August 12th – August 26th 2025
ISHBEL ANGUS | NIAMH FINNIGAN | LUKAS SUCHY | OMAR IMIDAK | ERIN MATHESON | IZZY OSBORN | RACHEL BROWN | ALINA LITVINOVA | ORLA HENAGHEN | NATALIA BOCIAN | ANNA CHARLOTTA GARDINER | CODIE ANNE | STINA ALDÉN | ALAN BRASH | EUAN TAIT | YIYANG CHEN | SHI SHI | ZIQI CHEN | CARLA SMITH | MALACHY McCRIMMON | TOM MAGRANE | KAMA JING | QIANYI ZHU | PHOEBE MORLEY | KATIE MUIR | BIXIA JIN
Works available to buy from £40.
Please direct all sales enquiries to sixfootgallery@gmail.com
In the months after graduation, thousands of young artists across the country are leaving the safety nets of their art schools and universities. As a 2023 graduate from the Manchester School of Art, it is both a liberating and daunting time that I am all too familiar with. Having developed their practices over the last three or four years, many artists are now facing the often harsh realities of being freelance for the first time, unbacked by an institute or organisation.
Starter Pack is many things: it’s a grass roots opportunity for artists to begin, or expand on, their repertoire of exhibitions, to connect with other artists in Glasgow, to further their understanding of working with galleries and curators, and to gain publicity.
Community is crucial for artists, and arguably my greatest goal for Starter Pack. I encourage those involved directly, as well as those who visit the show, to make personal connections – reach out to artists you are interested in or where you see potential for collaboration.
The twenty six exhibiting artists have been invited, or selected through open call, to showcase the variety of emerging local and international talent. Visitors can expect to see a dynamic range of painting, printmaking, photography and sculpture. The works are rooted in personal histories, reflections on today’s social and environmental climates, and interpretations of mythology and culture. It is a snapshot into these emerging artists’ expressions of the turbulent world around them.
–Hope Reynolds, curator
Participating Artists
Ishbel Angus
Ishbel Angus is an artist currently based in London studying Painting at the Royal College of Art, supported by The President and Vice-Chancellor’s UK Cost of Living Scholarship. Ishbel graduated from Glasgow School of Art with a First Class BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking.
Ishbel juxtaposes the cryptic and hyperreal in their work as her paintings become vessels. She centres queerness using painting to define undefined things and investigates tensions between the known and unknown. Ishbel examines categories by blending materiality using both painted and real objects as interventions in her work, creating ‘illusionisms’ that challenge boundaries of surfaces. Painting becomes an act of archiving and legitimisation, offering form to the unfixed. Ishbel’s work reimagines objects not as passive symbols, but as active participants in queerness.
Currently, Ishbel is making work about an artefact called the ‘witch in a bottle’, held in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
@ ishbelangusart | ishbelangusartist.cargo.site
Niamh Finnigan
Niamh Finnigan is an artist whose work challenges traditional art conventions to provide sharp, humorous commentary on contemporary human behaviour. Her art is rooted in a candid portrayal of people, often shown in unflattering or morally ambiguous situations, subtly critiquing the social, ideological, and economic structures that shape society. Finnigan’s approach is both engaging and thought-provoking, inviting viewers to reflect on the complexities of modern life through her lens.
Experimenting with mixed media, she frequently employs discarded materials like cardboard, fabric, packaging, and everyday detritus. These scrap materials are assembled into crude, deliberately garish sculptures that convey a raw aesthetic. Through this process, Finnigan offers anthropological insights into 21st century British culture, using her work to explore the contradictions, quirks, and absurdities of human behaviour in a way that is as humorous as it is critical.
Lukas Suchy
Lukas Suchy (b. 1983, Košice, Slovakia) is an abstract street art expressionist currently based in Glasgow. He holds an HND in Art & Design and blends expressionist technique with urban influences to create bold, narrative-driven works. His solo exhibition at Cass Art Glasgow marked his emergence on the local scene, followed by participation in Storytellers at Glue factory, couple exhibitions at Rowan Gallery. Lukas was awarded second place in the Higher Education Art category by Abacus Creative and completed a work placement with Letterpress Brazil. Lukas is participating in the upcoming Icons exhibition in Florence Contemporary Gallery.
Omar Imidak
Omar is a Glasgow-based illustrator and printmaker from the Canary Islands. Under the pen name Imidak Art he creates and shares work that celebrates the simple pleasures in life, like the appreciation of nature’s little creatures, whimsical playfulness, and carefree peace and relaxation. His art practice is multidisciplinary, with a focus on linoprint and digital drawing. He also facilitates lino printing workshops for beginners, so others can learn and enjoy this art medium.
