Our Annual Autumn Open Call
Sept 30th – Oct 14th 2025
Works available to buy from £95.
Please direct all sales enquiries to sixfootgallery@gmail.com.
YY WANG | NORU INNES | RACHEL ARTON | EMILY JACKSON | XIAOPING YU | BIANCA PATANIA | VAL CANNON | FRAN SPEICHER | SARA OUSSAIDEN | ZHIYANG DING | VIKA PROKOPIV | AMY KELLY | YA LUN ZHENG | JONI BARRETT | NINI JINGWEN | AMMNA SHEIKH | ZAMAN ARMAGHAN | JENNY MONTGOMERY | KATIE MUIR | LOU GRAVES | DAVID PATRICK | SITIAN ZENG | CAT GEMMILL | ALASDAIR WATSON | SOPHIE BELL | LIN CHENG
Our annual autumn show, Future/Past, features a sublime collection of works by twenty six artists inspired by ancestral echoes and future visions; pieces that dismantle tradition, reimagine narratives, and linger in the margins of the radical, the oneiric, and the everyday.
Participating Artists
YY Wang
YY Wang is a mixed media artist based in Scotland. Her practice are deeply rooted in Jung’s childhood analysis theory in positive psychology and the healing effect of early dreams, combining nostalgia with dreamcore aesthetics to create healing fantasy spaces. In her art world, ethereal dreams, abandoned paradises, and deformed memory fragments are given new life, bridging the past and the present, and encouraging people to rediscover and recover past emotional experiences.
@avrile1111 | yywang.cargo.site
Noru Innes
Noru Innes (b. 1978, Finland) is a Glasgow-based interdisciplinary artist primarily working with photography, sculpture, and installation art. Her practice is rooted in personal narratives, exploring the intersections of memory, identity, and emotion. Noru’s process is both controlled and experimental, often starting with an idea – perhaps just a fragment, a question, or a feeling – which she then develops through experimentation with materials and forms. Through her work Noru aims to create spaces where the viewer can encounter themselves in a reflective way and learn something not only about the artwork but also about themselves, their own memories, perceptions, and the similarities we all share in our lives when moving through the world.
Rachel Arton
Rachel Arton is a Scottish emerging self-taught artist whose practice blends narrative illustration with dreamlike abstraction. Drawing inspiration from myths, oral traditions, and the enduring power of superstition, she reimagines these echoes through a surreal, illustrative lens. Her practice combines watercolour, acrylic, and mixed media to create bold, fluid compositions that balance playfulness with unease. Arton is fascinated by the spaces where ancestral memory collides with the everyday: a flower that becomes a spirit, a rabbit that glows with lunar energy, a portrait dissolving into visionary abstraction. Much of her work explores themes of solitude, emotional landscapes, and quiet transformation. Through her work, Arton seeks to create portals into liminal worlds that are both recognisable and strange. Arton invites viewers to linger in the thresholds between myth and futurism, tradition and reinvention, the ordinary and the unreal.
Emily Jackson
Emily McGhie Jackson is a Scottish Artist exploring the line between realities. Inspired by the Scottish landscape, digital space and fairytales, she explores the ways in which mood affects our personal perceptions of space. Painting with Acrylic on board, Emily’s paintings exist as physical portals to another world, inviting the viewer to step inside. (b.2004) Emily studied a BA (Hons) for Fine Art: Painting, at Camberwell College of Arts (UAL). After winning the Big Walls and Windows Project in 2023 and being shortlisted for the Scottish Portrait Awards in 2021 she has showcased her work both in London and across Scotland, with her first Solo Show Thinking Space, being held in Dundee.
@emmie.j.arts | emilymcghiejackson.com
Xiaoping Yu
Xiaoping Yu is based in Edinburgh and has completed her Master’s degree in Contemporary Art Practice at The University of Edinburgh. She believes that art knows no boundaries, so she is experimenting with various media. She makes sculpture, wall pieces, and installations in clay and resin. Her art concretises the involuntary memories and emotions of the individual, revealing complexities that reflect existence, nature, history, and behaviour. One by one, the brushstrokes are scattered throughout the picture, encapsulating time and memories triggered by emotions and senses. Focusing on intricate details, her work aims to make the invisible visible, exploring the deep connections between herself and the world.
