Our Annual Summer Open Call
July 17th – August 8th 2025
Works available to buy from £45.
Please direct all sales enquiries to sixfootgallery@gmail.com.
JUDE ZAHID | JENNA MACLEAN | ABBY QUINN | RACHEL HUTCHISON | ALAN BRAIDWOOD | SARAH OATES | ZIQI CHEN | ALAN BRASH | CERYS SCOREY | XUANMING XIE | JUNO CLARKSON FIRTH | LOU GRAVES | CLOVER CHRISTOPHERSON | ERIK RICHARD H | RAB WILSON | CAROLINE WATSON | DAVID PATRICK | POLLY THELWALL | INGRID EVANS | PHILLIT PURRMAN | ANOUSHKA HAVINDEN | NATALIA BOCIAN | YONGTU HE | MALCOLM S DOBSON | LEENA KHARBANDA | INGRID CORSON | FRAN GORDON |
Our annual summer show, Something in the Mirage, features an incredible collection of works by twenty seven artists inspired by the dreamlike shimmering of summer sunshine, heat hazes, lingering afterimages, maybe the momentary glint of something half-seen and half-imagined in the dappled golden light.
Read more about our participating artists’ work and practice over on our blog.
Participating Artists
Jude Zahid
Jude is a multidisciplinary artist from Saudi Arabia, currently based in Glasgow, where they are now studying their Master’s at the Glasgow School of Art. Jude’s work explores how cultural metaphors and proverbs shape the way we see and understand the world. Especially interested in the strange, layered meanings behind everyday expressions and how they can be both poetic and a little absurd. Through collage and mixed media, the Artist likes to pull apart familiar images and symbols, then reassemble them in ways that invite people to see things differently.
@judebeetroot | judezahid.squarespace.com
Jenna Maclean
Jenna’s practice is rooted in abstract painting, where she explores themes of nostalgia and memory. The focus is primarily on Procedural memory, through gesture and the process of intuitive mark-making. Her process focuses on immediacy and embraces repetition. Jenna’s paintings allow for the viewer to enter a space of reminiscence. A place that’s not exactly there but fragments remain. This could be through colour choice, application methods or mark-making.
Abby Quinn
Abby is an illustrator and printmaker from Glasgow, Scotland. She creates personal, connection-based work inspired by nature, relationships, and pop culture. Everything Abby makes is a form of self-expression in some way: whether that be her love for the outdoors, a current binge watch, or her permanent state of nostalgia. Abby’s latest artistic obsession has been bookbinding and riso printing, which has led to some interesting exploration into both mediums. She is currently completing her degree in art & design at the University of the Highlands and Islands.
Rachel Hutchison
Rachel is a Scottish visual artist working primarily in painting and drawing. Her practice explores the emotional experience of change, grief, and longing through expressive, figurative imagery and theatrical motifs. Often drawing from personal life, particularly moments of rupture, her work transforms inner chaos into visual metaphor, giving physicality to the unseen. With a background in participatory art and community engagement, Rachel sees creativity not only as a tool for self-expression but as a way to connect with others. Her work aims to hold space for complex emotion while inviting others to reflect on their own. Through each of her projects, she advocates for art as a space of shared vulnerability and healing. Rachel is a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art (2022) and a British Council Venice Fellow (2024). She is currently developing her first solo exhibition, Have you seen my marbles? to debut in the winter. And founding a cross-border exchange initiative Auld Atelier, to connect artists across Scotland & continental Europe through civic town twinning.
@rachelhutchison.art | rachelhutchisonart
Alan Braidwood
Alan studied at Edinburgh College of Art and his work over time has developed to reflect his time spent outdoors observing landscape, nature and light. The work aims to bring an atmosphere which can be relaxing, joyful, challenging or reflective.
@alanbraidwoodpictures | alanbraidwood.co.uk
Sarah Oates
Sarah is a photographer based in Glasgow who works primarily with analogue processes, including 35mm film, medium format, and historic techniques such as wet plate collodion. Drawn to the slow, hands-on nature of film photography, Sarah explores the emotional tone of a scene through light, texture, and colour. Her images often feature reflections, soft focus, long exposures, and a sense of pause… inviting the viewer to look a little longer. She has exhibited in group shows across the UK and continues to build her practice through personal projects, zine contributions, and ongoing experimentation with traditional photographic methods.
