Shaper/Caper is delighted to have commissioned 10 artists who identify as LGBTQ+ to participate in our Queer & Now programme, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
The bursary programme, Queer & Now, involves 10 artists researching & developing work as part of an action research project for an exhibition which runs parallel to our current tour of Small Town Boys.
Small Town Boys is an award winning show exploring the escapism of queer nightlife during the 80s & early 90s AIDS crisis through dance and spoken word.
The Queer & Now exhibition explores the queer experience with themes around Section 28 and LGBTQ+ culture in the 80’s and 90’s, right through to present day.
The exhibition opened in July 2024 at Perth Theatre, then will tour to Stirling, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness and Dundee.
The Queer & Now artists worked with OurStory Scotland to learn about collecting and curating oral history.
We also invited some brilliant creatives to create some masterclasses about their field of work. From dramaturgs to museum curators, check out the full series of free masterclasses below.
Artists
AJ Duncan (she/her)
@ajd.illustrates
‘I’m a Glasgow-based artist who predominantly creates feminist illustrations centered around the everyday experiences of women and non-binary folk. My work typically depicts narrative scenes, simply hanging out at home or at the bar. Representation is particularly important to my practice - my work strives to make all intersections of women and queer folk feel seen, particularly in the visual arts where certain intersections such as disability and differing body types are often underrepresented.’
Alex Hayward (he/him/they)
I identify as a gay man, and as a queer person.
@tibby_schlegel
‘Originally from Devon, I moved to Edinburgh in 2016 to partake in the BA Painting programme at Edinburgh College of Art.
I magpie across television, photography, books, architecture, film, theatre, and beyond to find what shines. My degree show explored queer desire and longing through the ballet; which led me to collaborate with renowned choreographer Sir Matthew Bourne and his company ‘New Adventures’.
More recently my practice has focused on the urban-rural dichotomy, and how those environments impact what it means to be socially, culturally, politically, and sexually queer.
I am drawn to canonically softer materials like pencil crayon, watercolour, and gouache. There’s a wish to centre my childhood modes of making, challenging hierarchical relationships between media, fine art and craft/hobby, adult and childish, and between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’.
I have exhibited across the UK, including four times at the Royal Scottish Academy, and had work acquired by the University of Edinburgh’s Art Collection. I was recently invited by Perth Museum to install a new work exploring living rurally as an LGBTQ+ person in Scotland, as part of their exhibition ‘Unicorn’.
I’m very proud and excited to be responding to ‘Small Town Boys’, and to continue my interest in dance theatre and storytelling with a specifically queer and Scottish focus.’
Bart Grabski (he/him)
@bart.east
Image credit for headshot 1 - captured by Nicole Paterson, Gray’s School of Art, 2024
Bart Grabski is a passionate advocate for community engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration, driven by his Master's studies in Curatorial Practice. With a focus on amplifying underrepresented voices, Bart has dedicated his career to facilitating projects with marginalised communities. His freelance work as a Facilitator for the Founding Lab in Austria honed his skills in fostering cross-disciplinary dialogue.
As the Digital Media Engagement Co-Ordinator at Robert Gordon University (RGU), Bart elevates the institution's digital presence, contributing to societal impact and student recruitment. During his tenure as an assistant researcher at RGU's School of Social Sciences, Bart focused on amplifying migrant voices through innovative research methods. He played a pivotal role in a British Academy-funded project, employing art-based research to explore the experiences of middle-aged EU nationals in post-Brexit UK. Bart's work sheds light on migrant challenges and advocates for their recognition and empowerment. Additionally, Bart engages in freelance creative projects, notably as a Producer of Queer Events at Aberdeen Performing Arts, fostering dialogue and celebration within the LGBTQ+ community.
His dedication reflects a profound commitment to social change and inclusivity.
Brian Evans (he/him)
@insta_bri_
Brian is an actor and writer from Glasgow. He gained a first-class honours degree in Drama and Performance from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, in 2021. Since then, he has garnered success by contributing to multiple award-winning theatre productions, including performing in Ode to Joy (How Gordon got to go to the nasty pig party) at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022. He has recently been longlisted for A Play, A Pie and A Pint’s prestigious David MacLennan Award for his writing. He is passionate about creating and sharing queer stories and narratives through the medium of playwriting and performance. Brian is excited to be a part of the Queer & Now Programme with Shaper Caper to develop his writing skills further and foster connections within the queer arts community through his writing.
Ciaran Cannon (he/him)
Ciaran is a multi-media artist who is intrigued by the things society casts aside: metals and other materials that disintegrate, morph and change texture in response to environmental processes. He often works
with found objects and materials through sculpture, installation and film.
Ciaran worked with Shaper/Caper on their 2022-23 Queer to Stay programme and is delighted to be back working alongside them on their Queer and Now project which will involve oral histories research and
artwork to accompany their inspiring and incredibly moving Small Town Boys production. He currently has work in the joyfully queer ‘Unicorn’ exhibition in Perth Museum until September 2024. Ciaran’s work - Breakthrough! - explores the insubstantiality of gender through sculpture formed of salvaged metal found in different locations in Scotland.
https://www.instagram.com/ciaran_cannon_/
https://2022.gsashowcase.net/2022/03/26/ciaran-cannon/
Fiona Percy (she/her)
Fiona is a visual, mixed media textile storyteller from Forres, Moray. She identifies as a queer, menopausal, disabled, neurodivergent, care giver, her work reflecting the intersectional nature of self. Her methodology cycles through continual creative loops; gather, create, destroy, repeat.
She graduated from UHI with a BA(Hons) Fine Art Textiles in 2018 and PG Dip Art and Social Practice in 2022. Personal responses and socially engaged group work are two strands that ply together within her larger practice.