Bianca Patania
Bianca Patania is an Italian Glasgow-based artist working across painting, printmaking, photography, and film. A 2025 graduate of The Glasgow School of Art with a BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking, and currently undertaking an MFA at the same institution, her practice investigates memory, identity, and intergenerational relationships, often drawing on family archives and personal histories. She is fascinated by the spaces where memory and imagination intersect, transforming inherited stories into layered works that linger between intimacy, recollection, and the uncanny. Old family photographs, casually taken yet quietly elegant, serve as starting points for her exploration. Though etching, painting, and mark-making, Bianca embraces process, materiality, and imperfection, allowing them to carry meaning beyond precise representation. Her work reimagines ancestral narratives in ways that are intimate and dreamlike. Through colour, texture, and layered forms, she creates spaces where memory and imagination coexist, inviting reflection on the persistence, fragility, and emotional resonance of personal and collective histories.
@biancapatania | biancapatania.com
Val Cannon
Val is a Scottish artist, currently based in Edinburgh. She dares to paint emotions relating to love, courage and healing. Val has recently been working on a series of artworks that signify feeling free. Val is also a mental health practitioner and has worked within health and social care, employability, education and community arts. She has shared her knowledge and skills with many people of all ages to promote their mental health and wellbeing.
Fran Speicher
Fran Speicher is an Argentine visual artist, curator, and cultural manager based in Stockholm, Sweden. His practice explores resilience and identity through a figurative aesthetic that fuses conceptual pop surrealism with Pop Art. With a distinguished international career, his work has been exhibited in key cities such as London, Berlin, Vienna, Helsinki, and New York. He has been recognized with distinctions such as an Honourable Mention at the prestigious Art Olympia in Tokyo and was a finalist in the Toolip Art Contest in Vienna. His practice also extends to curation, where he has developed socially engaged projects. His artistic and curatorial projects address themes of demystifying prejudices, identity, and the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights and other social causes.
Sara Oussaiden
Sara Oussaiden is an artist, writer, and curator, born in Dundee and raised on the Isle of Skye. She recently graduated with a BA in Art and Philosophy from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, where she presented her degree show project Lay Me Where I’m Loved. Working primarily through sculpture and painting, Sara seeks relatability through tangible, material forms. Her practice is shaped by contemporary ecological movements and the theories of interconnected living as written by philosophers Astrida Neimanis and Donna Haraway. Sara’s process of art-as-research and research-as-art allows complex narratives to develop through experimentation, reflection, and dialogue. Her work explores how community engagement, nurtured through explorative yet accessible spaces, can lead to meaningful and positive social change.
Zhiyang Ding
Zhiyang Ding is a jewellery artist and design researcher pursuing a PhD in Design at the University of Edinburgh. He previously completed an MA in Jewellery and Metal at the Royal College of Art (2023). His practice-based research investigates mechanical jewellery as a medium to reconfigure human-machine relations, drawing on Artificial Life, speculative design, and unpredictable motion. Zhiyang’s work explores the porous boundary between ornament, agency, and autonomy. Influenced by kinetic art and low-tech mechanics, his wearable pieces behave with subtle independence, blurring the animate and the inanimate. These ambiguous movements invite co-constructed interactions, prompting reflection on intimacy, absurdity, and control within entangled human-machine systems. Through embodied experimentation and workshops, Zhiyang situates jewellery beyond aesthetic adornment, positioning it as a speculative tool for posthuman embodiment and multispecies coexistence. His research foregrounds jewellery as a critical design practice for reimagining intimacy, behaviour, and sympoiesis in uncertain futures.
Vika Prokopiv
Viktoria Prokopiv is an artist from Lviv, Ukraine, currently based in Glasgow. She studied Interior Design at the Lviv Professional College of Decorative and Applied Arts and is currently pursuing a filmmaking degree in Filmmaking at the University of the West of Scotland. She experiments with printmaking, oil painting, photography and film. As an artist she is deeply fascinated by the power of nature, specifically trees. She draws great inspiration and peace from depicting their presence through the medium of graphics. From an early age, Viktoria chose nature as the central subject of their work. In painting, she focuses on bringing life to the artwork, seeking to evoke emotions. For Viktoria, the purpose of art is to make one feel something and to leave space for reflection and thought. Her artworks are a reminder to appreciate and protect what is around us.
