Four for Mutuality

CARRIE –

Well it’s almost a week now since we opened our final show at the Southside, ‘Brigadoon’.

It’s been a summer of intense energy and we’re still reeling from the extreme highs and lows that go along with the total immersion in a project. But we grumble not!

The achievements of all the participating Mutual artists this summer is astounding, made all the more poignant as the students return to art school, we realise, we were doing the same only 12 months ago.

If you missed the opening last weekend, we will opening the doors of the Southside once more tomorrow, Saturday 26th, between 12 and 5.

Do pop along if you can, the 44A or the 66 gets you to Victoria road at Bowman Street. The show really is worth the trip over the river, and we’ll throw in a cup of tea and a biscuit for that extra incentive…

CARRIE –

Visual and historical collage has never been more prevalent within all realms of contemporary existence. A fairly obvious observation, but one that has caught the attention of many in our merry band of artists in the GSA Mutual. So much so we dedicated our second show Jack Move to cutting up, copying and pasting.

Indeed, within our own hotchpotch ranks demonstrate a plethora of diverse origins, ambitions, and characters. Some of us share commonalities, but we are all united by only one factor; we are making Art in Glasgow. We are striving and surviving together.

It was our realisation of this union that brought us to The Mutual. How then could we articulate this camaraderie to the world beyond ours? Our language and ideals are romantic, and naive, drawn to the heroic and chivalrous, a crest seemed a natural expression of our identity.

Never ones to opt for the easy route, digital technology was never shunned, just not considered necessary. Images, patterns and motifs were ripped out of books and magazines, photocopied, traced and glued.

Each one carefully considered, its relevance and meaning of the highest importance; holding distant ideas that the crest and The Mutual may continue long after us in our moment. Without the historical lineage of the oldest houses, our crest is born in this moment. Yet its imagery delves into our understanding of the past we bear. The Lions hold the long plait of GSA alumni Margaret Macdonald. ‘Our understanding’ as the plait indeed may not be an accurate memory of GSA’s past.

These feroucious Lions hint at the future we are fighting for, supporting the shield with our present, the Saltire of Scotland and the linked rings of St Mungo’s Glasgow. Support is fundamental; it is the hands of co-dependency and co-operation that crown our crest. We need each other, sticking together our skills and prowess for the mutual benefit of all.

AMY-

Mixing bowls belching out heaps of savoury snacks, a myriad of multi-coloured drinks; syrupy, cloying cavity catalysts, a fluffy pink mask sails past at eyesight- was that, is that my chum behind there? Speakers blare corny anthems, everyone is sporting little badges and enters through a silvery, fringed curtain straight into a rip-roaringly good old time. The evening was, perhaps some two sausage dog balloons and a clown short of bearing a true semblance of the most wonderful ever kid’s party. To interpose, that is, ahem, with an exceptionally mature, insightful offering of work from our collaborating artists.

Intentionally serving as welcome playback of erstwhile jolly misadventures- before council tax and c.vs and dole queues- the tone of the exhibition, in its entirety, was a little nostalgic for something now past; those heady days of party-harding which characterised Art School term time. Wearing rejection ever easier now, no longer licking our paws in maudlin self pity with each knock- back, each second sentence carried on the air seems to be suffixed with ‘I saw this residency online’ in somewhere or other. But one should not be deceived nor indeed disheartened by the necessity of ‘Jackmove’s unreserved jubilance to cure the onslaught of grown-up monotony now setting in. Professional opportunities have fallen into the worthy laps of many of Show Two’s exhibiting artists, pre-empting recognition and exorbitant success upon whom they have been bestowed. Slowly but, indisputably surely this year’s batch of fresh baked Glasgow art graduates are charting a clear route for themselves in the hinterland post Art School. Given a year, or perhaps less, it can be fully expected that they will emerge entirely from the undergrowth, rubbing their eyes, newly resplendent masters of their own practice.

Wary and not a little disquieted by the astronomical alcoholic percentage of Zamaretto we soon discovered that this was gloriously concealed by the most cheering of sugar-sweet flavours. The bar was arranged with bottles in colour gradation, from ambery peach and yellow-golden pear through to a windsory green apple and true blue raspberry, which was positively cerulean! The masses present were forced to individually ask themselves a question when confronted with bountifully free measures of this unfamiliar spirit. Their internal dialogue went something like this;

‘Am I Zam?’ glug of the beverage ‘Zam I am!’

Boy oh boy, Zam they certainly were, putting the stuff away like teens at a soda fountain and uncovering a vast quantity of mixer combinations in the process. Banana and coke, cherry and coke, pear and cloudy lemonade, original on the rocks and chocolate with milk à la white Russians all come highly recommended. Think something which looks like fruit syrup and tastes so innocuous must surely be a placebo? Think again.