of Harris with mossgreen foregrounds and distant silver waters, the scene is enveloped by an endless sky. The cloud formations shift from cumulus to cirrus to nimbus and so the fullest appreciation of this transient, ephemeral world is recognised in a prospect replete with wonder. The Sound of Harris is, in geographic terms, the main channel of sea between the islands of Harris and North Uist. It is the point where The Minch meets the Atlantic Ocean and is a passageway that navigates the many islands in the archipelago. Through time, Glassford would negotiate this passage travelling to Berneray, the Uists, and on to the island of Barra. Each island a source for her sketches and notes. Each locality an ambient experience of the natural world and so a source for her imagination.

The culmination of Glassford’s journeys, however, was to the archipelago of St Kilda, and to its largest island Hirta. The aweinspiring quality of the island is expressed in her painting Soar (cat. 6). A near abstract work it is freely painted in shades of blue. The scrubbed marks perhaps signify land and sea and sky, but the atmosphere is one of elation. Indeed, she has voiced her euphoria at this encounter: ‘From what seemed like the top of the world, on St Kilda. I walked up to the gap above the village and sat there alone, watching the birds in the mists, lifting and diving, soaring, swirling. It seemed like a place with no end, and no beginning’. Soar, it might be said, approaches that arrangement of veils, that ‘thin’ experience, that allows an embrace of spectral worlds. Glassford’s visit to Hirta was brief, but the impression it left was boundless. The painting Farewell (cat. 24) reflects upon her passage away from the island. Something like the wake of a ship on the cool,

Morning Ritual (Sound of Harris) (cat. 19)

Soar (cat. 6)

Farewell (cat. 24)

grey water. The subtle outline of the island, a soft blue shadow on the distant horizon. A sweeping sky, toned in grey and silver, unfolding across the scene. A painting at once elegiac and ecstatic. Glassford has remarked that ‘when you leave something behind, it usually slips from consciousness within seconds or perhaps minutes. St Kilda stays with you as you leave, and remains’. This thought and this painting is, in many senses, a fitting climax to her extraordinary travels.

occurs. The impressions and emotions released in the first, immanent immersion in the landscape become ‘cultured’. Paint becomes the medium in which feeling is modulated. In this space the world of experience becomes that extraordinary visual enigma, a painting. The ‘magic’ of the artist is to ensure that the emotional impact of the landscape remains in the painted image. That the ‘aura’ is inviolable and resolute. This evolution, this passage, from the real to the imagined is Glassford’s talent. Maintaining the authenticity, the wonder, of the lived experience of raw nature is Glassford’s art.

Helen Glassford, evidently, is a traveller in the landscape. Her preferred space is the wild places; those locales most closely tied to an elemental world, a primordial nature. Her constant companion is her sketchbook. Here, the images and sensations made available in nature are recorded and notated. More than this, they are creatively imagined. The culmination of this engagement with the wilderness is realised in the quiet of the studio. In this place a kind of alchemy

Dr Tom Normand HRSA January 2022

ST KILDA AND THE WESTERN ISLES It is the moulding together of the sensory and visual world with these fleeting, intangible moments that finds a form in my work. I paint the landscape and its multiple personalities, I paint its impalpable atmospheres, I paint the looming shadowy presence of twilight, and the fast and playful movements of air currents on the silent seas, or the veiled and mystical floating Islands just out of reach. Helen Glassford

Helen on St Kilda, July 2021

1. Good Fortune, 2021 oil on board • 50 x 40 cm 18

2. Pearl, 2021 oil on board • 39.5 x 30 cm 20

3. Ribbons, 2021 oil on board • 28.5 x 22 cm 21

4. Bird Culture (Flight), 2021 oil on board • 28.5 x 22 cm 22

5. Navigator (Sea Chart), 2021 oil on board • 28.5 x 22 cm 23

6. Soar, 2021 oil on board • 100 x 100 cm 24

7. Invisible Sea, 2021 oil on board • 28.5 x 22 cm 26

8. Temple, 2021 oil on board • 28.5 x 22 cm 27

9. Uninhabited, 2021 oil on board • 30 x 39.5 cm 28

10. Silence, 2021 oil on board • 28.5 x 22 cm 29

11. Pulse, 2022 oil on board • 70 x 150 cm 30

12. Sea Thrift, 2021 oil on board • 30 x 24 cm 32

13. Time Traveller, 2021 oil on board • 40 x 40 cm 33

14. Ballerina Dawn, 2021 oil on board • 22 x 18 cm 34

15. Interval, 2021 oil on board • 22 x 18 cm

16. Encore, 2021 oil on board • 22 x 18 cm 35

17. Tincture, 2021 oil on board • 20 x 30 cm 36

18. Weather Pocket, 2021 oil on board • 24 x 30 cm 38

19. Morning Ritual (Sound of Harris), 2021 oil on board • 50 x 120 cm 40

20. Liquid Mercury, 2021 oil on board • 30 x 39.5 cm 42

21. Guardian, 2021 oil on board • 30 x 39.5 cm 43

22. Voices of St Kilda, 2021 oil on board • 30 x 39.5 cm 44

23. Passage, 2021 oil on board • 30 x 39.5 cm 45

24. Farewell, 2021 oil on board • 39.5 x 30 cm 46

ASSYNT AND THE NORTH WEST Assynt is another of these places that holds a piece of my heart. Rugged and raw, it has charms that entice and entrap the unsuspecting visitor, unlocking a sense of belonging that is almost primal. Helen Glassford