Amy Kelly
Amy is a Fine Art student, currently in her third year at Edinburgh College of Art, with an HND in Art & Design from Glasgow Kelvin College. Her work centres around her excitement for many different materials, from painting and drawing to collage and printmaking. Amy’s variety of different working methods help her to find new and unique ways to express her inspirations in her work. Amy’s work and inspirations bloom from her family and friends, who she surrounds herself with, and are boosted by her love for travel, especially to Nashville, home of country music! Amy’s work is filled with bright, expressive colours which stem from her exciting inspirations and passion to create work, even when she isn’t sure what this work should be. She is currently working to show the importance of ‘comfort with ambiguity,’ and strives to create this sense of comfort in her work.
Ya Lun Zheng
Ya Lun Zheng is a Taiwanese artist currently based in Glasgow. She recently completed a Master of Fine Arts at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. Working primarily with acrylic, oils, and charcoal, Ya Lun explores the fluid interaction between dreams, memory, and consciousness, as well as their blurred boundaries. Through her creations, she aims to reveal poetic and unknown spaces within human perception, connecting personal experience with shared, collective imagination. Her practice often draws inspiration from lakes, mountains, and landscapes, where natural elements such as stones, rivers, branches, and forests act as vessels of ancestral and cultural memory. By reinterpreting these forms, Ya Lun dismantles conventional concepts of landscape and narrative, creating spaces that hover between the everyday, memory, and imagination. Dreams and subconscious imagery guide the flow of colour and composition, allowing me to reconstruct familiar elements into landscapes that evoke both inherited memory and visions of the future.
Joni Barrett
Joni Barrett is currently in her third year of studying Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art. She often creates landscapes, one of her biggest inspirations being the grandeur of nature especially the Scottish Highlands, and a common thread throughout her work is her passion for history, specifically Scottish history. This led to her interest in wool waulking, an age old practice where groups of women processed wool together while singing in Gaelic. As she did not have the means to waulk wool, Joni opted for needle felting wool instead, creating a landscape drawn from aerial images of the Minginish Peninsula on Skye, a place where wool waulking was commonplace. The piece Sgioba Luaidh or Waulking Team was inspired by her desire to create collaborative art and explore the joy found in making with other people.
Nini Jingwen
Nini is an emerging ceramic artist based in Edinburgh. Her work explores humour, vulnerability and the pressures beneath everyday life. Nini’s piece The Rat in the Bathroom draws on the Chinese term “rat people” (老鼠人), evoking those at the margins, often unseen, yet resilient. With a tie and a watch, the rat wears symbols of work and status, suggesting how roles and expectations mask shared experiences of exploitation and fatigue across class. In the levelling privacy of the toilet, pretence drops away and a raw, unmasked self returns. As a Chinese woman living in a predominantly white society, Nini recognises herself in this figure, sometimes small or overlooked, but enduring. By placing a folklore creature in a banal domestic setting, she reimagines tradition to mirror contemporary realities, letting humour and unease coexist and inviting viewers to look again at what survives in the corners.
Ammna Sheikh
Ammna Sheikh is a British/Pakistani artist whose practice celebrates cultural heritage and the handmade traditions passed down through generations. At the heart of her work is a commitment to preserving craft in an age increasingly shaped by digital technology. Through vibrant explorations of colour, pattern, and language, her work reflects on colonial displacement and the interconnected evolution of cultural expression. Ammna’s multidisciplinary practice spans textiles, photography, illustration, video, screenprinting, and installation, each medium offering new ways to trace the movement of traditions and the global circulation of motifs. Labour intensive processes are central to her work, highlighting the value of time, skill, and the human touch within handmade forms. By weaving together heritage and adaptation, her work underscores the cross-cultural journeys of pattern and design, echoing Pakistan’s own history of integration while resonating with broader global conversations around craft, identity, and belonging.
@ammnasheikh.art | ammnasheikh.com
Zaman Armaghan
Zaman Hazir is a woodworker by profession and the founder of Sweetleaf Craft Studio. Sweetleaf is a Glasgow-based independent studio dedicated to handcrafting unique, quirky and colourful contemporary objects, mainly from salvaged and one-off finds. Every Sweetleaf object is inspired by and created with things learnt and picked up from cultures around the world and shares a single purpose – to add something unusual and joyful to people’s space and understanding.
