Being immersed is so much more interesting that being exhibited to.
Grief Marks was my first exhibition and it was an immersive one, I didn’t originally intend it to be but it turned out that there could not be paintings without poems, poems without music, music without texture, texture without smell, smell without flowers.
I also learnt that the spirit of grief could not exist without lightness, freedom without containment… and that people need and appreciate places to be without rules, places where their emotions can arise unexpectedly. People sat and meditated, people talked to their loved ones who had passed in the wrapped room with the heartbeat. There were tears and catharsis and there was unexpected joy.
This time, in Portals, I want to make it even more experiential – the more points of contact the more creativity, the more emotions. I would like people to laugh and to struggle a little, and to be surprised, as well as to face and move through the portal, whether or not that is, for them, the portal of death and birth which it is to me.
The portal started as the heart of a flower, and then the flower changed into my heart, some Aztec poems floated up from my memory to remind me that poetry is flower and song, that death and war and the heart are all flowers, and then the heart of the flower as I made it into music took me by ambulance to the portal of a matte obsidian mirror in which I saw the blank face of death as the poem searched for the name of a God in their hand. I walked through the canvas.
It was pretty immersive! I wonder how it will be in ‘real life’ in the gallery and how it’ll be for the people who come.
Portals opens on Friday, that’s October 16th, 2026 at Salt Space gallery, in Glasgow. I’d love to see you there!