In the storm, Achmelvich, Assynt, November 2021

25. Other World, 2022 oil on board • 120 x 150 cm 50

26. Night Falls, 2021 oil on board • 20 x 25.5 cm

27. Old Silence, 2021 oil on board • 20 x 25.5 cm 52

28. Pocket Storm, 2022 oil on board • 19 x 20.5 cm 53

29. Permeate, 2022 oil on board • 40 x 40 cm 54

30. Slow Light, 2021 oil on board • 40 x 40 cm 55

31. Fanfare, 2021 oil on board • 24 x 30 cm 56

32. Rich, 2021 oil on board • 100 x 100 cm 57

33. Whispering Cliffs, 2021 oil on board • 20 x 25.5 cm 58

34. Rain Shapes, 2021 oil on board • 50 x 40 cm 59

35. Aloof, 2022 oil on board • 22 x 29 cm 60

36. Visitor, 2021 oil on board • 50 x 40 cm 61

37. Snow Promise, 2021 oil on board • 30 x 20 cm 62

38. The Milky Way, 2022 oil on board • 61 x 51 cm 64

39. Temptation, 2021 oil on board • 22 x 29 cm 66

40. Night Compass, 2021 oil on board • 20 x 25.5 cm

41. Midnight Encounter, 2021 oil on board • 20 x 25.5 cm 67

42. Wind Coils (after MacCaig), 2021 oil on board • 150 x 120 cm 68

43. Exposed, 2022 oil on board • 50 x 120 cm 70

44. Watershed, 2021 oil on board • 90 x 150 cm 73

45. Drifter, 2021 oil on board • 50 x 120 cm 74

46. Time Line, 2022 oil on board • 50 x 120 cm 77

47. Sea Notes II, 2021 oil on board • 50 x 50 cm 78

48. Wintering, 2021 oil on board • 20 x 25.5 cm 80

49. Absorbed, 2021 oil on board • 50 x 100 cm 81

50. Idling, 2021 oil on board • 22 x 29 cm

51. Billow, 2021 oil on board • 90 x 150 cm 82

52. Enchanted, 2022 oil on board • 90 x 150 cm 84

HELEN GLASSFORD Born

1976, Lancaster, England Lives and works in Newport-on-Tay, Fife, Scotland

2013–20 2021

Co-founder, Director, Curator of Tatha Gallery Elected professional member of Visual Arts Scotland

Selected Exhibitions 2022 Encounters, Solo Exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 2020 Realist and Lyrical Landscapes, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 2019 Immerse, Solo Exhibition, Tatha Gallery, Newport-on Tay 2018 Depth of Field, Tatha Gallery, Newport-on-Tay Visual Art Scotland Annual Exhibition Scotland Watercolour Exhibition, Fabriano, Italy 2017 Elements, Tatha Gallery, Newport-on-Tay 2016 Promised Land, Tatha Gallery, Newport-on Tay 2012–13 Castlegate House Gallery, Cockermouth 2012–16, 2019–20 Annual Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 2011 Solo Exhibition, Frames Gallery, Perth 2010 The Scottish Show, Oakham Contemporary, London 2009 Lennox Gallery, London Solo Exhibition, Meffan Museum and Art Gallery, Forfar The Scottish Show, Oakham Contemporary, London

Education 2002 Masters of Fine Art, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee 1995–98 BA (Hons) Fine Art, Drawing & Painting, Duncan of Jordanstone 1994–95 Foundation in Art & Design, Cumbria Institute of the Arts, Carlisle, Cumbria Awards 2020 2007 2002 1999 1998 1998 1998

Shortlisted Castlegate Prize Awarded runner up the Jolomo Lloyds TSB Landscape Painting Awards MFA Scholarship, Duncan of Jordanstone The Armour Award, Royal Glasgow Institute Cuthbert New Young Artist Award, The Royal Glasgow Institute Highland Spring Purchase Prize Sir Robin Philipson Memorial Medal, Royal Scottish Academy

2008 2006

Air Gallery, London Altitude, Solo Exhibition, Upfront Gallery, Cumbria Morgan Boyce Contemporary Art Gallery, Marlborough, Wiltshire Hamnavoe Gallery, Aberdeen

2005 2004 2002 2000

Gallery 54, London Solo Exhibition, Frames Gallery, Perth Festival Exhibition, The Bellevue Gallery, Edinburgh Spool, Manhattan Graphics Centre, USA (touring) Solo Exhibition, Frames Gallery, Perth Meffan Museum and Art Gallery, Forfar 1998–2003 Aberdeen Artists Society, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum 1999 Royal Glasgow Institute 1998 I.C.A. Galleries, London Selected Collections McManus Art Gallery and Museum, Dundee Private Collections worldwide

Right: Helen drawing at Scarp, Harris, July 2021

Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition

The Scottish Gallery would like to thank Dr Tom Normand HRSA for his contribution to the catalogue

HELEN GLASSFORD Encounters 31 March – 30 April 2022 Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery.co.uk/helenglassford ISBN: 978 1 912900 49 7 Produced by The Scottish Gallery Designed by Kenneth Gray Photography by Michael Wolchover, Patricia Ramaer, Alan Greig Printed by Pureprint Group All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers. All essays and picture notes copyright The Scottish Gallery.

Cover: Good Fortune, 2021, oil on board, 50 x 40 cm (cat. 1) (detail) Inside front cover: Farewell, 2021, oil on board, 39.5 x 30 cm (cat. 24) (detail) Inside back cover: Idling, 2021, oil on board, 22 x 29 cm (cat. 50) (detail) Back cover: Fanfare, 2021, oil on board, 24 x 30 cm (cat. 31) (detail) 88