VENT

Moira Salt is a multimedia artist, looking at B/black diasporas, particularly women, and their connection to memory, myth, and land. She uses geology, technology and fiction to imagine voices of the unspoken, which cast a critical eye on capitalism and environmental consumption. Screeings and exhibitions include Needs and Freedoms, 16 Nicholson Street Gallery, Black British Shorts II, Glasgow International, where the restless oceans pound, Bowling Harbour, and others. She has been commissioned by Sustran's, 2021, and was the 2023 recipient of the David Dale studio residency. She is currently a participant of Syllabus VII 24/25.

My practice is rooted in a deep engagement with material, philosophy, and process, exploring how humans might live more dynamically within ecological and social systems. 

I am occupied with heterotopic playscapes, a carnivalesque aesthetic, and the tensions between escapism and revolution. I am intrigued by the notion of child who grows sideways, who does not give up on playfulness, opposes power that always presumes a hierarchy, and subverts linear progressions. 

Working across disciplines, I integrate ceramics, textiles, and metalwork with writing and drawing, creating works that resonate with concepts of play, paradox, and transformation. My research-driven approach draws on post colonialist, feminist thinkers whose ideas inspire me to interrogate binaries and embrace complexity.

Beyond the studio, my role as a curator and educator extends my commitment to engagement and collaboration. Developing and leading programs that offer audiences and communities immersive encounters with contemporary art. These experiences echo my artistic practice, where I use material exploration, dialogue, and play to invite new perspectives and challenge conventional boundaries.

Many of my works involve a process of spacial and temporal cartography, mapping foraged flora through the process of natural dying, and then bringing the logic of the shifting seasons into spaces reserved for acculturation of children. Natural dyeing is an ephemeral practice, like each season the dye will also inevitably fade. The process reflects the successive nature, flux, and impermanence of life.

Recurrent circle motifs appear in my practice; circles are heavily loaded with semiotics, they describe a completeness, a renewal of life, a womb, a holding space, a revolutionary capacity, a wheel turning on its head. Repeated, almost schematic, symbols crop up in my formation of wilding nurseries, they act as clues and significations, like the key to a map they might indicate, marsh lands, rabbit holes or an apocalyptic sprawl.

Alexandra Beteeva (b.1999) creates nostalgic paintings tinged with intimacy and innocence. Motivated by themes of immersion, her Ossetian roots and the Caucasus becomes an interesting space to explore. Her work responds to a turbulent time of grief and loss. Alexandra graduated with a BA in Painting and Printmaking from Glasgow School of Art in 2022 and completed the Turps Correspondence Course in 2023. She is a recipient of the Euan Stewart Memorial Prize for Printmaking, RSA New Contemporaries 2024, Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2023. She was selected for the Hospitalfield Graduate Residency Programme 2023-24 and Royal Drawing School Printmaking Residency.

Helen Eel is a visual artist, mainly working in gouache and ink illustration and painting. Her work is based around themes of captured moments, emotion, unease and strange scenes of dreams and everyday life populated by characters and symbols of her own imagining.

She graduated in painting from GSA in 2018 and worked as a painter, exhibiting in the National Portrait Gallery London and elsewhere. She now focuses on more abstract illustration, has been part of numerous group and solo shows since 2014, and exhibits, works and sells within the Glasgow art scene. She is currently a part of G20 Artist Collective, comprising of 15 multimedia artists who work and exhibit together.

Samantha Sloane is a Glasgow-based jewellery artist who delves into her personal
identity through her creations. Inspired by the Scottish West Coast's landscape and
her interactions with objects and people, she explores themes of preciousness and
embodiment, reflecting on her past and present experiences. By incorporating found
objects alongside precious and non-precious gemstones, Samantha challenges
traditional notions of what we consider "precious." Her innovative work has garnered
multiple awards and has been exhibited internationally. Currently, she is expanding
her practice by investigating materiality and sense of place while interning at
Munich Jewellery Week, an independent, artist-run jewellery festival.

Tally Tunnell is a Scottish artist currently studying at the Glasgow School of Art. Seeking to question and reframe how relational space interacts with physical space, her work embarks on an engaged, iterative process of mapping, collecting, musing, and remapping of these spaces in order to question and reframe historical and political contexts of land ownership and use.  

As a practice rooted in a bodily and immediate response to space where the human and non-human are entangled, she uses the guise of ‘mapping’ in order to find, document, and latch onto moments of personal intrigue in reply to these often-messy intersections in which both conversation or contention between human and non may lie. Her practice attempts to make sense of the often confusing, wonderful, or saddening narratives in which we consider human interaction with the natural world.

Ruby Daley is a storyteller, making work in clay and facilitating community gatherings. Her work speaks to ancient stories, lore and song. From these she builds clay objects intuitively pressed, painted and carved by hand. The symbols in her work sing harmonies with folk art, medievalism, and the song of the living world. Tiles are at the core of Ruby’s practice. She uses traditional techniques learned here in the UK and in Sevilla, Spain to build tiles and mosaics that explore the possibilities of divining and building preciousness into a place. Her practice is grounded in the lore of the land. Much of her work has been based in folkloric research and community practice, having strong threads to tree folklore, archetypal emergence, and ritual practice. Her work hopes to bring us close to the living world, to feel empowered by its resilience and our interconnectedness. The gatherings or workshops she runs focus on community, storytelling, and hand making. They hope to reach to people to offer support, holding, or guidance through the magic of story and clay.

Sofia Caers is a multidisciplinary artist based in Scotland. Throughout her years at the Glasgow School of Art, her work became increasingly focused on nature and rewilding –  to the point where, once graduated, she felt the need to move into the Land to fully experience it.  As part of her art practice, Sofia has been living in a yurt-like tent by the woods for the past two years, learning ancestral crafting techniques, foraging, primitive skills and herbalism: deepening her connection to Land.

Feminism and ecology are recurrent themes and activism is a key part of her work that comes through in a subtle way. Sofia is interested in bringing critical reflection to the collective narratives we hold while celebrating nature, beauty and poetry.

Wool spinning and hide tanning are the current focus of her practice.

Stina Aldén, born in Sweden, is an artist working primarily with photography but
also with an act of performance art. They are currently based in Glasgow finishing
their studies in Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art.
A lot of Stina’s work evolves around their background coming from a masculine
and labour intensive environment, and with that the contrast to the life they’re
currently living. With a lot of frustration they tackle themes as body image,
heritage, gender and self understanding. And the relationship between the human
vs non-human.
Their practice focuses mostly on the photographic analogue process, and using
their own body as their main object and prop.