Our Annual Spring Open Call
March 31st – April 21st 2026
Works available to buy from £95.
Please direct all sales enquiries to sixfootgallery@gmail.com.
Opening night Thurs 31st March 7pm
VARVARA YU | AMY IONA | NEAVE McCORMICK | REBECCA PAUL | CLARE ARCHIBALD | KAYLA HOWIE | ADRIANA BERGEN | CORA FARR | OZ SPEIR | SHIVANGI DWIVEDI | IPSHITA MEYER | CATRIONA CLARK | ERIK RICHARD H | NIAMH O’BRIEN | LOU GRAVES | YOANNA WALDEN | JOHN TINNENY | JACK MCELROY | LYDIA S. | OMAR IMIDIAK | CONNOR McLENNAGHAN | LENA PHALEN | NINI JINGWEN | NICOLA J BOLLAND | GILL MCBRIER
Our annual spring show features twenty six artists exploring the ways hope and creativity take root in hostile environments. Inspired by queer histories of creating against all odds, and by the ways communities nurture possibility and make offerings for the future, Offerings showcases works that bring warmth, colour, and a sense of renewal, that soften the spaces they inhabit, or that suggest endurance or growth: no matter how harsh the winter, the flowers will bloom again.
Following an HIV diagnosis in 1986, artist and activist Derek Jarman moved to Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, an abandoned fisherman’s hut on a nuclear power site. Neighbours told him nothing would ever grow. Yet he planted his first rose, staked with a piece of driftwood, and spent his remaining years nurturing a flourishing garden, making offerings to the future. Jarman passed away in 1994 from AIDS-related complications, but Prospect Cottage endures as a sanctuary of creativity and inspiration. As the AIDS Memorial Quilt returns to Glasgow in September 2026, we are reflecting on themes of hope, ritual, sanctuary, and remembrance.
Participating Artists
Varvara Yu
Varvara is a Ukrainian multimedia artist, currently based in Scotland. Varvara is interested in building her own worlds, but also explores being one with the real world. She plays with the feelings of her audience, exploring whether they can blur the lines that are separating these worlds: the one created by her, the one created by the viewer, the one they see, the one they imagine, and the one they want to be present in, asking whether they see signs of morality, themselves, and what is happening around them. Varvara likes to think that people become the actors in her play, and without their presence, the work would not exist. Silhouettes create a dynamic plot, and bold colours play with one another. Shapes act as punctuation marks in this visual language – circles of connection, sharp lines of rupture, shadows that suggest rather than declare.
Amy Iona
Amy is a lens-based artist, researcher, and creative facilitator. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2020 and was latterly awarded the inaugural Creativity and Inclusivity award, and the Virtual award, supporting a year of research at the University of Glasgow, developing frameworks for access and inclusion in the creative industries. She is interested in facilitating encounters with art outwith the white cube, and contributing to projects which foster collaboration and collective care. Amy is particularly interested in how relationships between people and nature are impacted by social and cultural identity, explored through photographic objects and alternative processes. Her work is heavily informed by Scottish folklore, esotericism, and queer feminist theory.
@amyiona.photo | amyiona.format.com
Neave McCormick
Neave is an artist working out of Paisley and East Renfrewshire, who, after graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 2020 with a degree in printed textiles, continues to develop her practice and skills in contemporary painting. Neave’s recent work explores themes of nostalgia and dream states, creating work primarily in oils. Having been trained in textiles, Neave’s process almost always centres around pattern and working in layers, particularly how different layers interact with one another. Her artistic process involves photography, digital manipulation, and different drawing techniques to establish a finished piece.
Rebecca Paul
Rebecca is a Glasgow-based mixed media artist. She paints plein air natural landscapes and living spaces of homes and cities. She takes much of her inspiration from Scottish landscapes as seen from her dog walks. Her work explores the relationship of colour, form, and mood, through layers of mixed media materials. She’s especially interested in bold, unexpected colour palettes and shapes. Her influences include mid-century American artists Eyvind Earle, Mary Blair and David Weidman.
