21st May — 11th June 2023

They Had Four Years is Generator’s flagship recent graduate exhibition - each year the Generator committee tour Scotland’s degree shows, issue a call for proposals to the artists whose work we like best, then select a handful of artists to develop and exhibit new work a year on from their graduation. This year’s selected artists were:

•  Anuschka Barlas (she/her), who works with tapestries and works on paper, and developed pieces looking at the British Raj in 1939-40, exploring how repressed histories, narratives and data can be recorded and communicated through art objects while they retain their identity as art.

•  Kitty Glover (they/them), who creates fantastical creatures and worlds using knitting, crocheting and sewing. For TH4Y they built a speculative ecosystem in the galleries, using the traditional symbolism of fair isle patterns to open up a joyous, wild space that resists oppressive systems and binaries.

• Lucy Mulholland (she/her), a sculptor who makes large-scale installations. For TH4Y, she developed a work that uses humour to approach our era of polycrisis, translating and re-translating the distress call of the chaffinch to examine how human and other experiences of crisis intersect.

•  Hebe Ramsay (she/they), a multidisciplinary artist who made a single-channel moving image work asking how care, grief and illness can be mediated through digital technologies. This piece will be accompanied by a custom scent permeating the galleries.

All four artists make sensitive, timely works that challenge inherited systems of meaning-making, looking closely at how and where our caring and attentive energies are, can be, and ought to be directed.

Exhibition