Our Annual Autumn Open Call
Tuesday 1st October – Friday 16th October 2026
Works available to buy from £50.
Please direct all sales enquiries to sixfootgallery@gmail.com.
Opening night Thursday 1st October 7pm
ELIZABETH RIDDELL | IONA NAVARRO McINTOSH | MONICA MARSHALL | JONI BARRET | MIMI BUTLER | SKYE FORSYTH | CALLUM BEATTIE | JOSS DINSMOR | KLAUS PINTER | JANE McINALLY | ZAMAN HAZIR + RACHEL BLANE | JENNI SHEWARD | GILL McBRIER | LOU GRAVES | GARROW WILSON | TORI BISHOP | PAGAN McKENZIE | LINDSAY O’BRIEN | FIONA BEVERIDGE | NATALIA BABYCH | MELISSA HUGO | HENRI K. REID | SHONA McDERMOTT | YING ZHU | RIEL NOIR | TESSIE HUMBLE | CARRIE GRAINGER | JACK GIBSON | HANNAH RADCLIFFE | AIDEN MILLIGAN | SARA JANE McKENZIE | REBECCA SCOTT | GUNILLA KRAL-DROFENIK
For this seasonal open call we’re going back to our roots, exploring the strange and magical stories of Scottish Folklore, the ones passed down for generations and still powerful enough to be told again: visions of traditional tales, fear, myth, and magic; Cutty Sarks, brownies, spirits, and bogles, chapman billies and drouthy neebors; selkies, banshees, kelpies, and cailleachs; uncanny landscapes, stone circles, rocks, and rivers; hagstones, talismans, rowan, and heather.
Participating Artists
Elizabeth Riddell
Elizabeth’s practice spans sculpture, installation, and digital media. Drawing upon personal experience and social observation, her work explores the intersections of class, place, memory, and everyday life. Rooted in Glasgow and its histories, she examines how individual narratives are shaped by broader social and cultural forces. Her practice is informed by an interest in the overlooked and familiar, often focusing on domestic environments, communal spaces, and the rituals of daily existence.
Iona Navarro McIntosh
Iona is a second year Glasgow University zoology student and emerging artist dedicated to the medium of oil paint. Originally from Belfast, Ireland, though connected with Scotland and Catalonia through her parents, Iona is deeply inspired by how the natural world, mythology and legend, and cultural tradition roots people to the land, even when disconnected physically. Although not currently an art student, art has been a lifelong passion for Iona and a daily compulsion. She is often drawn to compositions featuring a juxtaposition of fine detail, pattern and large spaces of flat vibrant colour usually applied with a flat brush, as well as memorable and balanced silhouettes intended to always keep the viewer’s eye busy with the next noticed feature. It’s not uncommon to find living creatures represented in Iona’s work as her interest in nature spreads beyond her degree, birds dominate her pieces as a favourite in the menagerie.
Monica Marshall
Monica is a multidisciplinary artist focusing on the grotesque and challenging aspects of society, politics and her personal experiences. She is an intense and prolific creator, influenced by Expressionism, and aims for their work to create a visceral yet entertained reaction. Although much of Monica’s work is directly influenced by their life – particularly navigating the world as an autistic individual – the symbolism allows the meaning to be open to interpretation. She is currently based in Glasgow, holds a Master of Letters in Fine Art Practice specialising in Print Media, and is in the process of achieving qualified teacher status.
Joni Barrett
Joni is currently in her fourth year of studying Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art. She has a love of Scottish history and folklore which lead to an obsession with all things pagan, witchcraft and ritual. Her paintings often portray themes of community and togetherness through ritualistic, storytelling imagery. Many of her works are inspired by her participation in the Beltane Fire Festival and the community she has found from performing in it over the last few years. Most of her recent paintings contain fiery reds and oranges influenced by the festival.
Mimi Butler
Mimi is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brighton, Sussex. Her fields of interests are ancient landscapes, mythical beasts, folk and country lore, she is currently looking at the relationships of the land with historic uses through stories.. She has layered the fabric to create a feeling of time passing on the telling of the folktale.
Skye Forsyth
Skye is a North Ayrshire based artist who works with mixed media, from oil paints to sculpture with fabrics. She is currently enrolled in the sculpture & environmental art course in GSA and loves to take past emotional, meaningful memories and twist them into art. With themes of childhood and remembrance, she challenges the audience to think about memories and forgotten traditions that have faded in time.