Clare Archibald
Clare is a Scottish multidisciplinary writer and artist whose diverse, multi-layered experimental practice has transformation, connection, learning, encounter, situation, and reoccurrence as foundational concepts. The blur of imperfection, the disarray of unknown and the sway of repetition are fundamental. Working individually, collaboratively and collectively, she is published in numerous international journals and independent and academic presses, with several album, field recording/sound art releases, visual art exhibitions, artist films screened internationally, and an internationally touring sound installation. Her practice spans remote forest broadcasts, performance, walking/psychogeography, movement, curation/chairing of events/anthologies, stand-up, experimental weaving, puppet-making and more. A body of work on expected neonatal death is acquisitioned by the Wellcome Collection. She is the first non-doctoral researcher to work with the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham archive, producing two books in relation to her Lanzarote period. Versions of Undefined is her imprint/press housing work that could exist elsewhere but is purposefully situated there without compromise. She tries stuff.
Kayla Howie
Kayla is a queer South African artist, currently residing in Glasgow and studying at the Glasgow School of Art. She explores ideas of womanhood, mortality, and connection through oil paintings of herself, the women in her family, and the bathroom as a space of both discomfort and refuge. Kayla hopes to draw attention to the importance of considering women in art and art history, as both artists and subjects. She conveys ideas of mortality as seen in the way the body ages. Women have a specific relationship with mortality, often one of attempting to delay it, and Kayla explores this relationship through her paintings of women in her family, including her late Grandma. These paintings tend to also be a celebration of a life lived, and the beauty found in the aged body. Both comfort and discomfort play equal parts in Howie’s work, such as the warmth of a subject coupled with the discomfort of an averted gaze.
Adriana Bergen
Adriana is a queer Canadian-Italian artist currently based in Glasgow, Scotland. Isolating moments of introspection and feeling into visual objects, Adriana’s work explores the body as a vessel for emotional weight. Through their work, Adriana claims that our bodies are made up of our experiences and trauma, invisible for public investigation, intangible and against our will. Their practice is a quiet and intimate experience as the work reckons with the artist’s own physical sensations of emotional memory. Described as an objectification of ‘the internal that gets stuck in the throat’, their practice attempts to bridge this gap of sight and transfer these residues into object forms. The work becomes the site of making the unseen physical and tangible. Through material and visual exploration, the works seek to understand the artist’s emotional memory and lived memory and, in turn, offer a space for others to encounter their own.
Cora Farr
Cora is a promoter, curator, and multidisciplinary artist working primarily with latex, fibre arts, and photography. Originally from London, they moved to Manchester where they found inspiration in the perceived dichotomy between the peaks and the club, and stumbling upon the ability to exist as both they cultivated an uncompromised relationship to nature in a city on the edge of a national park. Now resident in Glasgow, they are currently studying on the MLitt Curatorial Practice course at GSA and interning at Six Foot, and making, and clubbing. They seek to queer the materials they work with and disrupt traditional conceptions of portraiture, fibre artistry, and sculpture. Their work documents a queer relationship to nature and natural forms, relating queer realities that are unsanitised and instinctive. Their work demands for queerness a share of the space in and out of the city.
Oz Speir
Oz is a recent graduate from Gray’s School of Art, who moved to Glasgow to pursue an MLitt in Contemporary Art Practice from Glasgow School of Art. They are currently working to create site-specific installations exploring queer temporality, built from drawings, writing and sculpture.
Shivangi Dwivedi
Shivangi is a mixed media and textile artist whose practice explores women’s livelihoods, emotional landscapes, and lived experiences. All fabrics and textile elements in her artworks are created by her own hands, making each piece deeply personal and unique. Her work combines contemporary art with textile-based techniques, using fabric, texture, and layered materials to create expressive and tactile surfaces that reflect both personal emotions and collective stories of resilience, identity, and strength. Through her practice, she celebrates women’s voices and honours human experience. Her work invites viewers to connect with themes of identity, emotion, and cultural heritage through the sensory and material qualities of handcrafted textile art.
