As a street-artist from Paisley who graduated from GSA in 2024 and self-identifies as working class, a recovering alcoholic and student of the “[Darren] McGarvey School of Thought” Panda has held plenty “resentments” in his time, though he’s moving past them now.
Malak Naseem saw Glasgow as a city with ‘a heart to it’ (Image: Colin Mearns)
Grateful Gallery is a fitting name for the exhibition space and shopfront he co-owns with fellow local street-artists, Ciaran Globel and Conzo Throb. It sits sloping on Hill Street with its door strictly open and sun-trapping windows that make it easy for passers-by to wave in. At least five do in the hour and a half I sit chatting with Panda.
He flits between describing the gallery’s origin story as the culmination of various serendipities he’s still trying to comprehend – he jumped into 3rd year at art school, wrote a dissertation, published it, sold it and graduated before the gallery ‘presented itself’ to him last year – and the product of 20 years in the game.
He met Ciaran when he was 16 on the screen-printing course at the old College of Building and Printing, now the ‘People Make Glasgow’ tower, though dropped out half-way through because he “was 16 and just wanted to go smoke weed”. Reflecting on it now, almost a decade into his sobriety he tells me: “Getting really into drinking and partying was me just like, aw, there’s this thing I really want to do but that seems unattainable so I’m just going to go do stuff that makes me feel sad inside and drink at the weekend to feel better. I think if you’re working class that’s always going to be there. Not having a safety net limits your ability to do things.”
He’s cautious, though, of forcing himself into any concrete identity boxes. ‘I’m always trying to work out if that’s a self-imposed thing. Do we as working-class people end up doing that to ourselves where we walk into a space and go “oh, this isn’t for me?’”
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Or is the onus on gallerists, curators and funders to expand their world? It is a question of agency and the invisible privileges that become more visible in a space like the art world. It rings through my head when I speak with some of GSA’s recent and soon-to-graduate students.
I begin by asking them why they were attracted to Glasgow in the first place. Malak Naseem, a final-year painting and printmaking student, moved from the Maldives and Sri Lanka. After growing up under the Sri Lankan civil war and the country’s stringent censorship laws, Malak “looked to the west for artistic freedom”. She came to Scotland because she “didn’t want to go to England”, saw London as “oversaturated” and Glasgow as a city with “a heart to it”.
Anna Jack, a friend of Malak, grew up on Scotland’s west coast and came to GSA on its widening participation programme. “I definitely wouldn’t have gotten in if it wasn’t for that programme,” she tells me, “it just opened a door I didn’t know was there”.
Her work now is rooted both in growing up on the west coast and coming of age in Glasgow’s intersecting art and music scenes. “There’s this unavoidable crossover that really enriches the scene”, she says, describing it as a “rising tide of tall ships”. Both Anna and Malak plan to stay in Glasgow after they graduate. When I ask Anna if the recent spate of closures don’t make her want to leave, she says: “From the outside it looks really unstable, but at the same time there’s this energy that’s drummed up by people in the process. If you shut artists out of the spaces they have been happily and fruitfully occupying for a long time we will just hang our art in the streets.”
Connie Woods, left and Laurie Knott pictured at the Garnethill Multicultural Centre in Garnethill, Glasgow (Image: Colin Mearns)
It is a sentiment that Panda lives by. Excepting the Banksy show at GOMA in 2023, street artists have never happily nor fruitfully occupied any of Glasgow’s leading galleries. When somewhere like the CCA closes, an institution funded by Creative Scotland and effective satellite of GSA, the impact is little more than a symbolic one for self-sustaining artists who didn’t go to art school and for whom the doors of the CCA seemed always closed.
Malak described Panda as one of the most optimistic artists she knew, and when I put this to him he offers a very tentative pizza analogy by way of explanation: “Pizza Express used to be the best pizza place, then Paesano opens…Pizza Express is probably like ‘oh my God nobody likes pizza anymore, this is so terrible, the economy, the cost of living’ but Paesano are going ‘this is a pure great time to make pizzas’. I think sometimes things go in cycles. Do you know what I mean?’”