Callum Beattie
Callum is an emerging artist based in Paisley. He focuses on mundane scenes in contrasting colours and resulting greys as well as expressive portraits. The resultant images usually end up moody and distorted with thick patches of paint in light or dark areas. He has no formal training in art.
Joss Dinsmor
Rabbitsoup is a mixed media artist working across soft sculpture, music and interactive art, using sustainable and recycled materials. Her work explores themes of mixed-race identity, nostalgia and loneliness.
Klaus Pinter
*1968
Jane McInally
Jane is a visual artist whose work spans painting, sculpture, collage, installation,
moving-image, public artworks, and events. Her personal practice goes hand-in-hand
with commissioned work and socially-engaged projects and collaborations.
Her creative process often involves elements of chance and playful observations of the
absurdities and everydayness of life, touching on questions of reality, memory and
imagination.
Zaman Hazir and Rachel Blane
Rachel, at nine years of age, is an artist in the making. She is an instinctual creator who is interested in everything from pottery, painting, and sculpture, to illustration, architecture, and interior design. She will be starting her second GSA Open Studio-Young Creatives programme this October to further develop her artistic skills and learn more about art. She lives in Glasgow and loves chocolate.
Zaman Hazir is a Glasgow-based woodworker and Rachel’s Papa.
Jenni Sheward
Jenni is a visual artist and illustrator who creates work influenced by all things Scottish. This includes local folklore and mythology, history, and her personal connection growing up and living here. She enjoys the story telling aspect of illustration, how she can encourage curiosity in her audience with the subjects she chooses to portray. She wishes to spark an excitement in others for folklore, history and knowledge that she herself holds. As an illustrator, she also creates a variety of design work including murals, package design, motifs, and characters to add visual interest to every project.
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. Swapping the countryside for the city, her appreciation of the solitude of the natural landscape are an enduring focus in her work. In 2024 Gill left teaching to focus full-time on her own artwork. She exhibits regularly. In her most recent collection, Gill explores mark-making and colour through watercolour painting, extending her established practice of combining implied and physical textures. Adding ornamentation and a sense of the precious she incorporates beading and metallics to pieces to celebrate the delicate beauty of nature. Threads and needles are used as drawing tools and hark back to her days of warp and weft at the tapestry loom and serve as a metaphor for the emotional ties she has with the landscape.
Lou Graves
Lou 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 – insigts 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?
Garrow Wilson
Garrow is an artist based on the Isle of Skye. His practice explores the folklore, local culture, people, and history of the Highlands and Western Isles. He draws on the work of folklorists and illustrates their findings, most of which were collected orally over generations. His work engages with place and obscured and historically threatened stories, attempting to draw links between narrative neighbours and locations so the viewer can fill in the gaps. His work aims to encourage learning about the history of those who live in the landscapes that gave birth to these tales.
Tori Bishop
Tori is a Fife-based artist, interested in the remnants of folklore and the ways stories evolve and mutate through retelling over time. Myths are echoes of the past; a way of making sense of the things we cannot fully understand. Tori’s work questions what might be lost through our desire to explain, empirically and physically, that which our ancestors accepted as otherworldly. A graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, Tori works across the mediums of sculpture, painting and mixed media textiles. She is drawn to the abstraction of natural forms, creating objects and images that appear familiar yet remain mysterious. They exist somewhere between the known and the imagined: otherworldly, ethereal, and suggestive of life forms from the deep past, or perhaps of forms yet to evolve. Through this ambiguity, her work explores the space between what we know, what we believe, and what we can allow ourselves to imagine.
Pagan McKenzie
Pagan is a Scottish interdisciplinary, abstract, conceptual sculptor and installation artist from Glasgow, Scotland. She is a recent Sculpture MA graduate from the Royal College of Art London, with an Undergraduate degree in Sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art. Being of both Scottish and Irish descent, Pagan is interested in reconnecting with her diasporic Celtic heritage through her art, addressing this in a modern context and creating works in response. She longs to connect with the ancient symbols, traditions, folklore and plant uses of these forgotten cultures and is incorporating/reimagining aspects of these practices into her own works. Her practice responds to the fragmentation/displacement of Celtic culture/identity in the UK today, referencing the violent undercurrent of sectarianism which she experienced growing up in Glasgow. She references the resurgence of Gaelic language and the cross-community aspect of Scottish/Irish rave culture. She addresses these discourses through conceptual and borderline-surrealist aestheticism.
