Happy Tide Will Flood Again
25 June to 9 July 2022
Tue – Sat, 11:00-17:00, booking recommended
5 Florence Street, Glasgow, G5 0YX
For full visitor and access information, or to book your visit, please see here.
Featuring work from 2020 MFA graduates of The Glasgow School of Art, Happy Tide Will Flood Again includes: new drawing, painting and sculpture from Ragini Chawla; new film and objects by Fionn Duffy; a new total installation by Ayla Dmyterko; new painting work by Sooun Kim; new drawings and photographs by Ali Lotz; new installation by Lillian Ross-Millard; a video work by NNNull; new sculpture from Emilie Peyre Smith; new sculpture from Ned Pooler; a new installation from Rodrigo Nava Ramírez; new video installation by José Carlos Rivera; a new film by Wei Zhang; and a conceptual art piece by Lars Schmidt who graduated in 2020 from the MLitt Fine Art Practice (Performance pathway).
Exhibition Preview on Friday 24 June 2022. For more information or to book see here.
Artist Bios
Ragini Chawla is an artist from Delhi, currently based in Glasgow. After completing a bachelor’s in visual arts from the faculty of fine arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara in 2018 she moved to Glasgow to study Master of Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art in 2020.
She is interested in the formalistic use of different tools and mediums encompassing painting, sculpting, and publications and has recently taken an interest in web coding and design. At the crux of these different expressions lies her intention to make narratives and visuals around structures of power inherent in gendered roles in family and surroundings around her. Her recent paintings and sculptures closely look at the women in her family and the knowledge they’ve parted on through personal stories.
Chawla has been supported by and awarded an honorary graduate fellowship by Glasgow Sculpture Studio in 2020. She has recently shown work in India and Glasgow and her publications can be found in many different institutions including Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong.
Solastalgic Sololoquy (2020) 05:27 minutes: Ukrainian Cultural Centre in Regina, Saskatchewan on Treaty 4, the territories of the nêhiyawak (Cree), Anihšināpēk (Saulteaux), Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, as well as the homeland of the Métis/Michif Nation.
Ayla Dmyterko’s works are anachronisms – she warps time to seek interstices where we can dream ourselves as one another. Echoing the fragmentary and porous nature of diasporic imagination, her interdisciplinary installations weave together moving image, dance, painting, sculpture, textiles and texts. Poetics of precarity and dissonance expose how traditions are in flux amidst generational slippage. Oscillating between reverence and regeneration, she examines spectres of eternal recurrence to understand ways that images and artists are mediums. Upon completing her MFA at GSA, she was awarded the Graduate Fellowship through the Glasgow Sculpture Studios. She has exhibited her work internationally at VITRINE, Basel & London; Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto; Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick; CCA Glasgow; Lunchtime Gallery, Glasgow; Art Gallery of Regina; Hague Gallery, Regina; a Cinema, Milwaukee; Regina Performing Arts Centre; MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina; Projet Pangée, Montréal; Gallery Aux Vues, Montréal. She looks forward to a forthcoming screening with Mourning School, Stockholm, Sweden; a residency at the Inshriach Bothy Residency in the Cairngorms and her solo exhibition with Projet Pangée, Montréal.
For Happy Tide Will Flood Again, Dmyterko exhibits Warmings in the Weft is a total installation composed of large-scale oil paintings, latent symbols, stoneware hollyhocks, hempcrete trypillian forms, USSR-era matryoshka dolls, cross-century regalia, cross-stitched textiles and a para-fictional text. In a separate space, moving image work Solastalgic Soliloquy subverts dance choreography to question ways that traditions exist amidst appropriation, assimilation; removed from congregation and a natural environment. Reactivating and re-embodying cultural memory, this body of work addresses tensions of waiting, anxieties of complicity, and delusions that emerge within these states. Moments before the curtain rises, the work whispers – are we ever really ready?
Dmyterko is on Instagram @ayla.dmyterko
With an interest in human folly and its slippery definitions*, Duffy responds to the material consequences of modern mythologies surrounding labour and infrastructure, landscape and capital. She uses objects, video and text to instigate spiralling macro-narratives that explore ethical and ecological concerns converging in porous zones of contact between bodies: chemical, mineral, cultural and historic.
Process-led and embracing autodidactic conglomerations of knowledge, Duffy attends to sympoetic methodologies to inform her practice; often working collaboratively with other artists, enthusiasts, researchers and specialists, be they human or otherwise.
*from early 13th century Middle English (from Old French folie) “foolish behaviour/wickedness/madness”, but also, in the 12th century meaning “delight”.
For Happy Tide Will Flood Again, Duffy exhibits A Mineral Dance: Or How To Become Glass (2021 – 2022), a research project exploring the 18th Century Kelping Industry, which signalled the dissolution of tenant-landlord relations based on tithes and the emergence of capital-based land holdings, and the 20th century Nuclear Industry and their legacies on our coastal regions through an attempt to make glass out of seaweed and sand. The significance of glass as a material stems from both its role in the Kelping Industry, where seaweed ash was transported to industrial centres to be used in glassmaking, while vitrification is one method used to store radioactive waste in the nuclear industry.
