New Acquisitions #1

Glasgow Life Museums is delighted to announce that we have recently acquired two works by Sam Ainsley RSA for the collection. Blue Body, Red Centre, Green Acanthus (2023) and Where there are hopes there are also fears (2025) were presented by Contemporary Art Society through their annual membership scheme with support from the GLM contemporary art fund (2025/6).

This time two years ago we were installing and about to open Wednesday is Cobalt Blue, Friday is Cadmium Red. The exhibition ran until June 2024 and was visited by over 70,000 people in GoMA. The first institutional show in Glasgow for almost 40 years for Sam, it was important for us to acknowledge the artist in her home city where she has forged a remarkable career within the visual arts sector and in a time when she is experiencing a revival of interest in her work thanks to academics like Catriona McAra (Aberdeen), Lynsey Young (Tate) , Jenny Brownrigg (GSA), Marianne Greated (GSA) and Susannah Thompson (MMU, Manchester) who are interested in and committed to this generation of Scotland-based painters for their research.

I know art is like life itself, full of confusion, tenderness, beauty, sorrow, struggle, anger and joy. Manifesto, Sam Ainsley, October 2024. For The Ignorant Art School: Sit-in #4 Outside the Circle exhibition and events, Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee.

Sam Ainsley RSA is a widely respected artist and educator. Born in North Shields, England in 1950, she lives and works in Glasgow where she taught at The Glasgow School of Art in Environmental Art (1985-1990) and was co-founder and former Head of The Master of Fine Art programme (1990 -2005). She is known for her largescale, unstretched and bias bound paintings with bold colours and imagery. Her interest in the human body – especially the female body, however abstracted – and its relationship to the world we live in has been at the core of her work and has remained constant despite shifts in the focus of her attention over the years. Her practice can be closely aligned with feminist protest art (banners and slogan art) and therefore also constitutes an important social document. She has a long history of making shrewdly prescient work on the environment, social and political change and the importance of culture for a nation’s identity.

Her commitment to providing art students with an art education and role model she felt was profoundly lacking in her own art school experience has been written about as the ‘Ainsley effect’ by Charlotte Rostek in Scottish Women Artists (London: The Fleming Collection, 2022). Her alumni of 500 + artists include Christine Borland, Ilana Halperin, Claire Barclay, Jacqueline Donachie, Ross Sinclair, Roderick Buchanan and Douglas Gordon. All of whom have relied on her pedagogy for their success stories and are first to acknowledge it. They are all artists with significant works in collections like ours, while their teachers have been ignored or sidelined by institutions until relatively recently.

Therefore, this acquisition of Blue Body, Red Centre, Green Acanthus (2023) and Where there are hopes there are also fears (2025) ensures that there is a strong representation of this influential artist in a Scottish collection. It is also part of a growing understanding that collections need to acknowledge and acquire works for Public Collections of works by older women artists with a lifetime of experience as artists.

Blue Body, Red Centre, Green Acanthus 2023 is representative of Ainsley’s bold work with textile and paint in that it is formed of 3 shaped connecting canvases, with sewn binding holding the edges. Here, in these painted forms, we see her interest in the human body exposed anatomically and how that references forms found in nature (branches and roots) or in manufactured landscapes (roads or scars left by extractions of minerals) or how organs like the heart are used a metaphors for emotions but also a beating heart at the centre of things to drive forward change, with the acanthus there as a symbol of renewal and hope.

Where there are hopes there are also fears (2025) represents a recent development that finds Ainsley painting on shaped boards covered in canvas creating wall works that suggest islands or archipelagos (an ongoing concern), or amoeba like forms that contain the evolution of hope. Continuing her interest in collaging motifs and ideas together the centre of the work has an image of an ammonite (from imagination) painted across two of painted forms.  Here Ainsley is inspired by the work of James Hutton, a Scottish geologist – often cited as the “Father of Modern Geology” and his ideas about “deep time” and how far back we go. This led Ainsley to look at fossils, particularly the ammonite and her obsession with the circle and many of its connotations for her, the moon, the earth, magnifying glasses, microscopes, circadian rhythms, embroidery hoops etc. It also continues her interest in the climate emergency as through this work there is the current threat to our land and to our way of life, with grey/dying plant forms and the idea of “slabs” of landscape cut off from us. Echoing the circle motif there is a painted magnifying lens on to a city “map” which might also be an embroidery hoop with the stitching lines escaping from the circle.

Running through the work there painting of a length of rope another recurring motif in relation to networks of connectivity (bindings) and the knot as an “aide memoire”.

GoMA’s aim is to build a world-class collection of contemporary visual art through the acquisition of important national and international works of art. Since 2015 and the exhibition Ripples on the Pond, there has been a focus on the gender balance represented by the collection and the influence of women artists on contemporary practice. The acquisition of two works by Sam Ainsley reflects this ambition to place important works by women artists living and working in the city, proudly presenting an ongoing genealogy of feminist practice that continues to inspire others.