The Tale of the Lillie Makers
On April 1st, we will be in Milngavie exhibiting our work at The Lillie Art Gallery and selling our prints and drawings at the Milngavie Makers Market. As a group of recent graduates from Glasgow School of Art, we have been exploring our role as women artists and how we can best make our mark in a meaningful and professional way.
We are delighted to be exhibiting in the foyer of the Lillie Art Gallery both on April 1st and again in October - a space that has been under-utilised in a gallery that has a rich tradition of promoting female artists. We want to take this opportunity to question what is women's work and how is it viewed. In Women's Work: Being Seen, we aim to challenge the expectations and document our insights in to the relationship between women and the arts in a contemporary sense.
We are also extremely excited to participate in the Milngavie Makers Market, where we will be selling prints and drawings produced in response to Women's Work: Being Seen. This is a brilliant chance to meet with our fellow makers, hear people's views on our work and the wider project and to have an extremely fun day selling our wares!
As part of Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, we have chosen to donate 20% of the money raised by our stall and exhibition to 'Target Ovarian Cancer'.
With 7,000 women a year being diagnosed with this illness, and as a group of women creating an exhibition centred around issues concerning woman, we realised it would be irresponsible not to use this opportunity to promote awareness and help raise funds for the continuing research into ovarian cancer.
Read the full account of why we have chosen this charity to support:
We hope to see you in Milngavie on April 1st, scroll down for all the practical information!
The Exhibition
'The Lillie Art Gallery is a purpose built gallery opened in 1962. It owes its existence to local banker and artist Robert Lillie (1867-1949), who left a substantial number of his own artworks as well as funds to build the gallery.
Since 1962, this founding bequest of artworks has been developed to form a collection of Scottish art dating from the 1880s to the present day. Around 450 works are contained in the collection, which includes paintings, prints, drawings and a small collection of sculpture and ceramics.
The Lillie was proud to celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2012.
Opening Times
Tuesday - Saturday
10am - 1pm and 2pm - 5pm'
A taster of the gallery space and previous exhibitions held at The Lillie Art Gallery:
The Market
Milngavie Makers Market is a monthly indoor artisan market celebrating artists and makers and the wonderful things they create. It will be held in the Milngavie Town Hall on April 1st 11am-4pm.
Twitter: @MilngavieMakers Instagram:@milngaviemakersmarket
The Milngavie Makers on Twitter:
The Lillie Gallery on Instagram:
Helpfully, The Lillie Art Gallery and the Milngavie Makers Market will be conveniently located in the same building. It is a very short walk from the train station and easily accessible by the 60A bus from all over Glasgow.
And so to tell you a little bit about us. We are a group of recent graduates and here we are, recently graduating:
Jade Sturrock - Yellow, Catriona Thomson - Blue, Rowan Flint - Green, Hannah Lyth - Red.
We have really quite independent styles and motivations to make art but I would argue we are connected by our fierce love of printmaking and academic interest in the role of 'woman' in art. Studying Painting and Printmaking together at Glasgow School of Art equipped us with the tools and time to explore these themes and processes, but now we feel it's time to navigate how we can build and sustain practices in the real world.
Jade Sturrock
'Through a use of technical and expressive methods, my practice deals with the cultural construction of the body. By combining print making techniques with intuitive mark-making, I aim to re-configure ways in which the female form can be consumed viscerally. Incorporating found imagery with projective painting and drawing methods allows me to renegotiate the body’s sense of subjectivity. This often results in multi-layered, mixed media works which contain depictions of ambiguous bodily forms. I deconstruct the fixed image to reveal the body’s sensual and multifarious nature which acts as a means of re-coding the visual conditions typically regulative of the body; the aim being to place it within a more positive realm of depiction. Highlighted is the paradox between culture’s ideological impositions and natural bodily instinct and impulse. By developing forms which do not follow logical criteria, but are based on subjective associations, I incite the viewer to become incorporated in the language of the reconstructed imagery. Implementing a fluid, direct and emotive form of painterly communication allows me to favour the body’s uncontrollable, biological elements over the paradigms which seek to streamline it.'
Jade is off to Boston in June to embark upon an incredibly exciting internship - read more about her adventures here:
Instagram: @jade.sturrock
Twitter: @jade_sturrock
Rowan Flint
I am an Installation Printmaker, concerned with the collection and recombination of materials, objects and photographic imagery through the medium of print. I have a desire to take over spaces and create beauty through hybrid printmaking and installation processes whilst remaining faithful to the original context of the space. I deal with themes relating to personal, political and environmental concerns through colour and humour. I want to create beautiful visions for the viewer, to see the sights they have become accustomed to in new, exciting and challenging ways.
I am currently working as an intern for Timorous Beasties and plan to expand my understanding of spatial manipulation by undertaking a series of print installations across Scotland over the course of this year.
Instagram: @rowanflint
Twitter: @RowanMFlint
Catriona Thomson
'Taking inspiration from artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Matisse and Olafur Eliasson, my work converses between colour, experience and the ordinary.
The shapes evolved out of studies of everyday scenes. Things that appear mundane and uninteresting but actually are the experiences and objects we live with on a daily basis. The compositions I made with these shapes were simple and temporal, always changing into something new. This action of rearranging the patterns and all the endless possibilities that transpired intrigued me because of the similar way that everyday situations are continuously evolving. Life is experienced as an event through time which naturally led me to making stop motion animations. I see my fixed collages more as animation stills that are part of a series, like a moment that has been frozen in time.'
Instagram: @catrionarose27
Hannah Lyth
Instagram: @lythhannah
We are really excited to be working with the Lillie and the Milngavie Makers and we hope to show our gratitude by putting on a really good show, being a positive addition to the Makers Market and by raising awareness of Target Ovarian Cancer. We look forward to seeing you on April 1st!