Art works by two recent Graduates of Glasgow School of Art chosen by Professor Richard Demarco

 

These artists are dedicated to respecting the processes of change and transformation, as found in water, plants, creatures, in life on earth. Through the act of drawing they document this change; Lucy using natural plant dye, Io watercolour and oil paint. Drawing is an unstable process; the first forms perish, erased, overwritten or transformed, by those that follow in the making of the work. It is an unending cycle of formation and decay. Lucy traces the lives of plants, following their change in colour and form with her pencil and b

rush. The subject of Io’s paintings is transformation: a flower is a bird is a wave is a flame, all at the instant of their conception. James Joyce, like these two young artists, was concerned with the circle of life and death.  His masterwork, 'Finnegans Wake' begins, or rather begins again, for the text is a circle, with these words: riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay.  The work ends, or rather recirculates, so: a way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay.  Joyce's words echo in the marks made by these artists. 

 

Joseph Beuys, a Joyce scholar, was devoted to the earth, to plants, flowers, insects and the creatures who live with them: the hare, the stag, the swan. His spirit, devoted to Scotland, which he loved, and where he made masterworks, can be felt in the physical reality of their work.  In this uncertain time of climate change, these two artists, at the outset of their careers, have provided invaluable food for thought to remind us, like Joyce and Beuys, of the true function and purpose of the artist.

 

 

CHARLES STEPHENS

JULY 2019

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Photography: Marco J Federici