Jenny Montgomery
Jenny is a third year Fine Art student at Edinburgh College of Art. She loves experimenting with non-traditional materials, letting the objects and supplies guide her decision making. The history of the objects Jenny uses is very important to her, as well as the social and cultural context surrounding the mediums she works with. She aim to blur the lines between textiles, drawing, printmaking and book making, integrating different elements from each specialism into her work.
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. In her sculptures she adapts material from history and mythology, to tell modern stories. Muir’s interest in contemporary sculpture pushes her to work in a modern, textured style. She embraces the evidence of the creator’s mark, whether that be the artist’s 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
Lou Graves
Lou Graves is a lifelong Glasgwegian, illustrator, and artist, with a body of work encompassing two decades. He utilises his finely honed skills in drawing and painting to portray his remarkably vivid dreams – insights in a vaster, richer, truer world than our own. Incredible landscapes where vast spiralling towers and staircases organically mingle with and grow into endless expanses of land, sea and plant life that together almost seem to wake from dreaming and distantly regard you from the frame as you pass. You are invited to step inside his work. Perhaps this will be your first insight into the real world – or perhaps you have seen it before?
@gravelvetart | lougraves.co.uk
David Patrick
David Patrick makes paintings, altered books, boxes, collages and drawings. He likes the empirical adventure of making, finding it a satisfying and rewarding thing to lose yourself in. At his best he makes handmade objects of ideas, consideration and emotional expression. He is interested in pursuing the qualities of materials, strong colour, graphic observation and composition.
Sitian Zeng
Sitian Zeng (b. 1995, China) is a Glasgow-based artist and doctoral researcher at the Glasgow School of Art. Over the past decade, she has actively engaged in artistic practice and built her career through painting, mixed-media art, and moving images. Her practice-led research lies within interdisciplinary contexts across areas such as painting in the expanded field, subjectivity, identity, mass media, and the power structure in the post-digital age. Sitian’s work has been exhibited internationally, with recent highlights including the Watercolour Prize at the RWA 172nd Annual Open Exhibition (2025, Bristol) and participation in Crisis/Death/Resurrection: A Painting Symposium (2024, Cork).
Cat Gemmill
Cat Gemmill works from her Glasgow based Studio and enjoys challenging her style by exploring a variety of subjects and mediums to keep her ideas fresh.
@catgemmillart | catgemmill.com
Alasdair Watson
Alasdair Watson is a photographer and artist, working with families, community groups, cultural organisations, and other creators. He uses his photography to connect people, tell their stories, and help create joyful memories. His artistic projects are passionately rooted in the landscapes and languages of Glasgow and Scotland. Through the ritual of travel, connection, and creation, Alasdair uses analogue and digital processes to tell stories of how we belong to each other and our surroundings, while exploring feelings around the environment, nostalgia, loneliness, imperfection, and impermanence.
@Alasdair_Watson | alasdair.photography
Sophie Bell
Sophie Bell is currently in her third year of studying Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art. She mainly works with oil paint, creating work exploring the subject of cats and the fluidity of their movements, the many forms that they can take and the way they contort to fill up a space. She was originally inspired by the Cat Sìth, a fairy creature from Celtic mythology that was said to haunt the Scottish Highlands, and later drew influence from her own cats, that are said to haunt the streets of Troon. In her work she aims to harness the carefree, rebellious and enigmatic nature of felines, attempting to emulate this kind of energy into her own practice.
Lin Cheng
Lin Cheng is a Glasgow-based visual artist whose practice spans painting, illustration, experimental animation, and installation. She works internationally, with recent exhibitions in New York, Paris, Beijing, and London, including participation in the 2025 London Design Festival. Cheng’s cross-media storytelling investigates female subjectivity, collective memory, and the tension between self and environment. Drawing from Chinese cultural traditions and global feminist discourse, her work engages with urgent social themes such as domestic violence, migration, and belonging. Alongside these critical explorations, Cheng also incorporates a child’s-eye perspective, creating works that balance vulnerability with playfulness. This dual lens allows her to address profound societal issues while also celebrating imagination, empathy, and resilience. Through this layered approach, Cheng bridges personal narratives and collective experiences, connecting local communities with global conversations through powerful, silent visual languages.