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Expect them to err: an editorial
No full textThis is a story of digression. An excursion in loosening method.
In January I stood with one of this year’s Art Writing graduates and faced multiplied pangrams rendered in cyan, yellow and magenta across multiple media. This work was part of an ongoing exercise in improvisation and restraint, in the approximate senseless, and in discoveries of the associative profound. It is part of Aglaé D. Mouriaux’s graduate project and I turn to it here to demonstrate and reflect on the manner of Art Writing, the programme, its participants and of the genre or discipline. ‘Expect them to vowel,’ reads the third pangram.
‘To ryegrass, to bird funk, to jazz quartz.’1
Expect them to vowel.
I digress.
Expect them to verb. Let this be an excursion. Let the teller disappear into the act of telling. Expect them to err, to errancy, to assemble a programme of negations and reinventions. Expect them to imagine a genre of the yet to be.2
This is a story of digression. Where do we begin
Small Mercies
No full textSmall Mercies (2025) is the first solo show in England by Glasgow-based artist Matthew Arthur Williams. Spanning both galleries at Primary, the exhibition combines new printed media, sound and moving image.
In Gallery 1, textiles dyed with hibiscus dangle over windows, and black and white and colour darkroom prints resting on top of plinths take centre stage.
Permeating within Gallery 2 is an evolving and ‘trickling’ installation of moving image from Williams and others. Featuring the debut of a major new 16 mm film, Another Allegory (2025), he softly expands from his prior works, An Impossible Allegory (2019) and Soon Come (2022), to poetically bring together complex landscapes charged with labour, love and abandonment. This landscape is amplified in the film through the score Williams co-produced with violinist Blaize Henry, responding to the devastating archive of Julius Eastman.
These throughlines slowly weave with Williams’ long-time reflection on the extractive British post-industrial landscape. Small Mercies is not a love story but an intimate and entangled narration of material histories and presence that ‘speaks with its chest’.
Small Mercies is supported by the Elephant Trust
Communities of hope: design-led innovation for landscape decision making
Full text linkQuestions around future land-use and landscape decision-making pose challenges for communities with an increasing recognition that localised, contextual perspectives and creative modes of engagement have an important role to play. Focusing on landscape decision-making in the context of the Scottish Highlands & Islands, specifically the Northern and Western Isles, this article explores the potential of a design-led innovation approach. The methodological contribution connects design-led innovation and social design as modes of creative engagement that enable communities to play a key role in democratic deliberation. The Stravaig Symposium supported communities to engage in rich forms of dialogue and conversations for action across geographic, regional and local scales. Through the co-development of a conceptual Landscape Decision-Making Framework to navigate landscape decision-making the article advocates for the emergence of communities of hope, that is, communities capable of realising desirable environmental-cultural futures in relation to the complex systems that determine these futures
Final Report - Unpath'd Waters: Marine and Maritime Collections in the UK
Full text linkThe UK has a rich maritime heritage. It is impossible to tell the story of our islands without talking about our relationship with the sea. This maritime past is becoming increasingly important. People are more aware of our exploitation of the sea and topics such as colonialism, slavery and immigration.
Unpath’d Waters therefore sought to increase interaction with the UK’s maritime heritage by making it easier to research and easier for the public to discover and share stories in new ways. Despite its importance, it is not always easy to study our maritime heritage. Records, maps and objects are scattered across hundreds of different archives, museums, libraries and galleries.
A large part of our work has been to develop new ways of making information across these different collections easy to search and find.
This will help everyone – from researchers asking new questions to members of the public having direct access to records. We hope this will encourage more experts from all disciplines to use maritime collections in their own work. To make sure this project has a lasting impact, we have published all our methods, outputs, code and research so anyone can use it in their work and helpthe future of UK maritime heritage
Save Us or We Perish. We Are Subjects. Take Us Aboard.