@sarah_devstopfix | devstopfix.co.uk
Ziqi Chen
Ziqi is an artist based in Glasgow, currently a Master’s student at the Glasgow School of Art. Her artistic practice centres on juxtaposition, examining the visual convergence of organic forms and digital constructs. She explores the possibility of harmony between the natural and the synthetic, which reflects a broader inquiry into the evolving role of imagery within post-digital 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 investigates not only aesthetic relationships but also how we perceive and navigate images in a visually saturated environment of the post-digital era.
Alan Brash
Alan, a painter, utilises oils on canvas in his latest body of work. This biographical series serves as a reflection of his life, reflecting the learned behaviours acquired from living a double life in and out of the closet. Alan is currently pursuing a Master of Letters in Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art, with his degree show scheduled for September 2025. During this period, he has dedicated himself to researching gay representation in art and the portrayal of normal domestic life. Employing large-scale pieces, Alan explores his thoughts, memories, and seeks to alleviate the shame he has been carrying. In his later years, Alan celebrates love, happiness, and the visibility of the LGBTQ+ community within the ageing population.
@artzcollector | artzcollector.co.uk
Cerys Scorey
Cerys is an artist and illustrator from Cardiff, currently based in Edinburgh. Since graduating from Kingston School of Art with a BA in Illustration Animation in 2020, she has continued to use drawing as a tool to engage directly with her surroundings and to evoke a sense of place. Her practice stems from sketchbooks that she carries with her day-to-day. Integrating image-making into everything she does blurs the line between creative practice and everyday life, with a messy and instinctive approach. She enjoys the challenges that come with working on the go and welcomes the unexpected outcomes of a broken pen, a drop of rain or capturing a busy crowd. Recently, Cerys has been embracing small moments of calm, stillness and rest within her work.
@cerysscoreycelf | cerysscorey.co.uk
Xuanming Xie
Xuanming is from China and studied oil painting at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts for five years, earning both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Fine Art Practice at the Glasgow School of Art. His works deal with daily experiences, aiming to create an atmosphere where fantasy and reality intertwine. He seamlessly blends figurative painting with abstract elements, employing soft, delicate brushstrokes and bright, saturated colours – particularly blue – giving the works a dreamlike ambiance, and revealing the emotions and inner worlds of the characters in them while evoking associations with vitality and nature.
Juno Clarkson Firth
Juno is a twenty year old Glasgow based artist going into her fourth year of studying BA (Hons) Painting at Edinburgh College of Art. Her practice blends figurative oil painting and collage, often exploring themes of storytelling, symbolism, and mythology.
Lou Graves
Lou is a lifelong Glaswegian, 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 into 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?
Clover Christopherson
Clover is an emerging Scottish artist. Her practice revolves around interlaying textile, moving image, drawing, and printmaking to replicate her experiences in the ocean, all stemming from her passion for surfing in Scotland and beyond. She has always been fascinated by water, observing the way liquid moves, its spiralling patterns, and smooth surface. Clover’s recent work is a series of images taken on film representing women in Scottish seas, lakes, and rivers. These photographic works have been further developed as prints. They focus on hydrofeminism, a philosophical concept that views the body as primarily composed of water, aiming to impact the way viewers perceive themselves. This perspective within Christopherson’s practice opens conversations about how water affects us socially, environmentally, and politically. She explores how water flows through bodies and organisms, gestating and connecting us through life cycles, aiming to document the relationship between natural water sources and light, and in turn, how that permeates through the human body.
Erik Richard H
A traveler, trying something new with each project.
Rab Wilson
Rab is a landscape, abstract and portrait artist based in the Inverclyde village of Kilmacolm. His work is intuitive and physical, with textured layers that create a personal communication. He is fascinated with how the landscape reflects and exudes a synthesis of colours, tones, lines, marks, layers and abstract shapes. He does not intend to be representational but reimagines what he has viewed in the landscape with the intention of capturing an emotion or conveying a message. He uses a mixed-media approach using materials that include sand, paper, inks, acrylic and oil paint.
@artistrabwilson | robertwilsonartist.co.uk
Caroline Watson
Caroline is a Canadian Scot who lives and works in Paisley. She studied fine art at Fanshawe College in London Ontario then moving to Halifax graduating from the Nova Scotia College of Art Design which included a 4-week, self-directed residency in the Orkney Islands. She makes drawings and mixed material works on paper and has a developing interest in photography. Caroline is interested in light and space focussing on our relationship and attachment to place, creating work about connection and wonder. The artist has exhibited in Scotland and abroad including VAS and RGI. She is currently a Board member of Creative Renfrewshire and a member of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics and part of the editorial team for the on-line journal Stravaig.
