Views from my studio by Norman Sutton-Hibbert

2 - 16 December 2023

‘From my studio I daily look into a tidal river, working harbour, the sea and along part of the Ayrshire coastline. The paintings in this exhibition are my responses to the colours, shapes and patterns I see daily. The constant changes in the light, times of day and weather, act like a kaleidoscope of colours. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

The plethora of colours provides me with a rich palette to draw from. And the constantly changing display of ships, their various cargoes, harbour-side buildings and machinery give me another range of shapes, forms and outlines.

Two of the many artists I admire have provided me with quotes that better articulate my approach to making art works:

‘The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create another reality of the same intensity’ Alberto Giacometti.

‘I found I could say things with colours and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way’.Georgia O’Keefe’.

Norman Sutton-Hibbert.

Compelling, abstract, small works by the artist whose sculpture was previously shown at iota in 2019.

Not Before Time curated by Laura A. Hunter

4-18 November 2023.

Tues.- Sat. 12-5 Thurs. 12-6 & by appointment

Notes on reflection by Laura A. Hunter:

A. Barr

A.Barr's piece has nailed describing the challenging times we live in.

We may be overwhelmed by global events, or by personal circumstances.

Essentially, I'm looking for antidotes.

How do creative spirits, creative thinkers, creative problem solvers sustain themselves in the face of things?

What inspires & motivates us all to keep going?

I am a big believer in craft as meditation: the making of things in a burst of inspiration & joy; finding that particular space where we become absorbed in the making of the things that we then share.

This sharing offers not only another's perspective on the World, on Life, it also taps into the viewer's own creative processes.

Not Before Time is an ongoing project, inspired by the first time friends were allowed back in a room together post lockdown.

The participants were given a very loose brief with the objective of exploring what motivates & inspires them, and then contributing whatever was right for them as a piece for the exhibition.

The participants range in age from their twenties to their eighties, they've many strings to their bows, they include: architects, activists, academics, animators, designers, educators, film makers, musicians, scientists, visual artists & writers.

My hope, in gathering these kindred spirits & their thoughtful work together in a room, is that connections will be made, that conversations & ideas will be sparked.

Ultimately, I hope visitors will feel motivated to explore their own creativity & think about ways we might change the world for the better.

Laura A. Hunter

From the Big Splash to the Last Splash GLASGOW

When I wrote about the first exhibition (at London’s Terrace Gallery) in this series of joint shows curated by the Glasgow-based artist Toby Messenger, I said that artists need each other. The central thesis of that first show was the conviction that the work of a curator is not just to bring artworks together for the delight or education of the viewer, but to create and encourage relationships and perhaps even new collaborations between the artists themselves.

This show brings some of those same works and artists to Glasgow and also includes new artists and new work, some of it directly inspired by the connections fostered in London. What started as a largely unconscious activity of assembling images online that “caught the eye” is turning into a loose but meaningful community of practice including artists at every stage of their careers and development.

As viewers, we are so rarely encouraged to think about what it means to mount a show: the seemingly endless emails, the logistics of shipping and insurance and wrapping and unwrapping, the physical challenge of hanging, the production of a catalogue, the costs, the conversations, the stresses, and the joy when it all finally comes together. In Messenger we see a curator that is less the self-appointed guardian or bearer of culture and much more a co-participant in the emergence of meaning. His role is, in the words of Kate Fowle, “more flexible and therefore also more vulnerable”. Here then, to paraphrase Szeeman, is an enthusiast, an administrator, an author of introductions, a postal depot regular, a van driver, a hanger, and a contributor.

Like Toby, many of us are also occupied by that most informal process of art collecting: bookmarking Instagram posts, perhaps saving favourite images to our phones. Unlike Toby, we might never think about how the act of viewing those images together creates connections and meaning, or the impact on artists when we view their work next to the work of others. This show is an opportunity to do just that.

Dr. Catherine Owen

References

Fowle, K. (2007). Who cares? Understanding the role of the curator today. Cautionary tales: Critical curating, 10-19. Szeemann, H “Does Art Need Directors?” in ed. Carin Kuoni, Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art (New York: Independent Curator’s International, 2001), p. 167.

