SaltSpace was founded by students and graduates of Glasgow School of Art. Since 2019, our committee has continuously grown and reformed, giving artists from a range of backgrounds opportunities to learn the skills of running a non-profit community interest company.
As a cooperative with a democratic constitution, we have a non hierarchical group of committee members. We hold regular meetings so that our decision making is a collective process and the running of SaltSpace involves everyone.
Committee
Hannah Kate Absalom
Hannah Kate Absalom (b.1998, she/her) is a visual artist originally from Northumberland, and currently based between Glasgow and London. Absalom studied Painting & Printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art achieving a First Class BaHons in 2020, and is currently studying their MAFA at Central Saint Martins (2022-2024). Absalom has been a committee member of Saltspace Cooperative since 2021, and became a co-Director in 2023. Absalom's main role within SaltSpace has been focused on marketing, social media and gallery programming. In 2023 she co-founded the artist collective FLESH TIDE GHOST. Absalom’s practice is a surreal, camp and grotesque reflection of the relationship between queerness, horror, domesticity and iconography. Through the mediums of oil-painting, printmaking, installation and moving-image the artist blends the sacred, the medieval and Science-Fiction, lending from the camp and overly-saturated graphics of classic horror and Sci-Fi. ​ Absalom approaches the flesh as a site of bodily horror, comedic relief and intimacy, placing equal value on each factor. The queer body becomes the uncanny within the work of the artist; the domestic is challenged and the homely is transmogrified into the unheimlich. Within the surreal, fictional worlds, characters and motifs drift from one work to another, like the merging and blurring boundaries of narratives and imagery within dreams. Absalom queers landscapes and characters to concoct an image both camp and macabre; the imagery used can often be unsettling, disturbing and hypnotic in its blending of dream and dogma. The painterly and the cinematic meet in Absalom’s moving-image work which often imitates the style of German Expressionism and matte painted sets, leaning into the Lo-Fi and humorously exploiting the limits of her methods of video-making. The artist does not intend to make works entirely independent of one another, but rather, through an act of world building often accompanied by auto-fictional assembled texts, creates spaces, sites of ritual and mysticism in which artworks and their means of display melt off the gallery walls and become semi-sculptural, installational works within theatrical and cinematic sets.
Aurelie Chan Hon Sen
Aurelie Chan Hon Sen is a maker, illustrator and writer from Mauritius, currently based in Glasgow. She recently joined the committee at SaltSpace Cooperative. She graduated from The Glasgow School of Art with a Distinction from the MLitt Art Writing programme in 2023, and a First Class from the BA Honours in Sculpture & Environmental Art programme in 2022. She is currently working as a part-time jewellery studio assistant at Silk Purse, Sow’s Ear. Aurelie illustrates and makes evocative objects that are used as an alternative access to history. This understanding is relayed in her written works to unfold memories and merge time frames. Her practice addresses contemporary linguistic and socio-cultural issues that arise from past and present forms of colonisation. Her developing decolonising strategies are fuelled by the ways of living of indigenous and diasporic people. Her works manifest their visual, oral and embodied forms of knowledge, and language hybridity and diversity.
Evie Frances Brown
Evie Frances Brown (she/they) is an artist, illustrator and graduate of the University of Edinburgh, with a Master of Art Degree in Architecture (Hons), now living and working in Glasgow. Returning to Glasgow after her degree, Evie returned to her long time passion of painting and making, and now runs their own small art business Sad Eyes Studio. Evie's work draws from the whimsical, the bold and the heartfelt, blending playful imagery with meaningful messages. She joined the Saltspace collective in 2022 and then the Committee in the Summer of 2023, hoping to help others, and herself, benefit from the rich artistic community within Glasgow. ​ She currently works in the Department A studio in the same Dornoch Street building as the Saltspace Makers Spaces.
Holly Osborne
Holly Osborne is a Glasgow-based visual artist who graduated with a First Class BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking from GSA in 2018. Through painting, ceramics, and illustration, she explores stereotypes, ideals, and mundanity through staged, awkward figures sourced from contemporary materials like stock photos and social media as well as religious imagery and vintage knitting patterns. She also runs a small business, creating wrapping paper, cards, and tea towels, bringing her disquieting humour to a wider audience. ​ After graduating, she returned to her hometown of Dingwall, where she contributed as a committee member at Circus Artspace from 2019 to 2021, aiding in the development and execution of their exhibitions and events programme. On returning to Glasgow in January 2022, she joined the SaltSpace committee, becoming a director in May 2022 and has been actively involved in the day-to-day administration, marketing, business development and funding applications. She is passionate about the ethos of SaltSpace and bringing opportunities to our member base.
