Return 02 (28 - 30 September 2026) is a show simultaneously run in Glasgow and Tokyo.
The exhibition brought together thirteen international artists working across painting, moving image, digital art, installation, glass, printmaking and mixed media.
In addition to myself, the other arists included: Baoyue Zhang, Clare Schouten, Claudia Ungersbäck, Esha Malik, Hengtai Zhang, Herbert Neuwirth, Jiawei Yu, Josie Johnson, Leon Crayfish, Monika Tkaczyk, Sofia On and Vincent Corrèze.
CLICK HERE for a PDF of the show and links to the works of the other artists.
RETURN O2
The idea behind Return is deceptively simple. What does it mean to return? Not simply to a place, but to a memory, a language, a relationship, a family history, a culture, or even an earlier version of ourselves?
Following Return 01, which focused on bodily awareness, emotion and our place in the world, Return 02 moved outward to explore how individual experience connects with wider cultural life through language, family, place and everyday experience. Appropriately, it did so across two very different cultural settings, with the exhibition taking place simultaneously in Glasgow and Tokyo. booklet
Across the exhibition, return took many forms: memories of places once lived, inherited cultural traditions, migration and diaspora, family separation, language, landscape, identity and imagined futures. What I particularly liked was that return was not treated simply as going backwards. Memory changes. Places change. Relationships change. We change. What returns is therefore never quite what was there before.
Displaced Memory
What is memory, self, place, language? In the final stages of my mother’s dementia, everything blurred together or disappeared. Music was a way to communicate; she loved to sing. Born in the States, the daughter of immigrants from Slovakia. Me, now living in the UK, a new immigrant, caring for my mother from abroad, sorting out the distance and its fracture. On a video call at her skilled nursing facility, her singing Slovak Christmas songs, returning to a language I don’t speak, and to a time and place lost to the past. My brother by her side, my daughter sitting next to me, listening, and me recording it all three thousand miles away, knowing it will all just be a memory (displaced) very soon.
(NOTE: Adjust YouTube settings to HQ 1080 to get the best image and sound)
Displaced Memory connects directly to Return 02 through its exploration of memory, language and family history and the instability of trying to recover them. For my mother, the Slovak songs become a form of cultural return, partial and displaced: they belong to her inherited past and to my own family history, but to a language I do not speak. Yet, now, a way to connect. Living in the UK, that earlier world is also beginning to blur for me and my family. We find ourselves telling the stories of our past again and again as our own cultural rapprochement, a way of reconciling where we came from with the life we have made in a new country.
The recording preserves a trace of a moment already slipping into memory.
The moving-image work reconstructs the moment through sound, portraiture and digital imagery, centred on a mind-like tangle of spheres and connections that gives visual form to language, place, and self as entangled, even as those connections shift, blur or disappear.
CLICK HERE to watch it on YouTube if the link above does not work.
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