Works available to buy from £45.
Please direct all sales enquiries to sixfootgallery@gmail.com.
In honour of our dear friends, Sándor and Erika Nagy, half of our income from this year’s Winter Open Call will be donated to Glasgow’s Marie Curie Hospice in January.
JOSEPHINE BURDON | NIAMH McGOLDRICK-McGRATH | ALISON DAVIES | CHLOÉ GRIMES-BILTIS | AMY KELLY | ERIK RICHARD H | CLOVA GILLIES | RUARIDH LAW | MARNIE CLARK | ANNA LANG | LYDIA SYMENS | GK GARRAMONE | MAEVE DIXON | BIANCA PATANIA | PRESTON TAYLOR | LAURIE GRIBBEN | DEAN JONES | SHEILA MACNEILL | CIORSTAIDH RHIANNON | AMELIA MORGAN | SASHA SHALMINA | AGNES EPERJESY | EMMA SCARLETT | CLARISS TAN | REYNA BEATON | ALANA BRAND | LOU P | GEMMA CAMPBELL | JANE McINALLY | JENNY MASON | BEL PYE | JOSSEROSE ILUNGA | DAWN MARTIN | XENNA HOW
Our annual winter show, TRACES, features an outstanding selection of works by thirty four artists inspired by the marks that we as humans leave in our wake: footprints in the snow, the enduring warmth of an embrace, the hollow left in the seat of your favourite armchair. These works speak to what lingers between presence and absence, material and memory, the visible and the unseen.
Participating Artists
Josephine Burdon
Josie is a student and artist based in Glasgow, currently studying History of Art and Spanish at the University of Glasgow. Her practice explores a range of themes and media, with a particular focus on figure drawing and portraiture. Josie attends weekly life drawing sessions to refine her technical skills and enjoys the challenge of capturing the model’s energy, presence, and movement in the moment. While living in Spain, she began sketching outdoors and experimenting with mark-making using quill and ink. Since returning to Glasgow, she has continued to sketch regularly, seeking to capture the atmosphere and rhythm of the city’s diverse urban landscape. Recently, Josie illustrated a children’s book and has exhibited at SaltSpace Southside, The Alchemy Experiment, Hidden Lane Gallery Finnieston, MonoBar Café, and Glasgow Society. Her work was also featured in Curtains (2024), a publication by The Alchemy Experiment. Josie is always open to commissions and collaborations.
Niamh McGoldrick-McGrath
Niamh’s practice examines the relationship between people and land. It is driven by the belief that the land shapes us as much as we shape it, and that understanding this is essential to our growth. In a world where our connection to nature has been diminished, her work reflects a desire to rekindle with the natural world by fostering a deeper relationship with the land around us. Her work reflects her journey through landscapes, using a process of collection. Working with a mix environmentally reactive mediums, she immerses herself in land, allowing the nature of the area to influence the artwork. Through this land collaborative process, Niamh examines how the land we occupy, inhabit, and pass through in our lifetime plays a significant role in forming who are.
@niamh.mcg.art | niamhmcgart.nicepage.io
Alison Davies
Time gazing at a westerly, expansive view in southwest France provides Alison with an endless source of different atmospheric effects at twilight and dawn. Her artwork shows fascination with evening light, reflections on broad expanses of wet estuary, sand, and the sea. The idea of ‘traces’ impacted on her technique; building subtle textural layers with a palette knife and a minimum of brush work, previous layers of textures becoming traces upon which to work. These pieces therefore are both physically and metaphysically steeped in the sense of what has been as we consider the present. Alison shows and sells work regularly, having left her post as head of art secondary schools in Oxfordshire. She found teaching art to young people for twenty eight years a privilege, and incredibly rewarding. Now painting full time, she is constantly evolving. Alison graduated with a BA (hons) degree in Fine Art, and a PGCE in Art and Design, and has studios in Wales and The Charente, France.
@artoft_davies | alisondaviesfineart.com
Chloé Grimes-Biltis
Chloé is a final year Painting & Printmaking student at The Glasgow School of Art. Born in Glasgow and raised between Scotland and the United States, her work explores desire and memory, driven by the urge to recreate yearned objects and moments. Her hyper realistic paintings revisit scenes from her hometown in Florida, featuring swamps, beaches and the exotic animals which inhabit them. Her most recent work focuses on the beautiful yet dangerous allure of the Portuguese man-o-war, a creature she’s been fascinated by since childhood, looking at the fine line between desire and threat, temptation and restraint. She explores the power of attraction as she builds on our natural drive for desire through seductive imagery which verges on the surreal, making viewers crave to touch. This tangible experience allows her captivating creatures to become vessels of forbidden desire and immerses her audience in the natural spaces she creates.
