They Had Four Years - May 21-Jun 11 2023

THEY HAD FOUR YEARS

Previewing at 6pm on May 20th and running until June 11th, They Had Four Years (TH4Y) is Generator’s flagship recent graduate exhibition, inviting a group of artists to develop and exhibit new work one year on from graduating from Scotland’s art schools.

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

For a reading list of works that informed the artists’ pieces, see here.

Poster. At the left, large textured blue text on yellow background reads “They Had Four Years”. The artists’ names are to the right, also in blue, overlaid on textured abstract orange shapes: Anuschka Barlas, Lucy Mulholland, Kitt Glover, Hebe Ramsay. 21 May to 11 Jun 2023, Preview 20th May 6pm. At the bottom are logos for Creative Scotland Lottery Funding, Leisure & Culture Dundee, and Generator Projects. Text reads “25 Mid Wynd DD1 4JG. For opening times & accessibility info see www.generatorprojects.co.uk”.

Anuschka Barlas

(she/her, https://www.instagram.com/anuschkabarlas) is a Scotland-based artist whose work engages with themes of memory, place and transience. Drawing variably with charcoal, graphite, inks and oil paint on paper and weaving with natural and synthetic fibres on a handloom, her practice probes the foundations of traditional drawing and painting, and its relationship with other art forms. Studies from observation and/or archival photographs fuse with unpremeditated forms conjured spontaneously on the surface or warp into dreamlike landscapes and figures woven into and from their surroundings.

For TH4Y, Anuschka is developing 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.

Kitt Glover

(they/them, https://www.instagram.com/kit_e_lover) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses drawings, written word, social engagement, and textiles to develop solo and collaborative projects that often focus on animals. They combine tongue-in-cheek visual storytelling with a serious concern for social and environmental issues. Their core drive when developing work is to communicate the intelligence, beauty, and diversity of non-human life forms by playing with both traditional techniques and experiments to generate an alternative material language.

For TH4Y, Kitt is building 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, https://www.instagram.com/lucygm_art) is an artist based in N. Ireland who studied Sculpture at the Edinburgh College of Art. Interested in the role art has in exploring possible post-anthropocentric futures, her practice playfully investigates connections and exchanges between humans and other species in nature. She choses to focus on actions or gestures that may seem insignificant or futile, and instead views them as catalysts for potential future action. Responding to the complexities of our ecological crisis, her practice foregrounds speculative imagination, humour and hope.

For TH4Y, Lucy presents Alarm Call, 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

(they/she, https://www.instagram.com/heberamsay) is a Glasgow-based artist working in writing, film, sound, installation and tactile technologies. Their work exists within the threshold between virtual and physical space, where elements momentarily meet under temporary conditions. They are concerned with personal and collective narratives of trauma and being through an intertwining of myth, ritual, post-structural thought, ecology and technologies.

For TH4Y, Hebe focuses on matter and materiality across digital, physical and conscious plains, using moving image, text, scent and sculpture to explore alternative potentialities and spaces guided by care, loss, somatics and memory as proponents for change within our binary, inherited histories, asking: how are we choreographed through time, matter, and space / how do time, matter, and space choreograph through ourselves?