@ iota

T. W. F. Sa. 12-5. Th. 12-6 & by appointment

2-16 September 2023

Wealth & Hellness: Underwater Collective Glasgow Debut: Sat 20 May - Sat 3 June @iota

Underwater Collective formed in Kirikiriroa, Aotearoa (NZ) in 2008 whilst Glen Leslie, Jared Benwell and Allister Selliman were studying at Waikato Institute of Technology.

‘While sharing a studio space, drawings spilled onto, and mingled together upon the objects and surfaces in the shared spaces. Underwater Collective was formed as a way of framing this collaborative output.

Jared Benwell graduated with Hons Illustration, myself with a MFA in painting, chiefly exploring collaboration and Alister Selliman opened Holiday Tattoos, Ali's the only one of us still in Aotearoa. We have had a number of solo shows, workshopped with kids, and worked on various commissions since.

I moved to Scotland in 2010 and when Jared made the move to Bristol we resumed our work together with 2016s exhibition 'Songs of the Harvest' followed by 2018s 'Country Punching Bag' both at Edinburgh's Flamingosaurus Rex Gallery.

It is within a similar model that we imagine creating work for this new show. With a unifying theme and palette we will create 15-20 new paintings, with spray, acrylic, marker and oil stick on board.’

Glen Leslie.

Underwater Collective

With a name that simultaneously conjures the submerged fantastical world of a TV cartoon – say Spongebob Squarepants – and some nightmarish future global catastrophe, Underwater Collective are engaged in an art practice that is scornful of the grand narrative of individual centrality, privileging a collaborative approach to produce paintings that are, in their very process of making, inscribed with the idea of erasure, ephemerality. Communicating a great sense of pleasure and specifics of occasion in their creation, these are works that are irreverent of their object value, ready to be displaced at any moment, as if other layers of imagery could be painted over them, endlessly, like the endless sources of imagery which are their inspiration.

Within the proliferation of visual culture nothing is beyond use, everything is a reference. The breakdown of high and low culture is a precondition for these artists, as is the preparedness to plunder from all and everything.

The sheer visual invention is breathtaking, as is the employment of their illustrator’s technical skill. Utilising bright, often garish colour combinations, as well as a paint surface that is often patterned or textured, ludicrous cartoony characters exist in fantastical spatial dimensions, multi-layered superimposed worlds with strange animal shapes, scary humorous monsters and bulbous distorted forms. The scenarios represented are often dark and always absurd, inviting a satirical interpretation. The humour here is more than the black humour of TV cartoon violence, it is rather the unsettling realisation that the true order of things may be discerned, the hierarchies of power, for example, or the outrageous contradictions of globalisation.

Underwater Collective can trace their spiritual links to the neo-surrealist, neo-pop of the Chicago Imagists (the Hairy Who), artists such as Peter Saul, Jim Nutt, Carroll Dunham and Elizabeth Murray, as well as the underground comic movement burgeoning from the 1970s. It is a painting that celebrates the wealth of sign systems available to the creative artist, the sheer joy, the confusion, the madness that is contemporary visual culture.

It is also in its practice, a collusion of shared experience and knowledge, a ‘knowing’, as Greil Marcus calls it when speaking of certain musical groups, born of the spontaneous exchanges between creative collaborators, the momentary interconnections and understandings, even across diverse time periods and geographic locations, that speak volumes about the possibilities of community, and by implication the possibilities for human existence on this threatened planet.

Paul Judge




Jamie Limond and Samuel O’Donnell @iota 15-29 April

Homage to those green things where I found you

‘Painting for Hélion is like a revolving door through which life comes and goes in both directions. A revolving door through which people and things undergo a startling, Clark Kent-like transformation… ‘*

Jamie Limond and Samuel O’Donnell shared a studio for many years. They recently set up a YouTube channel (Painting Nerds) for a series of video essays on painting. A recurring theme across their videos is the relationship between art and life.

Monochrome or almost-monochrome paintings are highly artificial in some ways. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re totally divorced from lived experience. Or that they can’t throw a different ‘colour’ on it.

*A Comedy of Rectangles: Jean Hélion and ‘meta’ painting, Painting Nerds 2022.



Jamie Limond (b.1993) currently lives and works in Amsterdam. Recent shows include Moderato Cantible (Stoppenbach & Delestre, London 2022) and a mean idea to call my own… (Pleinkamer, Amsterdam, 2021). He has also written on art for Frieze, The Herald, Burlington Contemporary, The Drouth, a-n The Artists Information Company, and MAP Magazine.