Ipshita Meyer
Ipshita is an award-winning Indian fine artist from Glasgow. She is passionate about making work that explore social issues, influenced by her culture and heritage and filled with symbolism and colours. Ipshita’s objective is to create something unconventional, generating curiosity, dialogue, and conversation. Within the space of the frame, she endeavours to narrate a subject that is linked with our moral psyche and society. Ipshita was a finalist for the John Hurt Art Prize and long listed for the Visual Art Open Awards, London. She gained international recognition as a finalist for Prisma Art Prize, Italy, and was awarded the Certificate of Achievement by the Pinacothèque Luxembourg Art Museum. She was the recipient of Renfrewshire Council’s One Ren Health and Wellbeing Award at The Big Art Show, Paisley, and her work was exhibited at Summerhall Arts as part of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Catriona Clark
Residing in Edinburgh, Catriona is a queer intermedia artist with a BA from Edinburgh College of Art. The manifesto for her artistic practice takes the viewer on a journey through the history, conflict, and resolution of queer voices. Creating a contemporary practice from these stories, she constructs an interdisciplinary range of affirming works for queer folk and allies alike. Intersecting archival material with pop-art visuals, Catriona reclaims common objects into loud and proud statements of queer love. Carrying our oral history into tactile objects memorialises subverted pasts and facilitates our ever-queering future. Through these queered objects, Catriona envisions an ever-evolving opportunity to transform, akin to how queer lives develop. In her installations, interactivity and customisation embed new potentials for storytelling to become story-making.
Erik Richard H
A traveler, trying something new with each project.
@erikrichardh | emptysilentpolicecar.blogspot.com
Niamh O’Brien
Niamh is a self taught artist, born and raised outside Edinburgh and currently based in the east end of Glasgow. Her work focuses on the relationship between nature and the current technical age, and the complexity of moving through a world built around us, not for us. Using pigeons as a primary subject, her work aims to put you through the eyes of an animal that, despite once being respected and loved as pets, have been left by the wayside as humans have evolved away from them. Her work is primarily in acrylic, and she utilises scale and perspective to make subjects feel small and diminutive or large and overwhelming. Some of her works are intended to feel satirical, pessimistic even, while others are just embracing the oft neglected beauty of these birds.
Adriana Bergen
Isolating moments of introspection and feeling into visual objects, Adriana Bergen’s work explores the body as a vessel for emotional weight. Adriana Bergen is a queer Canadian-Italian artist currently based in Glasgow, Scotland. Bergen through their work claims that our bodies are made up of our experiences and trauma, invisible for public investigation, intangible and against our will. Bergen’s practice is a quiet and intimate experience as the work reckons with the artist’s own physical sensations of emotional memory. Described as an objectification of ‘the internal that gets stuck in the throat’, their practice attempts to bridge this gap of sight and transfer these residues into object forms. The work becomes the site of making the unseen physical and tangible. Through material and visual exploration, the works seek to understand the artist’s emotional memory and lived memory and, in turn, offer a space for others to encounter their own.
Omar Imidiak
Omar is a printmaker, illustrator and facilitator from the Canary Islands, creating and sharing artwork as ‘Imidak Art’. With his work he tries to celebrate the beauty in the mundane, and to explore his emotions when words don’t do them justice. If you see him taking photos of a bird on top of a lamppost, say hi!
Yoanna Walden
Yoanna Walden is UK-based photographer (b. 2003) who, employing found objects, diy props, and her own body, stages images exploring themes of confinement, constraint and connection. Rooted in personal experience and shaped by an autodidactic approach, her practice interrogates systems of control and the social construction of madness. She engages with texts concerned with power and institutionalization, extracting words / phrases that inspire her and generate visual impulses which she then turns into photographs. Via her work she seeks to create a space in which historical experience, artistic response and contemporary reflection can co-exist. Yoanna left formal education at 15, and self-educated subsequently. She is now completing an MA in Creative Practice at Make Happen Institute, and has had work exhibited in the UK, China, and Greece.