Gathering seaweed and sand and processing these slowly by hand, opens up questions surrounding the energy and labour involved in creating such a ubiquitous material; the material legacies of historic and contemporary industries, the porous boundaries between human and mineral processes and the persistence of commodity chains which have shaped our coastal regions for centuries.
The project has so far resulted in a 3-channel video documenting the process of making glass, woven together with research surrounding the archaeological and geological legacies of human industries on the landscape. Much of the glass has been formed into beads and gifted to those involved in the process, acting as a communally owned artwork, and Duffy is currently in the process of creating glazes for ceramics using the waste material from the glass-making process.
Duffy is on Instagram @fionn000
Sooun Kim is a multidisciplinary visual artist working through music, painting and sculpture, more recently expanding his visual language to include video and installation. He is interested in hybrid cultures that iterate from the effects of post-colonialism and cultural imperialism. His work, Yellow Fever (2019), marked the beginning of his auto-ethnographic journey, where he collected his grandfather’s biography alongside records of historical figures to recover his personal cultural identity. Further interested in popular culture, he includes audio-visual reflections of his contemporary being as a South-Korean migrant where the past and present collide. Consciously unpredictable, Kim uses image and sound to play with viewer expectations by seducing and repulsing – genre bending to create an undefinable hybrid.
Previous work includes, Born Beneath, 2021, 07:00 minutes. Born Beneath is an experimental music video and short film that utilizes mythological storytelling to explore hybridized Korean cultural identity. Sooun Kim uses multivalent footage and audio influenced by traditional Korean music, contemporary electronic music and rap to demonstrate the ways in which cultural imperialism, the long-term influence of the Korean War and Japanese colonial era has influenced his generation. His use of footage gathered from multiple sources shows the birth of a new cultural identity. An identity that is acquired through the process of exploring cultural hybridity, formed amidst instability.
Kim is on Instagram on @low_keykim
Ali Lotz (b. 1994, Butler, PA, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist currently living in Glasgow. Her work is interested in the relationships between fandom, fantasy, music and the working class. Works can take the form of pencil drawings, film, photos, textiles, and screenprints, but are often united through installation. Ali also hosts a regular radio show through Clydebuilt.
Included in Happy Tide Will Flood Again is Lotz’ If I Leave Here Tomorrow, Would You Still Remember Me? 2022. Comprised of graphite drawings and silver gelatin panoramic prints, the installation takes its name from the canonical lyrics of ‘Free Bird’. Invoking both nostalgia and fantasy the images and text lead the viewer away from the known world of ‘Free Bird’ to somewhere unforeseen.
Lotz is on Instagram @nofear_official
NNNull undertakes a periodic and cyclical fluidity among various genders. Their work stages the courses of an in-constant shifting and growth of a mutable subject. An uncategorized Nth gender thwarting the positivist tools of gender delineations. They are based-adrift in Glasgow and merge moving image, sound, and installation as material outfits that frame their transitory presence.
NNNull exhibits, Limerence of a Null, a ruminative dialogue in images between the male psyche and the female psyche of an a-gender body, who has fallen into a state of limerence with a binary body, triggers the discovery of unknown assault trauma unravelling through lucid dreaming and punch images, recalling the original causes while generating a swirling therapy process. This piece is, at this point, unfinished and a partial composition of scenes of a five-chapter video work.
Ned Pooler (b. 1992 Birmingham, UK) graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2020 with an MA in Fine Art and The University of Leeds in 2014 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art. Between 2011-2018 he co-ran the nomadic art collective SEIZE Projects, working with early-mid career artists and exhibiting work with art spaces across England including &Model Gallery, The Royal Standard and Stryx Gallery. After studying at GSA he completed an extended residency and solo show entitled ‘Soft Rupture’ at CT20, Folkestone, UK. In 2021 his work was selected for the 195th Annual Exhibition at The Royal Scottish Academy.
Two new sculptural installations have been created for this exhibition. ‘well, to tell you the truth I haven’t been quite myself lately’ is an inflatable AK-47 attempting to, but failing to maintain its rigidity, let alone fire the loaded velvet bullet. ‘I won’t forget, I’ll just walk slow’ are a set of glass snake fangs biting into the gallery space. Both works and other supporting works by Ned Pooler use absurdity, dark humour and anthropomorphic gesture to discuss queerness, mental health and the trials of growing up. Looking to animation physics, he imagines how things might behave: when freed from the static confines of material reality, solid objects can melt, convulse, swell and droop with emotion.
Pooler is on Instagram @nedpooler
Rodrigo Nava Ramírez (he/him) is an artist and computer programmer from Mexico City. Throughout his work, Rodrigo seeks to reframe digital technologies—such as the web, Augmented Reality, 3D modelling, data systems, machine learning and biometrics—as tools to explore spaces that are materially and temporally restricted, allowing alternative spaces for representation capable of escaping western logic and structures. The emancipation of technology as a true decolonizing act of resistance.
