Glasgow Open House.

I have spent the last weekend in April visiting my daughter in Glasgow who is studying at the GSA. For part of the weekend we decided to take part in the Glasgow Open House Arts Festival.

Glasgow Open House Arts Festival is a biennial event ran by a voluntary group. They celebrate Glasgow's vibrant, insightful and industrious culture, by inviting it's residents to present art, music and performance in their homes.

The festival is an opportunity for artists of all backgrounds to get involved and exhibit their work in unusual spaces, linking DIY projects together to reach new and wider audiences. Glasgow open house brings communities together; creating opportunities to meet new people, get to know the surrounding area, and connect with neighbours.

Both myself and my daughter decided because there were over 69 different venues to visit we would take part in one of the organised guided walks in which we would be taken to 7 of the venues by a guide. I have only mentioned three of the exhibits we visited but it gives you a flour of this unique experience.

We met our guide at 12pm  by Kelvinbridge tube station. His name was Twig and he himself was an sculptor, poet and walker. he says of himself.......

"I see walking and writing as inextricably linked. My work is entirely built around the act of walking and I find it goes hand in hand with the Japanese aesthetic, specifically Zen.
I walk to gain a meditative mindset finding the creation of short, Zen poems flows easily from that act. In these poems I follow a structure of 3 lines of seven syllables, bearing similarity to a haiku but remaining my own poetic style, adhering to the same Zen rules: wabi (simplicity), sabi (solitude) and mujo (impermanence).
The walk is the work, making it temporal, a hint towards a walking experience never to be recovered. In the gallery I show documentation of these walking moments, usually in the form of Zen poetry".

There were eight people turned up as part of the group and Twig led us to the first venue which was in an apartment where the exhibition was called "Roots". 

"Roots" celebrated nature through visual art and live music performances. We met the artists who lived in the space, got the opportunity to experience the art on the walls, read the poetry and planted seeds. Later on there was going to be a live music performance but we didn't get a chance to listen to that. 

Prints from the "Roots" exhibition.

At the next venue the title was "Efflorescence". Here, a young woman called Violet Blyth explored the temporal nature and non permanence of creation using childhood pass times to navigate possibilities. She used video to present her work in a variety of ways,being viewed on, through or reflected off materials with their own fragility.

Viewing a video projection the lazy way......on my back!

The last venue we arrived at was titled "Freshly Baked Domestic Goddesses". Here the female artists questioned whether the term "Domestic Goddess" works for or against us as women in the art world. Within their living space they had a collection of domesticity, ceramics and food. A good place to end the tour with a cuppa and a cake.

The whole experience I thoroughly enjoyed. Not only was it a delight to experience a wonderful breadth of art work by so many talented people but the fact that as a guided group it enhanced the whole experience. Talking to the people in the group as we walked between venues became a piece of artwork in itself .

It certainly then inspires/makes me question my own art work, what I am doing and why I am doing it. Sometimes I feel what I produce is aesthetically very pleasing and it sells well but how much is it really about me?  When I think about the thought processes and amount of work that has gone into these open house art works I often wonder what I am doing. I have so much to say but I find it difficult to say it through my art work. It is always that dilemma of having to earn a living, which I do through workshops, commission work and selling visually pleasing pieces of art and wanting to just communicate about me through the glass......scary!  But experiencing these young people and their art gives me the courage to move forward with mine.