28th July – 11th August 2026
AMY IONA | AMY KELLY | CAT GEMMILL | CLARE CRINES | CORA FARR | DOUGIE MARSHALL | FEE CUIMEANACH | LISA BONNER | MANNIE ROSIE | OWEN SPEIR | VIKTORIIA PROKOPIV | ZARA NICOLE SMITH
Since 2010, Six Foot Gallery has operated from the lobby of the Pentagon Business Centre, a former whisky bond overlooking the Clyde. The gallery has gradually extended across the surrounding walls and corners. Its programme has also evolved with successive volunteers. Many have been artists, writers, curators and organisers whose interests have shaped the gallery’s activity.
Across Glasgow, artist-run spaces provide vital opportunities for artists to exhibit, experiment and build communities. However, many depend on voluntary labour to remain active. As cultural spaces across the city face uncertain futures, A Working History recognises some of the many volunteers whose creative and organisational work has sustained Six Foot Gallery.
Informed by the gallery’s Volunteer Showcase, a small display of volunteers’ work, the exhibition brings together work by current and former volunteers in painting, printmaking, textiles, photography, sound, sculpture, jewellery and writing. Shown in the gallery they helped sustain, these works place the volunteers’ practices within the gallery’s history.
The exhibition forms part of a wider project documenting how Six Foot Gallery has operated and how volunteers have shaped its creative and organisational development. Following the exhibition, a publication will present interviews with volunteers alongside images and archival material, creating a partial record of the gallery’s changing activity.
Artworks available to buy from £25
Please direct all sales enquiries to sixfootgallery@gmail.com
Participating Artists
AMY IONA
Amy Iona 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, Inclusivity & the Virtual award to support 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 alternative theories of ecology.
@amyiona.photo | amyiona.format.com
AMY KELLY
Amy Kelly is a printmaker drawn to meticulous, process-driven techniques. Her practice explores how art can shape the spaces around us and create a sense of home. Her family is a constant source of support and inspiration, informing her understanding of home as a place of safety where she can thrive. She brings this idea into her studio practice and the exhibition spaces she creates, aiming to make viewers feel welcomed and engaged. Colour is central to Amy’s work. Her rich palette is inspired by the vibrancy she encounters while travelling and the sense of ease she associates with being on holiday.
CAT GEMMILL
Cat Gemmill is a freelance artist based in Glasgow. Raised on the Ayrshire coast, she studied Design for Textiles in Edinburgh before graduating with a BA (Hons) from the School of Textiles in the Scottish Borders. Her background in textile design and interest in the emotional impact of colour inform her large-scale, expressive paintings. Nature remains central to her practice, shaped by her connection to coastal landscapes and the rural surroundings of the Scottish Borders. Working primarily in acrylic, Cat uses layered brushstrokes and colour blending to create movement and depth. Drawing on wildlife and landscapes, she reinterprets familiar subjects through a vivid visual language, aiming to create work that brings viewers a sense of joy and calm.
Cat presented her debut solo exhibition, Happiness Blooms From Within, at Six Foot Gallery in 2024. The collection later led to opportunities to exhibit in London, Bristol, Venice and Rome.
@catgemmillart | catgemmill.com
CLARE CRINES
Clare Crines is a Glasgow-based artist working across drawing, painting and jewellery, and is the former Director of Six Foot Gallery. Her painting practice reflects a long-standing interest in the natural world, shaped by more than twenty years of studying and teaching botanical drawing. She previously taught botanical illustration at the University of Glasgow and City of Glasgow College.
Moving away from the precision of traditional botanical illustration, Clare seeks to approach her subjects in a more abstract and expressive way. Through her use of vivid colour and composition, she responds to the overall form of her subjects without becoming constrained by detail. The works shown in the exhibition are drawn from her exhibitions Daytripper and A Rose Is a Rose…. They bring together observations gathered on days out with close-up floral studies exploring the delicacy of flowers.
@clarecrines | clarecrines.co.uk
CORA FARR
Cora Farr is a promoter, curator and multidisciplinary artist working primarily with latex, fibre arts and photography. Originally from London, they later moved to Manchester, where they found inspiration in the perceived dichotomy between the Peak District and the club. By discovering the ability to exist within both, they cultivated an uncompromised relationship with nature while living in a city on the edge of a national park.
Now based in Glasgow, Cora is studying on the MLitt Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) programme at The Glasgow School of Art, volunteering at Six Foot Gallery, making work, 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. It demands for queerness a share of the space both within and beyond the city.