Full text linkI was invited to submit a short, poetic piece to a special issue of 'Parallax' as an 'influential contemporary thinker'. The special edited issue focuses on the epistemological changes and challenges brought in by the covid epidemic and as such comes under the title 'Pandemonium'. The brief was as follows: Critical theorists have deconstructed knowledge production from many different perspectives. Directly or indirectly, they have addressed the intangible and material/political being of epistemology. If critique is always interested, embodied and emerges from particular contexts, given the current planetary predicament when knowing is changing its being, we want to ask, what sustains critique? How have the full stop of lockdowns around the globe and the certainty of ‘no planet b’, for example, challenged, puzzled, contradicted, deemed insignificant, and proved relevant, the premises that sustain our practices of knowing
PARliament Engagement: Applying Participatory Action Research & creative approaches to the committee scrutiny process within the Scottish Parliament
Full text linkThis report is the result of a SPICe Academic Fellowship in which Dr Cara Broadley, Research Fellow at the School of Innovation and Technology
at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), explored how to gather evidence in diverse and creative formats from participative and deliberative activities, and effectively build this into the body of evidence upon which Parliamentary Committees base their scrutiny and use to inform their recommendations to the Scottish Government. The research has been carried out in partnership with the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe), the Participation and Communities Team (PACT), the Parliament Communications Office (PCO), and Clerking Teams in the Committee Office. We would like to thank all participants from the Scottish Parliament for their time and contributions to the research. The Fellowship was supervised by Ailsa Burn-Murdoch (SPICe) and Laura Black (PACT), who provided guidance and oversight throughout the research process. This marks SPICe’s first fellowship in collaboration with GSA, highlighting new opportunities for design-led research to contribute to parliamentary scrutiny and evidence gathering beyond the social sciences. In addition to putting forward a set of co-design concepts for tools
to enhance committee scrutiny, the report sets out a roadmap and underpinning principles to disseminate and embed creative approaches in the work of the Scottish Parliament in session 7 (2026-2031)
Dusk to Nightfall (Hydra Island)
No full textThe works submitted to Art EDition on the theme of 'recovery' consider a condition of healing and the psychological foundation that underpins the consideration of recovery as both physical process and emotional journey. By juxtaposing the autobiographical diary entry and the photograph, the sequence proposes a path akin to exposure therapy, where the process of healing is interrupted by moments that challenge and reshape it. The initial coping strategies, in-and-of themselves benign methods that exhibit protective and stabilizing qualities, are gradually transformed by new insights and awareness. The photograph is considered as a place of recurring respite on emotional and visual sense
Is Agenda 2030 encouraging a benign Anthroposystem in Cities?
Full text linkThe UN’s 2030 Agenda Transforming our World was launched in 2015 and introduced the global Sustainable Development Goals and Targets. We have now begun the second half of the period towards the 2030 horizon.
This paper reviews research: at the international level for over 250 cities in the UNECE region for Habitat III and more recently in the document Place and Life A Regional Action Plan for 2030 (published 2022); at the sub-national level through the Scotland’s Urban AGE research 2011-2022 (for Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh) published in two volumes; and, at the metropolitan level for Glasgow, through the work of the independent Place Commission (published 2023).
This work, led by the author, analysed and reported on trends across the UNECE including the identification of the ‘supercity’ concept and the paradigm shift from the post-industrial to the proto-knowledge city. It tested these trends at the sub-national level in Scotland and looked at the performance of metropolitan Glasgow within the international context. The work, across international, (sub)national and city scales looked at the trends identified in the UNECE work; the growing importance of the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, and has concluded that, whereas progress has been made across all the SDGs and targets, national and local governments have not yet grasped the systems nature of the SDGs in terms of their vertical and horizontal integration. The systems nature of the SDGs is clear but subtle in the declaration at the beginning of Agenda 2030. The paper concludes by arguing that only by grasping a systems approach to this work can we hope to achieve the aims of Agenda 2030
The Caseroom: 60 Years of Letterpress etc.
No full textA publication produced to mark sixty years of The Caseroom as the dedicated Letterpress collection and workshop of The Glasgow School of Art. The book contains an introduction; inventory; photo-essay by Ross Finnie and an essay by Dr Frances Robertson based on interviews and archival research conducted by Edwin Pickstone and Dr Frances Robertson.
Introduction:
There is a poster on the wall of the Caseroom which reads ‘why would anyone do this?’. It was made by a student quoting a member of staff during an introductory class in Letterpress typography. It is a fair question but we had better start with an easier one: what is The Caseroom?