Amy Kelly
As a third year Fine Art student at Edinburgh College of Art, Amy is trying to make the most of the facilities ECA provides and falling in love with printmaking has made this so easy to do. This project began exploring much more vivid colours than seen in these prints but after pulling on the expertise of the printmaking technicians and experimenting with transparent and opaque inks, her project has become much more calming and delicate. Fascinated with ghost prints and the never-ending change when printmaking, Amy is exploring how mark-making and layering with lino can vary with the slightest change. She is constantly inspired to make more prints, to try and explore as many outcomes as possible. Amy is currently still developing this project, making more lino prints, as well as branching into some silkscreen printing and textile printing.
Erik Richard H
A traveller, trying something new with each project.
@erikrichardh | emptysilentpolicecar.blogspot.com
Clova Gillies
Clova is a Scottish artist currently pursuing a Masters in Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art. Her practice centres on realism-based oil painting, through which she explores themes of female ancestry, memory, and self-identity. Gillies examines objects, both found and inherited, as quiet evidence of a woman’s presence, connecting these to the poetry of her grandmother, whose words, along with her vivid dreams, serve as key inspirations. By identifying spaces, objects, and memories, Gillies translates her connections to both living and past female relatives through the concepts of absence and presence, and how this defines her sense of self. Through painting her vast accumulation of visual material, her work acts as both preservation and inquiry, holding fragments of memory, while questioning how identity is shaped by those who came before.
Ruaridh Law
Ruaridh is a sound artist and musician based in North Ayrshire. Over 20+ years he has performed in groups, collaborations and solo across a wide range of festivals, arts spaces, venues and clubs as performer, improviser, DJ and artist. He has been commissioned for new work for various groups in the UK, Europe and the USA; these have ranged from intimate audio performance and gallery pieces, to large-scale outdoor pieces combining sound walks, improvised performance and experimental storytelling. His artistic focusses are on data-visualisation, human voices and their stories, unusual paradigms for performance and composing, and marrying abstraction to a beating human heart. These have manifested themselves in a tarot deck that generates music, sequential stories told over film and radio, video sculptures of clubs and island coastlines, and a walk through a forest and its imagined mythologies in the dead of night, as well as countless CD, DVD, vinyl and other music releases. He also runs several record labels and the No Roof Only Sky small press imprint, which publishes wee books with accompanying audio
Marnie Clark
Marnie describes her practice as an investigation. She attempts to preserve and replicate fleeting moments in time to analyse the ways in which we as individuals experience the world around us. Her work explores themes of preservation and communication. Marnie employs a broad range of media in her explorations into the many forms communication takes, including film, sculpture, print, the written word, and drawing. She views her role as an artist not as a creator but a translator, constantly reinterpreting pre-existing information until it becomes legible to the viewer. In recent work, Clark has been interrogating and exploring film, both as a way of presenting her written works and as a method of translating experience and subsequently generating empathy. She interprets the act of viewing a film as a ‘half experience” as two of the five senses are engaged, and has been exploring this quality in recent work.
@marnieclarkart | marnieclark.cargo.site
Anna Lang
Anna is often found crouched in the corner of the studio experimenting, surrounded by
apparent chaos of gleaned stuff. Industrially made or touched, environmental residue, decaying natural matter, fabric, plastics, paper, stone. With an urgent environmental imperative, Lang moves around Glasgow and beyond; spaces and accumulations are photographed, matter as muse, collected, treated with reverence and care if chosen for feel, texture, bodily folds, character, story. Otherwise recycled. Coupled with a ready bank of human experience considering missing, absence, ageing and freedom they bring to life their own substitutions. A spontaneous practice, emotion is processed through process and materials in fearless bursts of intense intuitive activity, the result constantly becoming. Using found materials where possible, through sculptural assembly, lithography and painting liquid flows, human touch employed, drawing humans, from life, film, imagination deep looking and translation of inside and out. Truth not necessarily beauty is what matters.
Lydia Symens
Lydia is a hobby photographer using film to capture the ephemeral nature of everyday living. She uses film as a medium to slow down in a world where everything can now be obtained instantly. While her work in the exhibition was shot on a Canon AE-1 SLR, she carries a dumpster-rescued 35mm point and shoot around every day, often only going through a roll of film every few months. The rise of social media has bred a curatorial approach to the everyday. 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.