Lindsay O’Brien
Lindsay is a Glasgow-based Canadian artist . Her work primarily focuses on the mundane events and everyday scenarios that inform most of our lives. She often imbues her work with humour and the absurd and enjoys working in variety of media.
Natalia Babych
Natalia is a ceramic artist working primarily with porcelain. Originally from Ukraine, Natalia relocated to Edinburgh in 2022 and is rebuilding her creative practice within the Scottish context. Her work explores the balance between fragility and strength, often inspired by natural forms such as leaves, flowers, stones, and organic textures. She is drawn to how porcelain changes through fire, pressure, and time, and how something delicate can become strong and lasting. Themes of displacement, repair, vulnerability, and connection run through much of her work. She often combines porcelain with natural or found elements, allowing materials to speak to one another, letting the contrast in textures, colours, and meanings create a context. She is particularly drawn to imperfection, traces of making, where breaks and joins become part of the story rather than something to hide. Natalia creates both functional and sculptural pieces and is a resident artist at Leith Makers studios, where she continues to develop her practice while building strong connections within the local creative community.
Melissa Hugo
With work focusing on human connection and disconnection, unreality and dreamlike states, Melissa is a portrait painter who studied classical oils and charcoals in Florence and Salisbury. Taking inspiration from the magical held within the mundane, her use of disjointed, often unlifelike colours and the sfumato offered by oils mirrors the blurring of memory and reality. Currently based in Edinburgh, Melissa has exhibited previously with the Society of Women Artists in London, the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, and the Scottish Portrait Awards, winning their Members’ Choice prize in 2022. She is shortly to show with them again at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Henri K. Reid
Henri is a non-binary mixed-media illustrator based in the West Lothian area, graduating from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. They specialise in exploring the concept of the ‘creature’, and how it has manifested itself in thousands of years of human expression. They use the unpredictability of ink to relinquish perfectionism, creating fine linework which is then destroyed using water. In an age where artwork itself is losing its claim on reality, the humanity of storytelling and the creatures that come with it create their own form through this destruction. Henri’s other means of artistic expression include zine-making, print-making, and writing for comics and short stories.
Shona McDermott
Shona is a Glasgow-based photographic artist, originally from the highlands. Inspired by folklore and relics of the past, her work aims to create a sense of myth, magic and an air of the divine. Often using photography as a narrative tool and experimenting with ways to present it beyond the usual expectation of what a photographic work can be. Having focused particularly on water-based myths within Scottish or Celtic narrative folklore, she has realised iterations of this theme in many different mediums: digital photography, illustration, book-making, moving image. More recently branching out to Scottish landscapes and looking more closely at the natural elements that most likely inspired these tales.
Ying Zhu
Ying Zhu is a Chinese artist residing in Glasgow. She studied printmaking at the Hubei Academy of Fine Arts and later illustration at the Glasgow School of Art. She creates works across printmaking, digital painting, picture books, handmade books, and mixed media. Her work ranges from complex large-scale narratives to pieces rooted in personal experiences. She transforms ineffable emotions and psychological experiences into tangible images, focusing on often-overlooked or difficult-to-discuss topics such as mental health, compulsive behaviours, pain, aging, and sexuality. She also draws inspiration from different cultures, myths, and folk tales, retelling these stories from a contemporary perspective. As an early-career artist, she hopes to share her work with a wider audience and gradually build new connections and support. In 2026, she received the Applied Arts Young Blood Illustration Award and was selected for the RE International Original Print Exhibition in London.
Riel Noir
Riel is a Glasgow-based artist whose process-led conceptual practice explores relationships between history, place, material and circumstance. Working across photography, textile weaving, painting, printmaking and artists’ books, she allows material, process and enquiry to shape the development and form of each work. Riel graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 1998 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Photography. Her work has been exhibited across the UK, Copenhagen, and India, including with the Scottish Society of Artists at the Royal Scottish Academy, the Academy of Fine Arts, Kolkata, and Urmila Art Gallery, Ahmedabad. Her residency experience spans Scotland and India, with her relationship to India beginning through a residency in Tamil Nadu in 2017 and continuing through further residencies, exhibitions, workshops, and invited talks. Most recently, she undertook a three-month studio programme at Kanoria Centre for Arts, Ahmedabad.