Severed Words (Los Ocho-Presagios) The eight badly omens are a series of bad happenings that the Mexica affirmed seeing right before the Spanish arrival, marking the return of Quetzalcoatl and the end of the Fifth Sun. The beginning of a new cycle of birth, death and reincarnation.
Through the website http://ocho-presagios.mx/ this narrative is told, but a word gets removed through every visit and “gifted” to the visitor as a 3D object—except if that visit comes from Mexico. It uses cyberspace to mimic the act of looting that took place during the Spanish conquest.
In Happy Tides Will Flood Again, Nava Ramírez exhibits “Severed Words (Los Ocho-Presagios)” an installation that acts as a museum, displaying a collection of three objects taken from the website. A reflection on the colonial role of museums as institutions of memory.
Nava Ramírez is on Instagram @rodrigonavaramirez
Jose Carlos Rivera, based in Valencia, Spain, creates installations from durational re-actions, going through the rhythms of different hybrid beings and phenomena. His current research explores the different relationships between the Post-Digital Era, Posthuman thought, durational practice and New Materialisms.
Jose has exhibited work internationally including: Yellowstone Art Museum (MT, USA), Arts Research Collaborative (MA, USA), Tabacalera Promoción del Arte (Madrid, Spain) and NMAC Contemporary Art Foundation (Cadiz, Spain).
For Happy Tide Will Flood Again, Rivera exhibits Walking 1000 Miles. De Punta a Punta, a video installation based on a walk from the South to the North of the UK. Experiencing the country and pandemic landscape in an active manner. Entangled with climate, land, people and politics.
Rivera is on Instagram @keepitbowing
Lillian Ross-Millard is a Canadian video and performance artist based in Scotland. Through methods adapted from her background in experimental theatre, she conducts physical research on the contemporary body and its behavioural phenomena. While completing her degree in Contemporary Studies and Theatre Studies at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Lillian was a member of Wheelwright Theatre and trained under Zuppa Theatre Co. In 2016, she co-directed an award-winning experimental film, Heart & Soul: S10 S12, at which point her practice shifted towards moving image work. She is currently developing a participatory work to be hosted at Paragon Studios in Belfast this fall.
Autobiology, exhibited in Happy Tide Will Flood Again, responds to cultural paradigms surrounding illness and identity from the vantage point of someone with a chronic immune disorder. Using a customised graphic font, Ross-Millard considers the entanglement of therapeutic applications of language and illness as metaphor. She engages in a kind of self-diagnosis, testing the ways in which language mediates and medicates her experience of illness.
Lillian Ross-Millard, Autobiology, 2022
Lars Schmidt, multidisciplinary artist, natural thinker, facilitator/curator
His work explores a wide range of cultural and spiritual matters, often opening inter- and transdisciplinary spaces, in order to support the emergence of a new narrative.
He also creates gardens.
Formative years in New York City and Berlin.
Background and studies in fine and performing arts, somatics, photography and film, anthropology and ecology.
Later life and work on organic farms in France and Italy, and studies of applied ecological design (Diploma of Applied Permaculture Design).
Regular periods of retreated life in mountain regions of France and Norway.
Besides exploring the creative process in various artforms, he has curated interdisciplinary projects linking the arts and improvisation with ecological and spiritual understanding, and has facilitated workshops in the US, Latin America and Europe.
He exhibits the painting series The Illiterate Pond, By-products of Presence, and Cultural Revolutionaries, a conceptual work inspired by the idea of morphic resonance and memes.
Schmidt is on Instagram @larsschmidtorg
Émilie Peyre Smith (b. Delaware, 1985) lives and works in Glasgow as a multidisciplinary artist, working predominantly in sculpture.
Through forceful tinkering within material potential Émilie antagonises the susceptibility of commoplace place systems and utilitatian materials. Drawing parallels between these and the continual automation of the human experience to create anxious, uneasy works. Émilie studied Chemistry at Edinburgh University followed by Fine Art at Goldsmiths College London, before graduating from the MFA at The Glasgow School of Art.
Wei Zhang (b. 1991, China) currently lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Zhang is a filmmaker and visual artist working between moving images, performance, and installation.
The topics in Zhang’s work for Happy Tide Will Flood Again, range from queer theory and posthumanism fused with psychic trauma of the queer experience, the mutated body, and the imagination of the potentials of NBIC and other advanced technologies. Zhang views the metamorphosised or modified post-human body with its assigned meanings through the perspective of symbolic anthropology rather than the discussion of human enhancement ethics. Inspired by Catherine Malabou’s plasticity, Hegelian’ plastic’ and Heideggerian’ change,’ ‘transformation’ and ‘metamorphosis,’ Zhang tries to depict the relationship between queer body and post-human body and their symbolic meanings. Although Zhang fancies jumping back and forth between the illusioned future and the traumatic memory, Zhang’s pieces present an eagerness to be saved from the undissolvable melancholy in the immanent reality. Zhang’s work also shows the deep thinking about life’s fragility, vulnerability, and plasticity.
Zhang is on Instagram @weizhangpictures
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