Erin Matheson
A 2023 BA (Hons) Fine Art graduate from Moray School of Art, Erin Matheson explores our relationship with the objects we collect and accumulate in our homes, which evoke nostalgia and connect us to memories, people, and places. Erin investigates how our connection to everyday objects is formed and when an object stops being merely a possession and transforms into a part of the self. Through the medium of oil paint, she explores our personal connection to objects as extensions of ourselves due to the value we attribute to them.
A major inspiration for her artwork comes from the process of moving home in 2020 and rediscovering sentimental objects that have been kept throughout her life as well as being a fraternal twin. This influences her work, particularly the idea of being seen as a pair or set, which explains her use of diptychs in her work.
@erinmathesonart | erinmathesonart.com
Izzy Osborn
Izzy Osborn is an emerging intermedia artist who graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2024. Her practice responds to the Anthropocene: the notion that we are living in a new geological epoch brought about by humanities actions towards the planet, and that industrial activity has fundamentally altered the earth and we must now reckon with this. The Anthropocene impacts all areas of life, altering our culture, politics, the land we live on, and the food we eat. Izzy works with laser cutters to engrave into found substrates with the goal of illustrating the presence of the Anthropocene in our daily life.
Rachel Brown
Rachel is an artist from Glasgow. With a background in creative animation and digital art, she is interested in approaching and combining traditional and digital methods of artmaking, and using this approach to explore darker themes and horror with a grounding presence of historical interest and influence. Her exhibited work, the zine Mark of the Witch, is the culmination of exploring print-style art of both the past and present for both its high contrast impactful appearance, as well as the historical connections it has to the explored history of Scottish witch trials. The zine explores the rising paranoia, the birth of ‘the witch’, and the brutal crusade against the perceived evil that brutalised and killed thousands.
Alina Litvinova
Alina Litvinova is a curator and visual artist who works with a variety of mediums from photography and drawing to ceramics and glass. In 2025 she won a grant from Edinburgh Council and organized a glass art residency at Scot-ART during which she held workshops and taught 20+ artists who had never worked with glass before, covering techniques from engraving to stained glass. At the end of this residency, she made After the Laundry, the currently exhibited work, using glass left over from other participants.
Orla Henaghen
Orla Henaghen’s creative practice is rooted in exploring and honouring the process of grief. Her work transforms personal loss into something quietly powerful: an act of love and remembrance. She believes grief is a privilege, and to mourn deeply is to have loved deeply.
Her current body of work centres on core memories shared with her late father, each preserved in paint to keep them alive in the present. Created from memory without reference images, the paintings are honest reflections, imperfect but deeply felt. Distortions in scale, perspective, and detail are intentional, symbolising how memory shifts and fades over time. Each piece is scaled up from a photograph, reinforcing the personal and intimate nature of the memories she seeks to hold onto. Through this work, Henaghen invites others into a quiet space where grief and love coexist, and memory becomes a form of preservation.
Natalia Bocian
Natalia recently graduated from the Glasgow School of Art. Her works are frequently based on images from the bygone era, used as a distancing device to reflect on the current political and social climate. Her degree show series focused on the historical flood of 1997 that heavily affected the city she is from. The series was a personal retelling that draws directly from testimonies of her family and other flood survivors to reconstruct the flood as a myth that quickly abandons documentary realism to embrace the surreal logic of trauma and memory. Her works serve as both a literal and figurative warning, suggesting that the rising waters are not just a historical memory, but they are becoming an ever-looming future reality as climate change progresses.
Anna Charlotta Gardiner
For Anna, making art is ritual play, an improvised dance, and her materials are equal partners in this dance. Interwoven with this is her value and logic-driven science-geek curiosity. She uses reclaimed materials, a primary medium being the hair of her dog, Shadow, which she hand-spins and felts using ancient techniques. She creates costumes that are alive, whether inhabited in performance, or existing as beings in their own right.
Anna’s performance work is informed by embracing the awkward and weird as poetry. She uses her performances as the basis of further works, including films and embroidered panels. These components come together to create shrines to our inspirited world, haunted by beings that inhabit in the space between myth and science, between heritage and dreams.
Anna is a recipient of the RSA New Contemporaries Award and Outer Spaces Scotland Award. Her performance work is featured in the movie The Outrun.
@annagardinerartist | annagardinerartist.co.uk
Codie Anne
Codie Anne is a contemporary artist working between Moray and the Highlands of Scotland. Their disciplines include observational drawings, crochet tapestries, and performance. Codie Anne graduated from UHI Inverness with a BA First Class Honours in Art and Contemporary Practices. During their studies they were awarded the SSA New Graduate Award in 2025 and the Millers Art Prize in 2024.
Codie’s work challenges the art world on what should be considered ‘art’ or ‘craft’. The inspiration to craft from a young age from their maternal figures allowed Codie to grow and develop their legacy with a modern and personalised twist.