Tessie Humble
Tessie is from the Scottish borders and her creative connection is through the lore and spirits of the Lothians and the Borders. She reaches into this through walking the land and sleeping in it; learning about the myths and tales; and seeing what emerges when she goes out into the hills . Tessie’s art looks to weave back intimacy and belonging with where we are from. Tessie works in climate change and social justice and sees this work as entangled to our stories of where we are from and our intimate relationship with the land and everything that comes before and after us.
Carrie Grainger
Grainger’s practice explores cultural superstitions, folklore and spectral traces through a range of forms, including mask-making, sculpture, drawing and film. Drawing from historical events, myths and narratives rooted in landscape, her work engages with themes of mysticism, concealed societies and animism. Grainger is particularly interested in the idea that landscapes and dwellings can become haunted by the remnants of their past—through hearsay, memory and lived experience. Her work considers how these intangible traces might be uncovered, explored and illuminated through creative practice. Central to her work is the concept of place as a vessel: a site that holds layers of histories, stories and experiences, which can be unearthed and brought into focus through artistic practice.
Jack Gibson
Jack Gibson is a Scottish illustrator, graphic designer and animator based in Edinburgh.
His work is colourful, bold and expressive often reflecting aspects of Scottish culture,
nature and history in a humorous and playful style. Jack works across a range of
mediums including lino prints, risograph prints, digital and video.
Hannah Radcliffe
Hannah is a Manx illustrator living in Glasgow; creating paintings, drawings and street art. She is inspired by nature and folklore, my practice focuses on analogue techniques, playful character design and expressive lines.
Aiden Milligan
Aiden is a Scottish contemporary artist known for his vibrant and expressive work that often explores themes of identity, culture, and the natural world. Milligan’s paintings frequently depict natural landscapes, flora, and fauna, while also delving into themes of cultural heritage and the human experience, using naïve forms and symbols to convey complex narratives. In recent years, Aiden has gained recognition with exhibitions in various galleries and art spaces both locally and internationally. His work ultimately seeks to engage viewers in a dialogue about the intersections of nature, culture, and identity, and to consider the connections between the self and the environment. At their core, his paintings are a way of sharing stories and anecdotes that celebrate the strangeness of life, a form of storytelling that can be traced back to the throwaway conversations that happen in small town life where gossip is taken as gospel.
aidenmilligan.com | @aiden_milligan
Sara Jane McIntosh
Sara Jane is a multidisciplinary artist and arts educator, originally from Canada, working and living in Glasgow. With a professional background in creating stop motion animation puppets for the film industry, she has also worked in theatre and television, creating sets and costumes in Toronto for many years. For the past 10 years, Sara Jane has focused on integrating pottery, paper cutting and weaving, photography, printmaking and textiles into her teaching and artistic practice. Her current work focuses on memory, folklore and exploring the application of a variety of traditional craft skills.
Rebecca Scott
Rebecca is an Ayrshire based artist and practitioner. Over the past three years, she has developed Exploring Ayrshire, a personal project combining photography of historically significant places with artwork inspired by the region’s folklore. The collection has been exhibited in several galleries in Ayrshire and Glasgow, and brought together as a digital archive. Rebecca works primarily in mixed media, incorporating experimental processes, particularly blind drawing. Mythological Scottish female archetypes and real women from the past feature prominently in her work. Through these subjects, Rebecca explores society’s treatment of women and invites reflection on perceptions of powerful older women. She is inspired by the fantastical tales of Scottish folklore and their enduring messages, many of which remain relevant today. Alongside her artistic practice, Rebecca works with community groups as both a coordinator and tutor.
Gunilla Kral-Drofenik
Gunilla studied painting and graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She also studied German Philology and wrote her thesis about (un)fair plays in heroic poetry. As a kid she was friends with the neighbour’s goats and sheep, but the first pets at home were Indian stick insects so she fell in love with all the creepy crawlies. Animals of all kinds can be found in her art. Her scratchboard illustrations allow the viewer to dwell on fine details such as fur and delicate flower petals. Another important source of inspiration for Gunila are mythologies, folk tales, and epic poetry, and her favourite books include Ovid’s Metamorphoses and collections of fairy tales from all over the world. She generally feels drawn to spooky tales of shapeshifters, ghosts and household appliances that come alive after a hundred years of neglect.