exhibitions & events 2023

Alistair Gow: Mostly Trees

Alistair Gow is a Glasgow based artist working primarily with printmaking. His images come from a fascination with things that present potential: blank spaces, billboards, roads, and pictures hanging on walls are recurring motifs. The practice of printmaking, in particular the process, craft, and community of a workshop, is essential to how he thinks about and makes art.

Click to view the works in this exhibition.

Mostly Trees…

"I am fascinated with things that present potential: billboards, pictures hanging on studio or gallery walls and specific objects have all been recurring motifs. I hope that the artworks I create invite questions in others as they do in me: What is happening here? What could go there? Why has the artist valued this object? How has this been made?

For two years, twice a week I would take my child to nursery through Queens Park. On one return trip I was stopped in my tracks by an autumnal sycamore tree, entirely yellow, illuminated by sunlight. At first I was drawn to the beauty of the scene but as I left the image of it kept coming back and it quickly became a vehicle to explore the importance and potential of trees: as places, sometimes landmarks to meet and play, as well air cleaning giants. In trying to share my interrogation of two specific trees I began to present the trees as blank cleaned away spaces within a picture. This does two things; it makes the tree the stark focus and invites an oddness.

This exhibition presents eight prints, four made in the last month. There are two prints, an etching that presents billboards in front of a bank of trees and an artist working in their studio with pictures of trees on the wall. I see all the artwork I make as holding similar potential regardless of their subject. For this presentation at Glasgow Print Studio the subject is Mostly Trees…" Alistair Gow

Click to view the works in this exhibition.

Image: Alistair Gow, 'Early Tree Stop', 2022, etching, varied edition of 10.