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?
John Tinneny
Born and raised in Belfast, John Tinneny is an artist, writer and translator based in Glasgow. He works across photography, textiles and the written word, and his work explores themes of Irish and queer identity, history and heritage, as well as that of translation in its many and varied forms.
Jack McElroy
Jack McElroy is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice and curatorial projects explore Scottish identity and social history through personal and participatory research. His site-specific projects, creating – sculpture, installation, photography, and drawing – emerge from dialogue and conversations with individuals and communities close to him. Informed by his working-class background, his practice seeks to broaden access to the arts. His artworks aim to resonate with people who may not see themselves or their interests reflected in traditional art spaces, inviting connection, participation, and a shared sense of presence within the work.
Lydia S.
Lydia is a hobby photographer using film to capture the ephemeral nature of everyday living. She prefers analogue as a medium to slow down in a world where everything can be obtained instantly. Film photography is her means of combating this, slowing down and engaging with the world through delayed gratification. By freezing a moment in time and not being able to see it right away, the appreciation for the moment is not only felt more deeply, but is tinged with a sweet sense of nostalgia.
Connor McLennaghan
Connors work focuses on aspects of identity based on his own lived experience, primarily focusing on queerness, transness and Scottishness, to open up these ideas and reveal them as welcoming, rather than as divisive. Drawing inspiration from both current events and archival media, his work acts as undeniable and tangible proof of trans existence during a time of erasure and the roll-back of transgender rights within Scotland. Using his hands to create, using analogue photography and manual printmaking processes, is not just an aesthetic choice, but a political stance. Tactility in art is under threat, as technology such as AI begins to destabilise the artistic economy that was once deemed untouchable. Using a body to create is something AI cannot do, and therefore this is an important aspect to Connors practice, an act of resistance through the creation of physical tangible media.
@connor.prints
Lena Phalen
Lena is based in Glasgow, Scotland, and a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (2016 – BA and 2018 – MFA). She is originally from rural Sweden. Lena makes small-scale works – paintings and small sculptures, usually from paper. Her process is explorative and intuitive; a cycle of making, destroying, and remaking. Rejected paintings on paper incorporated as collage act as reminders of the continuous cycle. Imperfections and accidents remain, both as a record of the creative process and a celebration of the irregular and unique. By not dictating the outcome, Lena allows the work to unfold on its own organic terms. The resulting pieces reflect their own unique energy. When a few works are brought together, a narrative often develops – the pieces start to engage in dialogue with each other, taking on their own life. The process is complete, and can start again.
@lenaphalen
Nini Jingwen
Nini is an emerging artist working across clay sculpture and painting. Her practice explores themes of identity, body image, and emotional experience through soft, exaggerated, and often surreal forms. Drawing from personal experiences, she reflects on vulnerability, adaptation, and self-acceptance. Alongside her artistic practice, she is also a content creator focused on body positivity and empowering women, building an online community that encourages confidence and self-expression. Her work often balances humour and discomfort, creating pieces that are playful yet reflective, inviting viewers to reconsider familiar ideas about the body and self.
Gill McBrier
Gill Graduated in 1989 with a BA (Hons) from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee. Gill worked teaching art and design, in Fife, Lanarkshire and Argyll and Bute before settling in Glasgow. Having swapped the countryside for the city, Gill’s focus and appreciation of rural life and natures landscape have become a growing focus in her work.
In 2024 Gill left teaching to focus full-time on her own artwork.
Gill draws from her background in tapestry and papermaking to source fabrics and explore different surface textures. Adding ornamentation and a sense of the precious she incorporate beading and metallics to pieces to celebrate and evoke the delicate beauty of nature and its balance. Threads and needles are used as drawing tools and hark back to her days of warp and weft at the tapestry loom which serve as a metaphor for the emotional ties she has with the landscape.