GK Garramone
GK is an early career artist who recently graduated with a Masters in Contemporary Art Theory from the University of Edinburgh. Her practice works with the photographic image to create narrative expressionistic pieces centred around an individual sense of suffering and realisation. She is interested in the cycles of nature and in exploring human intimacy in landscapes beyond social restraints. It is the honest, almost primal feelings of terror and love which occupy GK’s imagery and forms; her self realisation of what it means to suffer in girlhood.
Maeve Dixon
Maeve enjoys working in printmaking and painting. She works predominantly in monoprinting, a process similar to tracing, which was a method used in the offices of many industries including architecture and engineering. Her subject matter at present is landscapes and buildings that have an almost hidden history to them, sometimes she has a personal connection to the sites. She is interested in the fragility of specific sites and the traces left behind by industry and people. She also wishes to celebrate buildings that maybe have had the beauty of their architecture overlooked. Buildings hold stories and sometimes traces of those stories are evident in the paintwork and the stonework of the building. People are the holders of the stories too. Some we may get to know and some are hidden.
@dixonmaeve | maevedixon.format.com
Bianca Patania
Bianca 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, she is currently undertaking an MFA at the same institution. Her practice investigates the act of looking and the subtle exchange between observer and observed, exploring how quiet moments of observation create fragile intimacies that are at once tender and voyeuristic. Windows and mirrors recur in her work: windows mark thresholds between private and public space, simultaneously distancing and connecting, while the mirror directs the gaze inward, prompting self-observation and performance. These ideas emerge from everyday encounters: watching people pass while working in a restaurant or documenting friends and family in unguarded moments, where she slips briefly into another’s narrative. Layering and repetition structure her work, accumulating marks, gestures, and images to evoke memory, presence, absence and the emotional traces that linger between seeing and being seen.
Preston Taylor
Preston is an artist, writer, and musician based in Edinburgh, from South Carolina (USA), currently in the Masters of Contemporary Art Theory program at University of Edinburgh. His work spans performance, painting, film, and sound to explore and unravel conditions of artistic practice, the shifting relationship between performativeness and honesty, and personal/collective memory.
@gene.tayl0r | prestongenetaylor.com
Laurie Gribben
Laurie is an artist working in Glasgow, studying painting and printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art. Her process involves drawing on a collection of both first-hand and found archival photographs. Through drawing and painting, she takes on the role of the storyteller, translating from journal entries of sensations, emotions, and dreams. Influenced by the all-consuming nature of grief, her work contemplates the space between waking reality, and realms of dreams, and between flesh and spirit.
Dean Jones
Dean is a Masters student at Glasgow School of Art, whose practice merges painting with traditional textile processes. His work examines the experience of queer identity through the lens of erotic art, exploring how intimacy, desire and emotion can be translated into the visual form. His work is less about queer sexual acts, but rather the emotional and sensory charge of desire. Working with domestic materials such as tablecloths, doilies and bedsheets, his work reframes softness, decoration and care as politically intense gestures, queering the boundaries between intimacy and display. Through the intersection of fine art and craft, his practice reclaims materials historically coded as feminine and repositions them as a site of resistance, pleasure and power.
Sheila MacNeill
Sheila is an artist living and working in Glasgow. Here work is primarily concerned with exploring notions of place and belonging and the evolving relationships between humans and our natural environment in both urban and rural environments. In a world saturated by instant imagery where everyone can find an image of anything or anywhere almost instantly, Sheila’s work is a deliberate slowing down and seeking out of the parts of an environment that evoke a sense of place. Sheila is fascinated by the intersections between people and nature in planned and re-wilded spaces. Using a range of techniques including painting, printing and photography, her work is an interpretation of these intersections.
@sheilmcn | howsheilasees.co.uk
Ciorstaidh Rhiannon
Ciorstaidh is a visual artist from the Highlands of Scotland primarily working within the disciplines of analogue photography, printmaking, and video. Drawing inspiration from surrealist cinema and Scottish folklore, her auto-fictional approach utilises the expansive nature of the medium of film; from an investigatory tool to its ability to fabricate narratives, piecing together scenes from both memory and constructed realities. Inviting you to explore landscapes which shift from familiarity to ambiguity and contemplate the undefined place between the subconscious mind and somatic memory.
Amelia Morgan
Amelia is a painter and printmaker based in Glasgow, whose work explores the natural world, and our ways of relating to the variety of ecosystems in Scotland. Wetlands, bogs and temperate rainforests, historically targeted for their barriers to cultivation, appear in her work through a psychedelic lens that sees a rural world far stranger and more diverse than she thought possible, having grown up in London. Wild swimming is a recurrent theme, and the fluid mark making and colours in these paintings are reminiscent of Munch, who’s emotional work of introspective figures by bodies of water she feels a deep connection to.