@carolinewatsonpaisley | carolinewatsonart.com
David Patrick
David 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.
Polly Thelwall
Polly is a sculptor who also sketches, draws and paints. She grew up in Northern Ireland and graduated from Edinburgh College of art in 1993 with a degree in Sculpture. The study of the natural world underpins all her work. She gathers sketches, research, thoughts and feelings into a sculpture or drawing. This coalesces in her whole self and comes to the surface through the urge to make in both mind and body. Her study includes experience that cannot be seen with the eyes. Her interest extends both into the unconscious and into the layers beneath, of soil and rock, of water and sea. She uses small scale casting, modelling, stitching, papier mache, found objects and painting in her sculpture. Last year she completed her first completely biodegradable sculptures.
Ingrid Evans
Ingrid is a Melbourne-born, Glasgow-based artist working in oil painting and collage. Her practice explores fragility, identity, and the tension between vulnerability and concealment. Beginning with staged photographs, she digitally edits and layers them to create soft, dreamlike compositions. These form the foundation of her paintings, where she uses translucent oil layers, softened edges, and blended subdued tones to evoke a hallucinatory atmosphere. Through symbolism, she explores the complexity of feminine identity, making visible the internal strategies of resistance and emotional self-protection.
Ingrid’s imagery draws influence from artists like Francesca Woodman and Hannah Höch, whose surreal and fragmented approaches embrace ambiguity and the unseen as forms of resistance. Working within a feminist lineage, Ingrid uses recurring motifs to explore how women protect their inner lives in response to pressures for visibility and performance. Softness and partiality become deliberate choices and acts of agency.
Phillit Purrman
Phillit’s art is informed by her educational and professional background in environmental and social sciences and politics. She considers her artistic practice a mode of research. Originally a self-taught artist, over the past years Phillit has explored the field of contemporary environmentalist art in Scotland and pursued further art education, visiting artist residencies and workshops focused on in-the-field environmental artistic research such as those offered by the Sail Britain program or the Dark Mountain Project. In autumn 2025, Phillit will take part in the Museum of Loss and Renewal residency, run by Tracy McKenna in Italy.
Anoushka Havinden
Anoushka is an artist and writer. Her visual art focuses mostly on semi-abstract drawing and painting, and her poetry is widely published and has won several awards. She studied Drawing and Painting at Glasgow School of Art, and now lives in Argyll. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited throughout the UK and internationally, often as part of the Drawing Box group, a group for contemporary artists whose practise includes drawing. Her artwork ‘A River of Names’ is installed at Stockingfield Bridge in Glasgow. Her artworks are an interplay between observation, imagination, and abstraction. Often referencing the body/figures and sensed perception, she is fascinated by pictorial space and composition. Poetic and ambiguous, her work aims to create insight that reveals itself slowly, in layers. Her pictures are a reflection of how it feels to be alive in an ever-changing world.
@anoushkahavinden | ahavinden.co.uk
Natalia Bocian
Natalia is a Polish painter based in Glasgow, Scotland. She 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 focuses on the historical flood of 1997 that heavily affected the city she is from. The series is a personal retelling that draws directly from testimonies of my 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.
Yongtu He
In the works displayed in Something in the Mirage, Yongtu extends her exploration of nature’s dialogue with the body through the mythic lens of the Lotus-Eater, dissolving the self into a haze where sensory experience and childhood memory merge. Nature is never still; it weaves time and sensation with a silent language. The female body
moves through this web of threads.
Malcolm S Dobson
Malcolm originally trained and worked as a Librarian, but art and creating has always been a strong interest for him. He moved to Glasgow in 1996 and worked part time in ceramics until the Covid lockdowns meant he couldn’t access my studio. He became interested in cyanotypes as something he could do at home, and they have now developed into the main focus of his work, enjoying the simplicity of the process, and that using sunlight as a source of UV light gives it an unpredictability.
Leena Kharbanda
Leena started meditating a few years ago and after a profound meditation had an urge to paint on large scale canvas, something she had never attempted before and probably haven’t drawn since childhood. Ever since then she has enjoyed portraying layers upon layers of her inner psyche on canvas. For Leena it’ is’s a very intuitive, energetic and explorative process, and she never really knows how a painting will turn out; it just becomes. The initial layers of her works usually start with affirmations and strong positive words depending on her mood in that moment. She hopes the joy and energy behind her work can be seen, and is captured on canvas.
Ingrid Corson
Ingrid is an artist living in Glasgow. She makes drawings, embroideries and other textile works.
Fran Gordon