DOUGIE MARSHALL
Dougie Marshall is primarily a composer and musician who works with field recordings, found and sampled sounds, and all kinds of electronic instruments. His work focuses heavily on sound texture using degradation and manipulation as production techniques, seeking new and interesting applications of these sources. His recent work has been towards finding new outlets beyond an audio only approach, including making compositions for use as part of sculptures, both collaboratively and of his own making, and also branching out to soundtracks.
In addition to his more experimental work, Dougie also writes, records, and releases music under the name Unthank, available on Bandcamp and through all major streaming services. His most recent release is an album commemorating the work of David Lynch, featuring poetry written by Six Foot Gallery’s own Fee.
@unthank.music | linktr.ee/unthank
FEE CUIMEANACH
Fee is a writer and interdisciplinary artist based in rural North Ayrshire, exploring fractured memory, mythic narratives, and gender as a liminal space through text, image, and object-making. You can find her work in Anarkiss Zine, Gutter Mag, and Lucent Dreaming, amongst others. She is currently working on a new translation of The Bacchae by Euripides. Fee started volunteering at Six Foot Gallery in 2023 before taking over as the Director.
LISA BONNER
Lisa Bonner is a multidisciplinary artist from Glasgow. She holds a BA (Hons) in Contemporary Art Practice from City of Glasgow College and volunteered at Six Foot Gallery in 2023. Within her practice, Lisa explores why technological commodities have built-in obsolescence and how an overreliance on technology has changed the ways we interact with one another and the world. She considers the effects of facing artificial light through screens every day, how technology can manipulate our perception of reality and how we continue to adapt our lives in a world where it is constantly present.
Working mainly with painting, sculpture, light and shadow projections, printmaking and digital art, Lisa’s work explores consumerism, overconsumption, connection, colour theory, perception and experimentation.
@lisabonner_art | lisabonnerart.com
MANNIE ROSIE
Mannie Rosie is a former volunteer at Six Foot Gallery, a BA Fashion Design graduate from The Glasgow School of Art and is currently completing an HND in Jewellery Design and Manufacturing. Mannie’s practice focuses on inclusivity and sustainability, creating pieces that combine discarded offcuts and ‘ugly bits’ through an amalgamation of materials. Working with recycled and upcycled components, Mannie’s work responds to the need for more responsible jewellery design and making processes.
OWEN SPEIR
Owen Speir is an artist working in sound, text, sculpture and installation. They previously studied at Gray’s School of Art, and are currently working towards an MLitt in Contemporary Art Practice from Glasgow School of Art. Owen’s current work aims to bring visibility to the phenomenon of extended waiting that affects transgender people in the UK. On a personal level, waiting to access the means to medically and socially transition can feel purgatorial. When this feeling is then expanded out to the thousands of trans people currently waiting to access healthcare, in waitlists that range from five to twenty-five years long, this feeling scales up dramatically. Trans bodies are systematically suspended in time, they are disconnected from moving towards a more comfortable or authentic way of living, and they are asked to remain in a state of discomfort for longer. This waiting in discomfort, this inability to settle, this frustration at not being able to reach something, is what underpins Owen’s research and practice.
@speir.artist | speirartist.hotglue.me
VIKTORIIA PROKOPIV
Viktoriia Prokopiv is an artist and printmaker from Lviv, Ukraine, currently based in Glasgow. Nature is the central theme running through her practice, alongside an interest in naivety and a childlike way of seeing the world. Viktoriia presents imagined worlds that she hopes offers a sense of safety and invites curiosity. These scenes often depict night, yet remain full of life and possibility.
Symbolism is important within her paintings and prints. Dragonflies represent transformation and change, reflecting life as a continuous process of growth. The new moon symbolises new beginnings and the possibility of starting again. Her main inspirations are nature and stories such as Alice in Wonderland and Coraline.
ZARA NICOLE SMITH
Zara Nicole Smith is a Glasgow-based artist working across drawing and sculpture. Her practice explores how objects and materials shape our understanding of place, memory and bodily experience. Using found and natural materials, she considers the emotional and physical relationships we form with landscapes and the environments we inhabit. Collection and observation are central to her process, while making acts as a form of research. She is drawn to slow, repetitive methods that allow materials to reveal their histories and develop new meanings through transformation. Her work treats place as something fluid, shaped by memory and imagination rather than fixed as a record.
Zara’s work invites quiet reflection on how places become embedded in objects and in personal experience. It also considers how making can become a way of remembering, reconstructing and finding a sense of belonging.
@zaranicoleart | linktr.ee/zaranicoleart