Sasha Shalmina
Representational art, like music with lyrics, carries a finite range of meaning.
Abstract art, however, resembles music without words, and its interpretation can
change over time, evolving with the viewer’s state of mind. Sasha’s work centres on painting the unseen: the shifting landscapes of emotions, memories, moods, thoughts, and atmospheres. Her practice prioritises feeling over representation, creating spaces where viewers can project their own inner worlds. Each painting begins with a powerful emotion sparked by a dream, a memory, a piece of music, or a realisation reached through meditation. She allows the experience to take hold and guide the early stages, working intuitively as the image emerges from her subconscious. Once the emotional intensity settles, she returns to the canvas with clarity and intention, refining the work through a more rational lens.
@sasha_shalmina | sashashalmina.com
Agnes Eperjesy
Creating different narratives and new angles to familiar scenes is what best describes Agnes’s work. Hungarian-born Scotland based artist with a practice rooted in traditional and experimental photography and collage. Agnes is investigating the concepts of photography and its potential to create space for reflection. Using a humanist lens she examines the human condition and our quest for self-discovery.
Emma Scarlett
Emma is a Scottish contemporary artist based in Glasgow and in her final year of study at The Glasgow School of Art. Through printmaking, painting, sculpture and installation Emma explores themes of connection and effect between domestic spaces and the natural world, whilst considering a feminist narrative. In examining texture, colour, form and materiality Emma creates abstract compositions in a variety of media, reminiscent of the familiar whilst maintaining a sense of ambiguity. Within printmaking Emma enjoys dissecting and reassembling imagery, manipulating tone through shadow and colour to create moments of introspection.
Clariss Tan
Clariss is a Singaporean artist whose practice spans painting and printmaking, guided by an ongoing investigation into urbanisation, femininity, and unseen emotional landscapes that shape contemporary life. Currently based in Scotland, she is pursuing her studies at the Glasgow School of Art, where her work continues to develop alongside new cultural and visual environments. Clariss’s practice is deeply rooted in layering, both conceptually and materially. Her works mirror the layered reality of life in modern cities where natural and man-made elements constantly overlap. These layers often evoke a sense of quiet tension, inviting viewers to linger on what usually goes unnoticed or unspoken. Driven by a commitment to open conversation, Clariss approaches her artmaking as a way to confront cultural silences and challenge the boundaries of what is considered appropriate to express. She aims to transform private, internal sensations into shared, public encounters, fostering empathy through their rawness and honesty.
Reyna Beaton
Reyna is a mixed media artist currently studying her final year of her honours degree in Design Practice at city of Glasgow college. Reyna has always been interested in the complexities of childhood and how our life experiences can impact a developing brain. Reynas work is usually introspective with a focus on family matters and conflicts; mostly working in pencils and graphite while occasionally combining this with screen printing, Reyna conveys this in both 2D and 3D form.
Alana Brand
Alana is a multidisciplinary artist based in Fife. Working between sculpture and printmaking, she aims to explore and encourage the contemplation of the complex relationship between humankind and nature, how both forms of life coexist and clash in a world threatened by climate change. Primarily working across ceramics and screen printing, materiality is an integral part of the work Alana makes. Material-led exploration involving different clays, papers, inks and ceramic glazes, Alana creates a material language that aims to communicate with the viewer both the physical marks we leave on the environment and the reality of the human impact on the planet. Forms, Patterns and shapes taken from nature and urban environments inform the structure and shape of the work- coral reefs, lichen, topography, architecture and scientific data are meshed together to create complex forms and layers that interact with one another.
@artisticallyalana | bit.ly/AlanaBrand
Lou Palmer
Lou is a student in her final year of Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art. Her practice revolves around the complex relationship between human and more-than-human entities. Specifically, she is interested in the idea – based in posthumanist theory, ecology, animal rights perspectives and Indigenous wisdom – that human life is not the earth’s most valuable asset but rather that all life is important and intertwined. With this sentiment in mind, her work explores the parallels and intersections between private life and vast global consequence, interrogating boundaries and illustrating a lack of them. Vaguely figurative bodies and ambiguous organic patterns echoing formations seen in plant matter, topography, water, skin, fungi and satellite images are collapsed into one layered surface through the use of paper cutting, wood engraving and drawing. Negative space suggests absence, ghosts, shadows and traces, all of which dance around the themes of extinction and mortality.
