Art reviews: Adrian Wiszniewski | Nationhood: Memory & Hope | Northern Lights
Celebrating Adrian Wiszniewski’s 40-year relationship with Glasgow Print Studio, In Full Colour showcases a huge range of styles and subjects, writes Susan Mansfield
Adrian Wiszniewski: In Full Colour, Glasgow Print Studio ★★★★
Nationhood: Memory & Hope, Street Level Photoworks ★★★
Northern Lights, The Big Burns Festival, Dumfries ★★★★
There is, quite possibly, no end to the inventiveness of Adrian Wiszniewski, in technique, in style, in ideas. His creative imagination seems to spark off in all directions, from Robert Burns to Stanley Kubrick, from wordplay and humour to philosophy and myth, from Madonna’s Sex book to the Stations of the Cross.
In Full Colour celebrates his 40-year relationship with Glasgow Print Studio, and how, during that time, he has worked across the full gamut of print processes, adapting them to suit his purposes.
His first silkscreen print, Po-et (1986) was made at a time when he was fascinated by the romantic poets. Perhaps sending them up a little, too, with this languorous reclining figure and the pun on the river Po, which has a tendency to burst its banks.
The Sculptor’s Nightmare (1986) is another key early work, a kind of horror fantasy in which the sculptor (the young romantic, again) returns home to find his lover has been bitten by a vampire. As he prepares to drive a stake through her heart, others wait around her body like a Greek chorus, to witness or to judge.
While both these works have elements of Wiszniewski’s signature figurative drawing, other works go in different directions. A series called Sex and Matisse (1993) draws out the artist’s sexier side and adds inspiration from Madonna’s book Sex, which had just come out when the work was made.
The series Flags (1991) uses brightly coloured cut-out shapes to create flags for places that don’t exist, with titles like Atlantis or Private Island Marlon Brando. Another work, Corrupt Love takes its inspiration from the medieval heretics, the Cathars. It’s also a play on words, a corruption of Roma and Amor, and the fact that lettering on a printing plate will come out in mirror image.
A landscape of Crail forms the basis of three large laser-cut woodblocks, in which he experiments with different colour ways with some surprising results. His Stations of the Cross are restrained and simple, relying on the power of the line against a single background colour. Other works are full of humour, like the gloriously suggestive Man with Sausage.
There is so much contrasting work here that the show does feel a little fragmented. There isn’t room to look in-depth into any of Wizsniewski’s many subjects. But the image of the artist, the poet recurs, fascinatingly in works like Trying to make a dollar (1991) and The Man Who Made It (2008). I’m wondering if what fascinates Wiszniewski most is creativity itself.
Nationhood: Memory & Hope, at Street Level Photoworks next door, is also a show of various parts. Premiered as part of Bradford City of Culture in 2025, it centres on two bodies of work by Ethiopia-born, Canada-based photographer Aïda Muluneh.
One is A Portrait of Us, a series of portraits of 15 “unsung heroes” from Bradford, Glasgow, Cardiff and Belfast, which includes Glasgow trade unionist Anita Shelton, writer and teacher Linda Jackson and Adele Patrick, co-founder of Glasgow Women’s Library. These are excellent.
This theme is also taken up in the work of seven emerging photographers from the four cities, including two from Glasgow: Miriam Ali, who has made portraits of grassroots community workers, and Haneen Hadiy, whose images of Muslim women in traditional dress in wild Scottish landscapes are quietly powerful.
But the work at the centre of the show, Muluneh’s The Necessity of Seeing, is very diffferent from all of these. And it’s this work, not her portrait photography, which is the reason she is making her way in the international art world.
These are constructed images, created almost like sets with props and backdrops (usually in a studio), elaborate costumes in primary colours and a cast of performers, usually Black women, adorned with body paint and billowing gowns. Traditional adornments from African culture are placed in a modern stylised context.
In this commission, many of the pictures were made in “real” locations in the four cities. We aren’t told where, though the one done at House for an Art Lover is unmistakable, the stylised figures almost blending in to Mackintosh’s highly stylised room. But they are so strange and distant, they are difficult to engage with.
Are they about diversity? Do they reveal hidden stories in the cities, in Britishness? It seems to me they operate on another level, one which is almost purely visual, with colour used in a way which is almost abstract, and a sensibility akin to symbolism producing titles like The Dew at Dawn and The Loud Silence. There’s no question that they are visually impactful, but they sit uneasily with the rest of the work in the show, and the somewhat overambitious title.
Meanwhile, in Dumfries, local organisation The Big Burns Supper has been staging events in the dark days of January for 14 years. The town is keen to stake its claim on Burns, who lived his later life in there and is buried there. The energy of Burns the subversive, inclusive radical, forms the underlying spirit of the project.
Last year, Big Burns Supper piloted Northern Lights, a programme of sound-and-light installations in the town, and this year it made a triumphant return with some ten works on a trail through Dumfries.
The centrepiece is Burns Light, a sound-and-light projection on the poet’s mausoleum, telling the story less of Burns himself than of his resting place: fans have paid homage there for centuries, from Keats to Bob Dylan. His widow, Jean Armour visited it daily. The elements are woven together into the six-minute projection, along with subtle threads of Dumfries history you would need to be a local to grasp.
Local artist Martin O’Neill, commissioned by Dumfries arts organisation The Stove Network, has created a sign The Show Must Go On, attached to the suspension bridge over the Nith. Perhaps the words refer to the traditional Rood Fair, which happens on the Whitesands on the other side, perhaps to Big Burns Supper, or even the town itself.
Either way, the sign is a gateway to O’Neill’s other project for Northern Lights, Phanto Spectra, in which visitors walk the site of the fair with binaural headphones, pausing at light installations to hear a ghostly story of fairs past and present unfold over several generations.
A little further upriver, Fire Fly is a projection across the river inspired by the fire fly squid found in Japan. Birds on a Wire, on the High Street, brings together birdsong and the voices of the local community choir, while Washing Line captures voices from the town’s past.
Divided, by lighting designer Dave Morris, in the former Jumping Jacks nightclub, is inspired by the experience of immigrants to the area. It uses mirrors, light and real Christmas trees donated by the local community to create an immersive installation designed to unsettle and disorientate. While the link to the theme is not always clear, it’s clear enough that we need to (in the words of Burns) learn to “see ourselves as others see us”.
While Northern Lights is not always easy for a non-local to navigate, its powerful grassroots aesthetic and the fact most of the work is made with a deep knowledge of the town make it an attractive and worthwhile project.
Adrian Wiszniewski: In Full Colour runs until 28 February; Nationhood: Memory & Hope until 8 February; Northern Lights run ended but some elements of the Big Burns Supper festival continue until 25 January, see www.bigburnssupper.com
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