Achi news desk-
The 2024/25 exhibition and events program is designed to test the limits of French Street’s exhibition space and provide a rare opportunity for artists to operate on a large scale with a budget rarely available to artist-led organisations.
Kicking off the series of major exhibitions at Barrowfield’s former 19th century weaving factory, French Street is Flywheel, a film and visual arts installation by Harriet Rickard showing between Friday 31 May and Sunday 23 June – which to coincide with the city’s contemporary visual arts festival, Glasgow International.
The next exhibition in the space will be Chris Leslie’s Heritage and Community Exhibition, Beyond The Games, the culmination of a six-month residency with Strange Field. Marking ten years since the 2014 Commonwealth Games, Leslie revisits his Disappearing Glasgow collection which documented the displacement of residents from Dalmarnock in order to demolish and rebuild the area ahead of the Games.
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The work was widely disseminated, featuring in a BBC documentary, a book, and the Glasgow Life collection, placing Dalmarnock and its community at the center of a national conversation. Beyond the Games is open to the public from Friday, July 5, until Sunday, August 28, and is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the William Grant Foundation.
In the autumn the last two exhibitions of the Strange Field 2024 program will take place. Performance artist Philip Ewe will be in court from mid-September, bringing their iconoclastic commentaries on social behavior and public spaces to French Street. His work is large scale and site specific, with unpredictable and absurd interventions exploring audience relationships and the politics of space – marking this performance exhibition as one of the most ambitious buildings in the space to date.
Finally, local Glasgow visual artist Morwenna Kearsley is exhibiting Devilled Eggs throughout November. For her first large-scale solo exhibition, Kearsley transforms a former Dalmarnock weaving factory into an immersive space with a new series of large-scale photographs and moving image works.
A number of one night only performance events are held throughout the year between these major exhibitions, welcoming a number of artists with strong links to Glasgow and its East End communities.
Just before Harriet Rickard’s opening exhibition, Strange Field welcomes four artists on Saturday May 18. An alumnus of Glasgow School of Art, the artist William Joys has co-curated an evening of performance with Strange Field Program Director Jenny Tipton.
At the end of August, firebrand Glasgow artist Trackie McLeod will bring a performance dinner party to Dalmarnock in collaboration with Durty Beanz and Len Goetzee. McLeod is a long-time collaborator with Strange Field, having held their first solo exhibition at The Pipe Factory, and created the first purchased piece of art which now hangs in the French Street venue. For this dinner party, McLeod will curate an evening inspired by tea at your grandmother’s, with creative courses made by Durty Beanz and an accompanying performance by up-and-coming artist Len Goetzee.
More performance events with a mix of early career and high profile artists such as Christian Noelle Charles and Chao-Ying Rao will be announced in due course.
Strange Field Program Director Jenny Tipton said: “We are very excited to launch our first ever major exhibition programme. Strange Field is proud to provide artistic opportunities in our Calton and Dalmarnock communities, and we are very grateful to our funders for making our largest series of artist-led performances and visual arts exhibitions possible in our evolving location in French Street .
“We’ve been looking to work with Harriet, Philip, and Morwenna for some time now, so it’s incredibly exciting to bring all three of them into our space for their major exhibitions and to explore their connections with the space and our communities.
“Having worked with Chris Leslie in his residency with us over the last few months, we are also looking forward to seeing the result of a decade’s worth of work with the residents of Dalmarnock past and present following the 2014 Commonwealth Games.
“It will be a real event by and for the community, which is at the heart of what we do, and we couldn’t be happier to have Chris on this journey with us.
“This will be an exciting 18 months, as we expand and evolve our approach to developing sustainable artist-led spaces in French Street and The Pipe Factory alongside our programmes.
“We hope to see many familiar and new faces come through our doors to experience exciting and unexpected approaches to art and performing”.
