170 x 230mm, black and white printing, perfect bound, 2021

Esther Draycott’s She’d been good, it hadn’t worked delves into twentieth century Glaswegian women’s memoir, redressing the surveillance and state controls enacted on the lives of those in council housing. Calum Sutherland’s interview with Hardeep Pandhal asks how to negotiate the Scottish art scene’s seemingly slim set of opportunities, starting with a critical discussion around the artist’s exhibition Confessions of a Thug: Pakiveli (2020) at Tramway. In Can I We really be all this !!!!, the poet Olivia Douglass uses family photographs to ask how language, memory and image can exceed themselves. In the lead up to COP26, Maria Howard looks at the limits of the heroic narratives that pervade nature writing in her essay Vigilant Care. Yuki Okumura writes our first REWORK. His The Depersonalization of Artist treats text sculpturally, manipulating each word of a version of Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s The Dematerialization of Art in a disassembling of conceptual art’s origins and virtues. K Patrick & Adrien Howard’s Silence continues our Writing Through column, drawing on their relationship to transgender experience to reimagine scenes from thirteenth century French romance, Le Roman de Silence. Mike Sunda and Caspar Heinemann inaugurate our book reviews. Sunda meditates on language learning, cultural immersion and noughties Japan through Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds. Reviewing Jackie Ess’ Darryl, Heinemann tracks a life lived in desiring, exhausted negotiation with masculinity. Hussein Mitha’s piece for this issue provides an expansive consideration of agency and class within GI through the lens of Shona Macnaughton’s performance Here To Deliver (2020). Elsewhere in our GI reviews, Esther Draycott writes about You’re Never Done at Springburn Museum and Kiah Endelman Music considers Martine Syms’ SHE MAD S1:E4 at Tramway. In an effort to balance the attention lumped on the festival, our reviews section also covers exhibitions which fall outside its bounds. Gwen Dupré reviews Emma Talbot’s Ghost Calls at Dundee Contemporary Arts, and Calum Sutherland looks at figurative painting across three shows in the city . On a lighter note, Maria Howard considers the merits of an annual competition of children’s art.

Writing, reviews and artworks by Andrew Black, Olivia Douglass, Esther Draycott, Gwen Dupré, Kiah Endelman Music, Esther Gamsu, Caspar Heinemann, Hannah Lockhart, Maria Howard, Hussein Mitha, Ewan Murray, Yuki Okumura, Hardeep Pandhal, Mike Sunda, Calum Sutherland, K Patrick and Adrien Howard, Jessie Whiteley.

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