The Caseroom is The Glasgow School of Art’s collection of Letterpress Printing equipment. Letterpress is the method and technology of setting and printing text using small interchangeable metal letters called type. This method,
known as typography, began in Europe in the mid 15th Century, though it existed in East Asia centuries earlier with metal types used in what is now Korea at least seventy years before Gutenberg in Germany. Letterpress printing spread rapidly across Europe. It supplanted the slow, laborious work of the scribe writing out each word by hand, in the making of books to allow large-scale production, a shift which had an incalculable effect on our modern world. Remaining the dominant means of print well into the mid twentieth Century, Letterpress technology, it’s systems, typefaces, terminology and aesthetics are engrained in all of our digital technologies from word processing and design software to email and text messages. The name Caseroom itself reflects this. A printer’s term dating back to the 19th Century, the word Caseroom is taken from the drawers, known as cases, in which the impactful little letters are kept. The upper case, for capital letters above the lower case for, well, lowercase letters.
This publication has been produced to mark sixty years of The Caseroom at GSA alongside an exhibition and bold, beautiful billboards and posters situated across Glasgow, designed by Letterpress Technician Ruth Kirkby. The exhibition in the Reid building of GSA shows a wealth of works made in the facility, outputs of many different kinds made by many hands. But the intention of this book is to get a little deeper into the room itself. An essay by Dr Frances Robertson gives a historical account of the Caseroom, starting with its embryonic stages in the Department of Commercial Art, official formation in the 1960s and subsequent development in the Departments of Graphic Design, Visual Communication and today’s Communication Design. Pairing our research in the GSA archives and Special Collections with interviews with staff and former students, Frances’ writing acts as a key to understanding the place of print in an art school context. A photo-essay commissioned from our colleague, Photography Technician, Ross Finnie provides a record of the room as it stands, giving the reader a sense of the atmosphere conjured by a unique combination of technology and community. Lastly, for those with a beady eye there is an inventory of equipment which gives a little more detailed history. It also hints at the direction of future travel through recent acquisitions and the re-materialisation of digitally designed typefaces.
Back to that question: why would anyone do this, especially in a society no longer dependant on print media? The answer is tricky, mainly because the room provides as many answers as there are people using it. The material possibilities of ink on paper, alternative ways of making, communal space, play, research, discovery, the genesis technology of poster manufacture and a great cd collection all come to mind. Here, one can engage with both design and print as a combined iterative process, a craft of making with words, less fractured than the standard division of disciplines. It is a space for the reintroduction of crafts like bookbinding to design education but not regressing into the simulated safety of nostalgia. Instead, in feeling for new meaning and opportunities through use, the collection provides a link between aesthetics and technologies drawn out in black and white through centuries of typographic development. This window into the evolution of communication through print in turn presents a stepping off point for explorations into the merit of materiality amid the constant flux of the digital age. Questions of class and values arise through the breadth of printing culture and our location in Glasgow encourages focus on the friction between access to ‘fine print’ equipment and hands-on experience with our shared industrial visual culture. A key accelerant in the growth of universities at the turn of the 16th century, print is a meeting point of technological culture with all academic disciplines, of craft with industry, the private press with radical printers. The lore, practices and equipment of a centuries old trade rub up against the professional designer of the twentieth century. This potent cocktail of themes is seen in the work of students, staff and guests from The Caseroom’s establishment through to the present day.
So why would anybody do this: inhabit this room, collection, printshop, bindery, studio, archive, bridge to the written history of all subjects and portal to the innards of text technology? Well, it is what each of us makes of it and with all of these possibilities, maybe the enriching of our thinking, experience, studies, research and most importantly, our making is reason enough.
Edwin Pickstone
Lecturer, Researcher & Typography Technician
Communication Design/TSD
Design School
The Glasgow School of Ar
Museums as the Catalysts for a Democratic Revolution in Cultural Policy
Full text linkThe cultural sector should step back from the colonial model of culture and the arts in buildings and collections, which framed the creation of the dominant model of cultural institutions across the world. The authors propose that, as culture exists and evolves predominantly in society, democratic principles may provide a stronger foundation for future cultural development. Through a range of case studies and provocations from Latin America and Europe, this paper delineates the necessary debate on urgent challenges and opportunities for practitioners, researchers and communities in working together with indigenous and marginalised groups to extend democratic cultural practice in the creative and museum sectors. It also considers some of the barriers that may stand in the way of transformation to democratic legitimacy, alongside some recent international collaborations that provide examples of commitment to cultural change