The Grief Marks show, on Easter weekend, 2026, at Salt Space gallery, Glasgow, really happened. I know it did because I was there and I did it!
I didn’t really know what was going to happen until I was in the space. I had mapped out the journey of the paintings, from the first black and white BONFIRES AND BONES that started the whole thing – the instructions I received from the first throes of grief – to the collection of other black ink lines on paper that I made down on my knees on the floor because there was literally nothing else I could do. I collected many of them into a book hanging on the wall with blank pages at the back for visitors to add their own. Words were also welcome.
I took the rolls of paper with the grief marks, many metres long, they would have stretched all the way to Victoria road and back, and wrapped them around a central point, I was making a nest, a grief-nest, for people to sit in, wrapped round and round until the urge arose to let the paper rise, in wings, or like a spider’s web, the spinning turned vertical. I got the ladder, I got clothes pegs, I threw it over the wire, I let it dance, I let it fall.
As people sat in the nest, it changed shape, it got dirtier, looser, fell apart a bit.
Then we moved into what I privately called the ‘womb-tomb-room’. This small, windowless room was just asking to be wrapped in black netting and filled with the sound of chanting (from the heart sutra), singing, long low cello notes and a slow heartbeat. I recorded all the parts (heartbeat not mine) myself, very fast, pretty much first takes. The room was already intact as I made the music. Niki at @moventia did the wrapping and dangled low lights from the ceiling that pulsed with the heartbeat. EMBRYONIC, BONFIRES AND BONES-THE SCAR, I AM STILL LOOKING BACK AT YOU and IGNITION lived here, close to each other, there were grief marks scattering and hanging around in their way, there was a meditation cushion, there were flowers.
This was a place for people to linger and experience the complexities of the death/birth crossing, and then to emerge back into the daylight.
There was a short detour into a corridor where CROSSING and BABIES ARE NOT TERRORISTS stood opposite each other. One visitor stood in that narrow corridor facing one and then turning to see the other, then turning back again. From purity on canvas to horror and fury on a cardboard protest sign. Whiplash.
The paintings continued from STANDING OUTSIDE THE INSIDES which seemed to viscerally attract some women viewers and terrify some men, through ASCENSION and LYCANTHROPIC whose name I didn’t understand myself at first, to the final UPRISING. Every painting found its own disparate family of viewers, it was fascinating and extremely heartwarming to stand all day in this universe that felt like my own ribcage, as people wandered around in it, each drawn to what they were drawn to and seeing in it what they saw in it. It felt like the greatest privilege, from opening night to last visitor and the final photos, this one taken just before the fullness of the whole experience and the subject matter caught up with me and I cried.
You can see all the paintings that were in the exhibition here on the prints page, and as the name suggests, order a print of any of them. For some more personal writings on what I’m up to, feel free to sign up for the newsletter here at the end of the page!