Gemma Campbell
Gemma creates drawings, prints, and installations to explore what it means to be vulnerable and strong at the same time. Her work brings together images of birds, bodies, and handwriting as motifs, giving the artist a language to describe things that are hard to put into words alone: memories, feelings, and experiences. Her methods fluctuate from expressive mark making to the quiet solitude of writing and documenting. She communicates with all parts of her process, even what feels private or imperfect, to embrace vulnerability and all sides of being human. Lists, personal archives, and process materials, shape her works reflecting on the dualities of everyday life; pain and joy, fatigue and energy, awkwardness and grace. Through works rooted in the experience of being a woman with a chronic illness and trauma, the artist creates space for honesty about struggle and strength, and the ways they often exist together.
@gemmacampbellart | gemmacampbell.com
Jane McInally
Jane is a Glasgow- based artist whose work spans painting, collage, sculpture, installation, moving-image, public art, and events. Her personal practice goes hand-in-hand with commissioned work, and socially-engaged projects. Her creative process often involves elements of chance and playful observations of the absurdities and everydayness of life, touching on notions of reality, memory and imagination.
@janemcinallyartist | facebook.com/janemcinallyartist
Jenny Mason
Jenny works with paint, textiles, text, and found objects in her practice. She is based in Edinburgh but spends as much time as possible immersed in wilder landscapes, running or sea swimming. Through these physical activities she gains a calmness and clarity. For her, immersion in the landscape frees the mind up; she can let thoughts come up, without effort, often writing notes in response to a swim or on completion of a run. She made a series of works during 2025 that were made in response to various lakes, places, swims, and runs. Diptychs combining landscape paintings with embroidered text from her notes, sharing with the viewer both a sense of place, and of the feelings she had when immersed in it.
@jennymason_artist | jennymason.co.uk
Bel Pye
Bel came to their visual arts practice through the Project Ability studios at Trongate 103. Recently they have completed a residency with the SaltSpace Collective as well as completing their first solo show hosted through the Project Ability gallery as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival. They enjoy working with ink on paper, choosing to pour the ink directly onto the surface and move it around indirectly either through tipping the paper itself or blowing air at the wet ink. This process forces them to surrender control over to the marks that emerge, remaining present with what’s emerging. They say that their practice is all about finding interesting ways to let the accidents happen.
Josserose Ilunga
Josserose’s practice is a process of misremembering her observations by distorting the
images, relying on chance and intuition to find a new direction. She deceives the audience
into questioning the materials, expressing a dynamic dialogue of reality and imagination.
She is drawn to the ambiguity of the marks, their complete erasure, and the emergence of
two. Works constantly feed off from each other, by revisiting different motifs, translating these into different methods and gestures. Traces of reflections through the horizontal lines or repeated motifs are cohesive elements in her practice. The artist explores how folds of paper create divides, crossing borders from one imagination to the next. She describes feeling drawn to strange shapes, imagining looking through a viewfinder to find the smaller
pictures inside the bigger piece. She believes the more intuitive her work is, the more
exciting interference appears.
Dawn Martin
Dawn is a fourth-year student at the Glasgow School of Art and is a multimedia artist specialising in ceramics. Her sculptures adapt elements of Scottish history and folklore to explore themes of personal identity. Martin is particularly interested in the local landscape and the mysteries of the Picts, one of Scotland’s earliest settlers, and she reimagines the legacy they left behind. Her inspiration is drawn from stone carvings and Scottish folklore, as well as from artefacts influenced by animals central to their religion. Martin’s mark-making is an integral part of her sculptures, leaving traces that connect history to the present. By using research and subconscious imagery, she makes crucial decisions about composition and colour, allowing her to deconstruct elements of the landscape into reimagined narratives.
Xenna How
Xenna How (How Xuan Ting) is a Singaporean artist currently studying in Glasgow. Her practice is grounded in research and the study of narratives, materials and the complex relationships between humans, objects and history. Xenna’s practice increasingly extends into language. She approaches language as both a medium and material. Currently, she is exploring how text can operate spatially, performatively, or as an object in itself. This secondary practice deepens her interest in narrative construction, offering another site which questions how stories are formed, held and communicated. Xenna’s work has been presented in a range of exhibitions and projects across Scotland and Singapore. Recent highlights include a residency with Isle of Cumbrae Studio & Gallery (2025), and a publication released with AyeAye Books in 2024. Prior to her move to Glasgow, she exhibited with the Singapore Airlines x TAFF’s Be the Change Exhibition (2022), and the Sculpture Society Singapore’s ReThinking Sculpture Exhibition (2021).