Samuel O’Donnell (b.1992) lives and works in Glasgow. Recent shows include From the Big Splash to the Last Splash (Terrace Gallery, London 2023) and he was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize (Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield & Thames-side Gallery, London 2022). He completed a residency at Dumfries House with the Royal Drawing School in 2021.




THE LAND OF BLACKNESS - 2023 Haneen Hadiy

18 March – 1 April 2023.

Haneen Hadiy

THE LAND OF BLACKNESS - 2023 is a collection of palm tree paintings exploring the concept of land and time by focusing on the density of Iraqi date palms in early Islamic times. Between the 7th – 12th century Southern Iraq was known as the ‘Black Land’ where millions of date palms crowded the region blocking out everything whilst providing food, shelter and shade.

The Black Land was referred to the stark contrast between the alluvial plain of Mesopotamia and the Arabian Desert. The date palm is responsible for growth of the human population.

Iraq is the Cradle of Civilisation where the date palms were known to have nurtured civilisation. Haneen Hadiy’s paintings powerfully explore anthropomorphism focusing on intentions and emotional responses to these spectacular organisms. As Hadiy connects with the land of her ancestors, she focuses on revealing the lands history and culture whilst discovering a deep growing connection to the Iraqi date palm which is considered a symbol of identity, growth and peace of mind.

  HANEEN HADIY

Biography

Haneen Hadiy was born in Glasgow, Scotland to Iraqi parents in 1999. She started her career as a visual artist at the age of eighteen. Haneen Hadiy has exhibited around Scotland, London, New York and Los Angeles, revealing the unseen attractions of her motherland. In 2018 she organised an exhibition in Glasgow, giving the opportunity for exposure to Iraqi artists living in Iraq. Haneen regularly travels back and forth from Iraq to Scotland to explore her identity within both cultures. When travelling to Iraq, Haneen continuously focuses on revealing the existing scenic attractions of her homeland. Her works are known for their distinctive intimacy and integrity. She continuously experiments through a variety of mediums to explore her family history, cultural heritage, and identity as a diasporic artist.                2022 Dewar Arts Awardee.  2023 Photo London Hahnemühle Student Award Nominee.

FLIPSIDE: Robert McNeil Until Saturday 17 December and beyond

Paintings by McNeil were first seen in the iota ‘What’s in a Mile?’ Exhibition in 2012. Now, predominantly known for his images and charity work relating to genocide & war, works by McNeil are held by Kelvingrove Museum & Art Gallery, the St Mungo’s Museum of Culture & Religion, Musee de la Bataille, Fromelles, Memorium Nuremberg & in private collections.

FLIPSIDE shifts the focus to a joyous collection of rich and varied work, showing the versatility and some of the humour of this artist.

Kelvin Guy ‘Nothing Yet’.

Show open @ Noon 12 November until 26th.

Private view 6-9pm 12 November.

Detail: ‘June Bug’

For forty years I painted the theatre backdrops (for Scottish Opera) by pinning them to the floor and walking over them. When raised to the vertical and new lit, the best of them escaped my recognition. At the easel, taking drawings into paintings, the picture arrives at a similar point of apprehension, when a symbol and surface concord, figuratively speaking.

Kelvin Guy.

NOON Sat 1st October 2022

Richard Walker: ‘Thick

1 -15 October 2022.

New works, painted from life and improvised from large scale studio installations. These installations are reminiscent of film or stage sets, and the connection with theatricality is there in the use of light, in the form of projected images. The paintings images are often overlapping and confusing, engaging with complexity of meaning as well as technique.

Opening Noon Saturday 6 August 2022

Misc. Radicalitionists by Rowena Comrie.

6-20 August 2022. Private View 6 August 6-9pm.

‘Expector’ 102x127cm

New Abstract Paintings by Rowena Comrie.

‘Paintings inspired by social revolutionaries, no longer in fashion, radical in their time, now forgotten or dismissed. My aim is to communicate the contradictory intricacies of judgement applied to radical achievers. To feel the power of their achievements by using abstract painting forms in response to their dynamic energy and free thinking. Although sidelined by todays society, their influence continues to contribute. Inspired by them, the paintings open the mind up to fresh sensations, to thoughts that both compliment the known and transcend experience.’

