Endlessly incomplete at all times - Talk on Still Glasgow exhibition

Still Glasgow event with artists Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan in conversation with Laura Guy

As part of the public programme for Still Glasgow, please join us for this event with artists Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan in conversation with Laura Guy. Their work, Easels (2016), was recently gifted to the collection and is on display in Still Glasgow. First shown at The Modern Institute in Glasgow International 2016, on one level Easels functions as a seemingly anthropological gaze on Glasgow’s visual art community at a moment in time, but the formal and aesthetic decisions employed by the artists disrupt interpreting the work as a piece of documentary photography. Within an international visual festival that invites people to come and ‘experience’ and celebrate this community, Easels reminded its viewers that narratives may not always be reliable.

This event with Joanne Tatham, Tom O’Sullivan and Laura Guy reflects on this work, which is now 10 years old, alongside the artists’ wider practice, within the context of a museum collection where GoMA is marking its 30th anniversary. Endlessly incomplete at all times introduces a conversation about relations between the city’s artists and the institutions that represent art in and for the city.

Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan have been working in collaboration since 1995, after meeting during the MFA Fine Art programme at The Glasgow School of Art in 1993. Their work was first exhibited at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow in 1995 and they represented Scotland at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 as part of the exhibition 'Selective Memory'. Tom O'Sullivan is Assistant Professor at Northumbria University, Newcastle and Joanne Tatham is Professor of Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London. Significant projects and commissions include: The Bitter Cup, a novella produced with Book Works, London in collaboration with Hospitalfield, Arbroath (2019); The Institute For The Magical Effect Of Actually Giving A Shit (a note to our future self), permanent commission at Studio Voltaire, London (2021); A Glasgow Spectacular (or the experience being an experience like the experience you just had), commissioned for Festival 2018, the cultural programme for Glasgow 2018 European Championships, George Square, Glasgow (2018); A Proposal To Ask Where Does A Threshold Begin & End, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough (2018); The abstraction of doing into labour, Summer Windows Project, Hermès Maison Shanghai (2018); Does the iterative fit, Granary Square, London (Commissioned by The King’s Cross Project 2017); Is this what brings things into focus?, Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, California (2017); A petition for an enquiry into a condition of anxiety, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (Part of Glasgow International 2016); Are you LOCATIONALIZED, with ATLAS Arts, North Uist and Isle of Skye (2014); Is your tesserae really necessary, Tramway, Glasgow (2014); DOES THE IT STICK, Bloomberg SPACE, London (2014); The indirect exchange of uncertain value, (Programmed by Collective), Fettes College, Edinburgh (2011); and Direct serious action is therefore necessary, CCA, Glasgow (2010)

Laura Guy is a Reader in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture at the Glasgow School of Art. She is co-editor of Queer Print in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2022), editor of Phyllis Christopher’s artist monograph Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Politics, 1988–2003 (Book Works, 2022) and co-editor of a special issue of British Art Studies dedicated to queer art in Britain since the 1980s (2025). In 2023–24, she was principal investigator on the Carnegie Trust-funded research project 'Remapping the City of Culture through Grassroots LGBTQ+ Cultural Production' and is currently co-lead on 'Preserving Queer Photography: Making and Maintaining Community-led Infrastructures of Care', supported by a Royal Society of Edinburgh Collaboration Grant.

IMAGE: Installation view of 'Easels' (2016), Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan in the exhibition 'Still Glasgow'- on display until 13 June 2027. © the artists.