By re-envisioning iconic works, they allow crochet to take over. Craft is in its revolution, its concept is evolving, and the legacy continues.
@codieanneartist | codieanneartist.com
Stina Aldén
Stina Aldén is a Swedish artist based in Glasgow working primarily with analogue photography. Through the act of performance, Stina raises themes of otherness, climate, gender, body-image, heritage, and traditions in order to highlight their upbringing within a hyper-masculine, and labour intensive environment. Their practice focuses mostly on the photographic analogue process, but is no stranger to sculpture and text. Metal is a reoccurring material in their sculptural framing, echoing the impact of such masculine backgrounds still making their mark.
Alan Brash
Alan Brash is a figurative abstract impressionist painter whose work explores queer identity through a deeply personal lens. In his body of work he reflects on moments of resilience, vulnerability, and the evolving sense of self, and is shaped by his experiences of growing up during the late 1970s and 1980s, as a gay man navigating a double life. He responds to the societal and political pressures of that era; forces that sought to suppress queer lives through targeted shame and rigid ideals of family and masculinity.
Now, in his sixties, he finds himself discarding the shame he once carried for simply being who he is: his authentic self. Painting has become a way to examine that internalised shame and to let it go. It’s an act of reclamation of self, of story, and of space.
@artzcollector | artzcollector.co.uk
Euan Tait
Euan is an emerging visual artist based in Irvine, Ayrshire. He has an experimental approach to his work using a range of multi-media platforms from printmaking, photography, and painting.
Euan addresses architecture and the figurative form that reflect aspects of the human condition. He explores colour in his pieces, often working on small-scale detail work but also expanding his repertoire to larger scale works, conveying images with simple brush strokes and abstractions in ephemeral conditions showing the boundaries between representation, reflection, and surfaces, with a sense of structure and form.
His inspiration comes from contemporary printmaking and the resurgence of figurative art in Scotland. He graduated from the University of the West of Scotland, Ayr in July 2024 with a BA (Hons) Degree in New Media Art. He is part of many local art collectives, and a member of the Paisley Art Institute
@euantaitart | euantaitart.com
Yiyang Chen
Yiyang Chen(she/they) is a Glasgow-based Chinese artist and researcher. Working across painting, moving image, performance, ceramics, and writing, her practice explores themes such as the monstrous, the archive, touch, and the gaze. Yiyang’s work engages with the liveness of bodies, (contact) surfaces, queerness, gesture, and self-reflexive configuration. Yiyang’s works have been exhibited internationally. Over the past three years, she has gained international recognition through exhibitions and screenings in the UK, Germany, China, and South Korea.
@yiyang_painting | chenyiyang.cargo.site
Shi Shi
Shi Shi, born in 2000, is currently in her final year at the Glasgow School of Art. Her painting practice explores the narrative potential of the image as a site of tension between species, symbols, and systems of control. Through layered compositions that incorporate hybrid elements such as urban birds, fragmented human gestures, and marks of disruption, she investigates how different forms of life co-exist, clash, or are regulated within shared environments. Rather than working purely symbolically, her figures operate as epistemological ‘interrupters’”’ that challenge stable notions of agency, identity, and visibility. Grounded in research across ecology, semiotics, and affect theory, her work invites viewers to engage with the ambiguity of presence and the porousness of boundarie between human and non-human, order and disorder, visibility and erasure.
Ziqi Chen
Ziqi Chen is an artist based in Glasgow and a current Master’s student at the Glasgow School of Art, set to graduate in September 2025. Her artistic practice centres on juxtaposition, exploring the visual convergence of organic forms and digital constructs. Working primarily with watercolour and acrylic, she investigates the potential harmony between the natural and the synthetic. This approach reflects a broader inquiry into the evolving role of imagery in a post-digital age marked by visual oversaturation. She is particularly interested in how contrasting materials and symbolic systems such as biological textures and pixelated structures, can coexist and interact on a single surface. Through this process, her work examines not only aesthetic relationships but also how we perceive and navigate images within a visually saturated environment.
Carla Smith
Inspired by the vast complexity of being alive, Carla believes play is vital and should extend beyond childhood. Her practice explores the social narratives and connections found in everyday moments, celebrating the tender joy of gathering and being present together.
She creates multisensory, interactive experiences that invite audiences to consume, touch, and physically engage with the work. Growing up where food was central to social life, she often uses meals as a creative tool, seeing them as powerful catalysts for connection. Meeting our most basic needs can open space for vulnerability, conversation, and meaningful interaction; conditions that spark collaborative art experiences.