It is a kind of ‘one door closes another door opens’ optimism, I think. From what I can tell, this optimism is spread across the grassroots of Glasgow’s art scene, though not without reservation. In the Mitchell Library I meet with Iris Phillips, one of the co-directors of STUCK Collective. She turns up in a flurry, apologising for being five minutes late and worried I’ll describe her like an artist with her head in the clouds. She seems far from it.
After graduating last year, she established STUCK to support other artists working in hospitality. She was working at McChuills, a Glasgow bar, and asked her boss, Nick, if he had any spaces in the city she could use for an exhibition. She framed her question like a business proposal: the arts and hospitality are both experiencing a downturn so ‘there’s got to be some way that they can help each other in the city”. He offered her Fern, a gallery café opposite the JP Morgan offices on Argyle Street. The collective has since expanded into Glad Café in the south side of the city.
Panda McGlone, centre, at the Grateful Gallery in Garnethill, Glasgow (Image: Colin Mearns)
While at GSA, Iris was very aware of the privilege gaps between students. “People are very shy to say ‘my auntie owns a gallery’ or ‘my dad is a lecturer here’ which is odd. I think people are quite embarrassed about having connections because they think it makes them less authentic people,” she tells me.
Because GSA is so small, Iris sees it as a “microcosm of these wider issues” that become more obvious when you graduate. For example, she recently sold a piece of work at the Royal Scottish Academy’s New Contemporaries show. Though the work sold for £380, after VAT and the RSA’s 40% commission, Iris will take home about £180. While she only spent roughly £60 on materials, she knows people that spent ‘upwards of £3000’. In this post-grad space, the art school divide between those who work and those who can afford not to ‘becomes more like a gulf’.
STUCK exists not to reproduce that gulf. Iris and her co-director, Agnes, take no commission on sales and only charge artists a hanging fee on a sliding scale of £10 to £0 to cover running costs. They recently became a Community Interest Company to make it easier to access funding, a process that she wishes art school had better prepared her for.
“I had to really teach myself what structures I could build to make something long lasting, because without funding or a proper structure so many of these endeavours just burn out.”
Panda also noted the lack of practical education at GSA – he was one of the only people selling work at his degree show – though is wary of funding bodies. “I find sometimes there’s a danger that people become reliant on funding,” he says. “You spend months on applications to get a seat in ‘meetings about meetings’ and end up making nothing. Most often, then, art is made at a DIY level.”
It is a sentiment shared by all the artists I speak to, most of whom work at least two jobs to sustain their practice. Connie Woods, a recent grad currently working on a film project with Garnethill Multicultural Centre, jokes about having upwards of four jobs ranging from a cleaner to a National Trust worker. She even attempted a coding course to make herself more employable.
Iris May (Image: Colin Mearns)
Agnes Little (Image: Colin Mearns)
The film is a collaboration with Laurie Knotts, GMC’s art coordinator who was in the same class as Connie. Two years on from graduating, the pair are well-practiced in making art at a DIY level. Before the Marks and Spencer on Sauchiehall Street was demolished, they were two of the tens of artists running around inside its makeshift studios. Connie held a ghost tour that was part history-lesson and part performance art. Laurie ‘played the ghost of a plastic bag’.
Their work, like Panda’s and Iris’s, is a testament to artistic perseverance. Sometimes that pays off in a funding grant – as it did for Connie and Laurie, whose film is supported by this year’s Commonwealth Games Festival Fund – but most of the time it doesn’t. Artists will keep making regardless. The bigger struggle is ensuring the next generation of students are not just those who never question if art school is ‘for them’ or who can afford to take a chance on a scene that appears to be dying.
From the outside, art in Glasgow seems stifled by bureaucracy. Trading on the legacy of its heydays in the 90s and 00s, the image of the city’s art scene has slipped from something genuinely radical into easily digestible culture strategies, slogans and symbols. The paradox of having both a city-wide mural trail and one the UK’s highest graffiti removal budgets is enough evidence of that hollowness.
But below the council-approved scene, on underpass walls, in cafes, pubs, empty office blocks and abandoned shopping centres, new art is still being made. As Laurie told me: “Maybe from the outside it seems like there’s not too much going on, but the artists are here and working, even if they’re invisible or wearing a plastic bag.”
Evie Glen is a freelance arts, culture and feature writer living in Glasgow. She divides her time between working in a music venue and reporting on the state of the city.