Rowena Comrie, July 2022.

TODAY! Saturday 11 June '22 OPENING 5-9pm.

Situated Knowledges: Organism; Plantationocene; Biopolitics by Rachy McEwan & Raya Gray

11-25 June 2022. T W F Sa. 12-5pm Th 12-6pm.

In multispecies alliance, across divisions of nature, culture, technology they explore the relationship between organism, language and machine. The boundaries are blurred through bodies being a multitude of both human and non-human cells. Their work actively engages with ecological and technological perspectives and issues. Mapping terrains and infrastructures to draw connections between ecology and technology made by the infrastructures that nature provides through a semi-fictional conceptual artistic lens.

Simultaneously working with traditional media and less conventional types that evoke the senses, they allow for

objective investigations with a keen acknowledgment of the role subjectivity plays in producing knowledge. Their view on knowledge production is less about a definitive outcome and more about fluctuations in what we are looking at and researching, where they open up nonconceptual spaces.

Through research and techno-sensual artistic exploration, Rachy and Raya open a new discourse in the realms of cognition and artificial intelligence, introducing concepts of the sensorial ecology of intelligence, machine ecosystems,

and biological machines. Maintaining a practice focused on co-subjectivity. Their project collaborates with engineers,

synthetic and microbiologists, scientists, perfumers and non-human organisms.

What's it all about then? Colin Robertson

Part 2. What’s it all about then 31 March–9 April 2022.

‘I’ve often used words and/or text in drawing but, for a time at least, they appear to have taken over, to become the main building block of the image on paper and spell out what the drawings are about   Statements – questions - no answers or resolutions but, on the positive side, the fact of wonder.’

Colin Robertson, born Glasgow 1936, now lives in Battlefield, south side, with partner Anne.  Graduate of Dundee College of Art and Technology in design & crafts.  In a post-diploma year he mostly drew and painted and won a travelling scholarship. Suffering from severe overdosing of ART in Italy, he escaped eastwards and returned with drawings and 3- dimensional works in response to the interior spaces of the mosques in Istanbul. Exhibited in Edinburgh in late 60's, paintings of Dundee bus conductresses and life aboard a trawler.

Worked at many trades: wireless operator doing National Service; commercial artist in Glasgow; farmworker in Perthshire; volunteer kibbutznik in Israel (before 67 war); trawler deckhand on boats sailing out of Rekyavik and Grimsby in winter and painting in a cottage in Glenisla in summers; cinema night-cleaner in London; council gardener in Westminster and trade union branch secretary in a local authority.  He has always drawn and painted.

iota OPENING! NOON 19 March 2022

Particularly as Colin Robertson’s show was the first to be cancelled due to Covid 19, we are delighted to present a two part show of his drawings.

Please note our new opening hours: Wed Fri Sat 12-5. Thurs.12-6 and by appointment.

Part 1.

MARY DON’T YOU WEEP

It’s the backing to Aretha Franklin by the South Carolina Community Choir, the hand-clapping, the guitars and the organ that grabbed me. 

All Saints   The Mangrove Steel Band’ and ‘The Undivided’ played reggae and jazz in our street when we lived just round the corner from All Saints Road in London’s Notting Hill.   At that time I made drawings and paintings of three West Indian women in Afros and platform heels seen on the Circle Line -  they are somewhat reinvented in a number of drawings.

Bad Moon  “Can we have some music” was the cry that often went up to the bridge from the deck of the Ross Cougar.

 A couple of years back I was in a record store in Glasgow.  ‘Bad Moon Rising’ came up on the turntable.  Instantly I was carried back fifty-odd years to being one of the yellow oilskin-clad figures on that deck, knee deep in fish, knife in hand: ‘fish in the other and two in the air’.

These drawings all date from the period just before Covid. The second batch follows on chronologically.

Mary Don't You Weep

Mary Don’t You Weep

Part 2.

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT THEN

I’ve often used words and/or text in drawing but, for a time at least, they appear to have taken over, to become the main building block of the image on paper and spell out what the drawings are about   Statements – questions - no answers or resolutions but, on the positive side, the fact of wonder.