Hotworks marks the conclusion of five years of study at The Glasgow School of Art—a deeply personal and formative period of my life. As the series is installed in the Stow Building for the Master’s Degree Show in August 2024, I watch people hanging their work around me. The anxieties of finishing a postgraduate degree in Fine Art rise alongside the excitement. It’s a strange, suspended moment: an end, but also a beginning.

I’m fortunate to exhibit Hotworks in a generous 10-metre space, where the scale and rhythm of the four large paintings can truly breathe. This year on the MLitt has been the first time I’ve been able to fully dedicate myself to a sustained period of making two-dimensional work. Coming from a background in Sculpture and Environmental Art, my route into painting didn’t begin with traditional image-making—it began with an interest in surface, materiality, and colour. That language of form has stayed with me.

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Hotworks is the culmination of a year-long research project that explored the communal identity of contemporary Lanarkshire, a place layered with cultural and industrial histories. By working with archival material from the North Lanarkshire Cultural Archive—specifically surrounding the rise and fall of the Motherwell Steelworks—I’ve developed a series of paintings that reflect the transient, often ambiguous nature of post-industrial landscapes. These are places in flux, where rusting remnants of machinery sprawl across the land: objects made in fire now caught in stasis.

Through methods of layering, erasure, and gesture, the work explores collapse and renewal—mirroring both the landscape itself and the process of becoming a painter. For me, this exhibition doesn’t feel like a final point, but more like a launchpad: a moment where momentum has gathered and continues to build.

To exhibit painting in such a direct and honest manner—after years of circling around the medium—feels like a beginning. And Hotworks is that beginning.

(Paintings sold to private collectors)