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Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe
Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe is a sculptor, writer, and project coordinator between the West of Ireland and Glasgow. She received a first class BA Honours in Sculpture & Combined Media from Limerick School of Art & Design in 2020 and went on to co-found and co-direct an artist studio and collective in Limerick city Miscreating Sculpture Studios (2020-2022). She started as a committee member at SaltSpace Cooperative in May 2023. ​ Theo recently graduated with distinction from the Art Writing MLitt at Glasgow School of Art & Design. She has published work with Circa Art magazine, Bloomers, Visual Artists Ireland Newsheet, and in Map Magazine in Glasgow, UK and has recently presented work at Centre of Contemporary Art Glasgow, Good Press Glasgow, and Flax Art Studios Belfast, amongst other locations both in Scotland and Ireland. Theo has recently been award an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland to develop her sculptural/research practice. ​ Her practice is currently located at the point of contact between sculpture and writing, engaging with feminist new materialist concerns, exploring language as a liminal site through which to practice material attention and translate the sensorial and enmeshed encounters of body and matter. Currently her praxis engages with the idea of aftermatter, residues of matter in the aftermath of action, inquiring into human and more-than-human tendencies towards the generation of matter both in intentional and incidental forms. ​ Through auto-fictional re-weavings her written work focuses on materially aware memories and how these inform a process of learning and building a language to mediate the world. Moments which explore attunement to physicalisations of time, and human tendencies towards the generation of matter, both the incidental and intentional, encountering a disappearing lake amidst other material state changes of matter. Her practice moves from writing, to casting, to papermaking, photographs, video, sculptural durational material work, utilizing all of these elements to create installations, exhibitions, publications.​
Rosie Patterson
Rosie Patterson is a Glasgow based animator and editor with a First Class BA (Hons) in Communication Design from Glasgow School of Art. Proficient in Quickbooks and with 3+ years bookkeeping experience, SaltSpace has provided them with the environment to combine those artistic and financial skills together, where they currently handle the co-op’s finances and financial admin.
Susan Torrance
Susan Torrance is a practicing visual artist based in Glasgow, having graduated in 2021 from GSA in Painting and Printmaking and in 2023 from the University of the Highlands and Islands with an MA in Contemporary Art and Archaeology. They went back to art school as a mature student, having previously qualified as a Scottish solicitor and after a professional life in affordable housing construction and delivery. Within Saltspace, they joined the Committee in 2023 and they have played a key role in developing the new business plan development and funding applications.
Luke 'Luca' Cockayne
Luke 'Luca' Cockayne (he/they), (b.1990) is a conceptual artist and writer based in Glasgow’s Southside. Previously known as Ana Hine, his work has featured in The Queer Dot exhibitions at Generator Projects, Cooper Gallery, and Slessor Gardens, the ‘Phreaking Gender’ installations with Nicole O’Reilly (including at the CCA’s Creative Lab during SQIFF), and the solo exhibition ‘Funeral For My Deadname’ at SaltSpace. Previously the editor of The Skinny’s ‘Deviance’ section, his writing has appeared in the Gay Times, DIVA, Hens Tae Watch Oot Fur, TYCI, Artificial Womb, and the recently published Poetic Sexploration anthology among other places. He likes watermelon vapes, LGBTQIA+ movies, and guava-flavoured energy drinks. He was excited to join the SaltSpace committee, having taken part in various other SaltSpace events and activities since he moved to Glasgow in Spring 2021. He’s particularly grateful they’ve let him join after he displayed the remnants of his guava-flavoured energy drink consumption at the members show in ‘In Finite Worlds’ in 2022, which he admits may have been on the borderline of ‘interesting conceptual art commentary’ and his own curiosity. He enjoys supporting & encouraging emerging and early-career artists. It’s now 10 years since he graduated from art college with a First Class degree and he’s living proof that while it’s hard work maintaining an art practice it is possible. He hopes he has acquired a tiny bit of sharable wisdom - even if it’s only how to hang a painting.