'Vagueness Of Heart' by Tess Glen & Andrea Christodoulides

This collaborative exhibition by members Tess Glen & Andrea Christodoulides presented drawings, paintings and works on fabric which were vibrant and colourful, conveying a mysterious atmosphere that invites the viewer to interpret multilayered and open-ended narratives.The artists utilise rich imagination and storytelling by creating works that follow the cracks of the real, which are approximated and folded onto surfaces that connect the inside and the outside and give texture to anxieties over the current contradictions in society.

Spaces like the circus or an amusement park, but also indoor, domestic spaces which reveal secret intimate stories that remain unfinished and suspended in time and place, reveal the peculiar appeal possessed by the eerie and the phantasmagorical. Patterned floors, doors leading to distant horizons, figures half hidden, emerging or trying to escape. In this way, the show provides various entry ways into the artists’ imaginary worlds and each piece forms a clue for the bigger story narrated in the show.

The works are informed by the artists’ experimentation with formal elements, especially colour, shape, line, and pattern, and a working-through of the limits of the canvas and the history of painting.

Tess Glen is a Glasgow-based artist who works between painting, drawing and writing. She graduated in Painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 2017 and in 2019 completed the Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School in London. Storytelling is at the heart of Tess’s practice. She is interested in the metamorphosis of the everyday into fiction. Beginning with fragments from a novel, poem or overheard conversations; descriptions of clothes, meals and domestic concerns she finds catalysts which send her travelling across lives and atmospheres.

Andrea Christodoulides, born in Nicosia, Cyprus, 1994 Andrea lives and works in Glasgow, UK. Within my work there is a constant dialogue between suspended body movement and a racing mind immobilized by sheer, silky cut fear, reflected in the imagery of static and running figures, techniques and materiality of the work. The patterns and shapes seem to weave the painting world together. Andrea graduated in 2019 from Royal College of Art, London, M.A. Painting and Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh B.A.Painting in 2017.