Printmaking is a cornerstone of Carla’s practice, which she developed further during a year-long residency at Peacock & the Worm Print Studio, culminating in her first solo exhibition in 2023. She has exhibited widely and also works across film and bookmaking, valuing collaboration and the friendships that shape her creative process.
@carlasmiith_art | carlasmithart.co.uk
Malachy McCrimmon
Malachy McCrimmon is a post-digital, new-age, anime-girl, hybrid-creative, ecologist-warrior, meme-queen navigating the e-jungle in a state of observation. The digital screen is their muse, transporting them into electric fields of information, connections and mayhem that materialise as multilayer canvases; explorations of Glitch Ecology that immortalise the displacement of the natural world amongst our surrealist, Anthropocentric overthrow. Their work exists in an intersection between humour, ecology, and post-internet culture. Each piece carries meaning beyond the chaotic compositions, asking the viewer to contemplate their positionality in a mutating world.
Tom Magrane
Tom Magrane is a visual artist and painter currently living and working in Dundee at Meadow Mill, having graduated from Falmouth University’s Fine Art course last year. His work aims to take note of the oversaturation of imagery in the modern world – taking reference images from a range of sources: films, music videos, Instagram reels of news reports, as well as more traditional media such as books and newspapers. These references are then presented through his lens, either with ink or paint or occasionally film, in order to present them with equal potency. One of the themes of Tom’s work is a consistent attempt to make connections between personal or familial memories and with wider social and cultural contexts – these memories can be applied to select images from a library of references.
Kama Jing
Kama Jing is currently studying at Glasgow School of Art. Their practice explores the subtle tension in social relationships, complex emotional states, and contemporary identity anxiety. Through fragmented narratives and symbolic elements, their work reinterprets familiar actions and gestures, often distorting their apparent meanings to open up alternative readings. Rather than delivering fully constructed messages, they intentionally leave their work partially unresolved and create a space where the viewer becomes a co-author of meaning. This open-ended strategy reflects their interest in ambiguity and the instability of interpretation. Playfulness, restraint, and disruption coexist in their visual language, inviting quiet but layered engagement.
By working between clarity and uncertainty, Kama builds a liminal space where image, emotion, and language hover just beyond resolution.
Qianyi Zhu
Qianyi Zhu is an abstract artist working primarily with painting and etching, alongside pastel and mixed works on paper. Currently based in Glasgow, she is soon to graduate from the Glasgow School of Art.
Her practice is grounded in a quiet exploration of inner landscapes, where remembered fragments of nature – trees, grasses, rivers, lakes, fields and urban edges – are revisited not as static images, but as shifting emotional states. Qianyi’s recent work examines the recurring pull of certain places and sensations, tracing how memory is never fixed, but continuously reinterpreted through time. She engages with repetition, not only as a visual motif, but as a way of navigating the distance between feeling and form. In her process, one site or image might be approached through multiple gestures, mediums, or layers, each iteration dissolving and reforming with subtle variation.
Phoebe Morley
Phoebe Morley’s works stem from outdoor performances, typically in forest spaces, where she moves through these landscapes slowly, observing their textures, marks, curves, and colours with an intimacy similar to how one might get to know a lover. Recently she has been exploring camouflage as a concept, using dappled forest light to create soft, shifting patterns across the body that blur the line between figure and landscape. This merging challenges traditional portrayals of the nude and reimagines how bodies can exist within and as part of nature. She sometimes works in a limited, monochrome palette to ‘queer’ the figure and interrupt the expectations that often come with viewing femme bodies in art. Using her nude body is a conscious act of reclamation, taking back a sense of sexual power and agency that has been taken or denied through years of living under the gaze and control of men.
@phoebemorley_studio | phoebemorley.com
Katie Muir
Katie Muir is a Dundee Based artist going into her fourth year of Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. She is a multi media artist with a focus on ceramics. Muir’s interest in contemporary sculpture pushes her to sculpt in a modern, textured style. She embraces the evidence of the creator’s mark; whether that be the artists fingerprints or the tools they have used to carve away at the material. She is inspired by process and therefore drawn to pieces where this evidence of working has been left exposed, hinting at how the work has been created, such as the work of Carol Peace who welcomes the ‘fluid marks’ of her working. These traces of the artist give the artworks character.
@sketchesbykate | katiemuirstudio.myportfolio.com
Bixia Jin
Bixia Jin is an artist who lives in Glasgow. Originally from Xiangxi, Hunan, China, and a member of the Tujia ethnic minority, she creates watercolour paintings inspired by memories of her hometown. Rather than depicting real scenes, she reconstructs her impressions through collage-like compositions. The recurring image of diaojiaolou – traditional stilted houses – serves as both a personal and cultural symbol. Using the transparency and unpredictability of watercolour, she captures the shifting, elusive nature of memory and invites viewers into a space where reality and imagination merge.