Exploring heritage crafts along with contemporary artistic practice she plays with ideas relating to nature’s reciprocity, its recurring iterations echoing her bodily interactions.
Her material choices including flora, fibre, and folk knowledge imbue a readable provenance within her work. Copper is also significant representing conduction, transformation, and protection.
She has worked with several marginalised groups from within northeast Scotland Rural communities, exploring the individual and collective lived experience together with ownership of place.
Forced othering and invisibility, be it consensual or not, fractures both personal and communal sense of self and through these interactions, bridges are spanned between disparate communities of practice.
She creates maps of place and people working as cyphers for new migratable artefacts. These artefacts are tactile repositories of the traced and forsaken, a challenge issued to the empirical heteronormative, they hold layers of place, time, and self.
Iona Rose Wheeler (they/them)
@iona.rosew
Iona Rose Wheeler is a multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker from Glasgow, Scotland. They specialise in experimental filmmaking, using analogue film in new ways to explore physicality and queerness.
During university, Iona wrote their dissertation on reality television and volunteered with the feminist society and Sexpression (a sex and relationship education charity). Iona is interested in video documentation as a medium and reading intersectional feminist and queer texts.
After graduating from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 2022, Iona has worked on multiple film projects. Iona’s films have been shown at screenings, festivals, and exhibitions including the Scot Re:design festival, LeithLate Festival, Generator Projects Annual Members’ Show, and Edge Code 2019.
Working with Shaper/Caper, Iona will be leading their own project for the first time in two years and they look forward to learning and creating alongside other queer people.
Lyra Sands (she/her)
Lyra is an Interaction Designer and New Media artist. Her work spans from small digital artefacts, music, prints and pieces of code, to community based participatory projects, research, and collaborations.
Her current interest is in combining sensory technology with movement, sound and play as well as exploring data driven narratives.
She explores and engages with the fringes of queer society – Sex Work, DIY healthcare, BDSM and other countercultural movements - communities, she believes, are the cornerstone for queer liberation and whose voices are often supressed.
Her work draws from lived experiences of being transgender and surviving in a hostile society. Often slipping between “worlds”, discovering joy in places of perceived darkness and taboo, facing adversity from systemic institutional transphobia, amplified by current "culture wars".
She believes community, intersectional solidarity and sharing our stories are key to continued survival.
Nina Marianne Scott (they/them)
Nina is a Geordie/Scottish theatre-maker, musician & facilitator who has recently moved to Glasgow. Their work explores different creative & collaborative tools for social change and often merges queer methodologies, verbatim, choral music, science/political communication & deep silliness.
Nina is an activist trainer at ULEX & a lecturer in Theatre for Social Change at Rose Bruford Drama School. They are Artistic Director of Be More Mushroom, which explores fungi as an educational tool for having intergenerational conversations about queer & trans identities through workshops, fungal drag and a raucous musical for kids.
Nina is a long standing member of queer choral collective, F*Choir and has been developing a queer method for co-creating political choral songs from verbatim. They have co-written & directed two verbatim musicals, Land of the Three Towers: Vol 1 & 2 which travelled to 6 London housing estates sharing tools for housing resistance.
They have longstanding solidarity with queer struggle & HIV activism, organising with ACT-UP London & as managing editor of Positively UK Magazine.
www.ninamariannescott.com
@ninamariannescott
Picture Credit: Brontë Fae
Ross Whyte (he/him)
Ross is a Glasgow-based composer, sound artist and arranger. In 2012 he completed a practice-based PhD in Musical Composition at the University of Aberdeen where his field research was concerned with impermanence in audio-visual inter-media and headphone specific composition.
His compositional output often includes collaborations with artists of disciplines different to his own, including dance, theatre, film and the digital arts.
He has released three albums as part of Gaelic ambient electronica due WHYTE (with singer-songwriter Alasdair Whyte). The duo was awarded the art and culture trophy at the 2019 Scottish Gaelic Awards.
Ross currently performs with the band A New International.
He has recently received commissions from BBC Alba, Sound Festival, Tron Theatre, Theatre Gu Leòr, National Theatre of Scotland, Art Walk Porty Festival and Ceòl is Craic.
Ross’ new solo album, Provenance, is coming out soon.
Masterclasses
As part of Queer & Now, we have invited lots of amazing creative queer people, from dramaturgs and playwrights to museum curators, to create a 30 minute masterclass in which they discuss their field and offer some advice! Check out the series below. New videos released each week. Captions will either automatically appear for some videos and for others they are available by selecting the CC option on the bottom right of each video.
Nat McGrath Masterclass
Natalie McGrath (she/her)
Nat is a Playwright, Dramaturg, Poet and Co-Director of Dreadnought South West and Queering the Museum project's in the South West. She is based in Devon and Scotland, is Writer and Dramaturg for Shaper/Caper's Small Town Boys and The World Is My... her play The Beat of Our Hearts, produced by Exeter Northcott Theatre is available to stream and published by Salamander Street. We'll Meet In Moscow was a digital commission for the Traverse Theatre, and she was awarded Self-Led Funding by Playwrights Studio Scotland to develop a new play; Cusp and work with the lesbian archive at Glasgow Women's Library. Her work has toured across the South West region and beyond. Current project's are; Pink Plates and Shipwrecks, a new initiative for LGBTQIA+ people impacted by cancer, and Natalie is also tentatively writing her first book. www.nataliemcgrath.net
Jules Stapleton Barnes Masterclass
Jules Stapleton Barnes (she/her)
Jules is producer of the Somewhere for Us podcast, championing LGBTQ+ arts, culture, heritage and enterprise across Scotland and beyond. With a background in radio broadcasting and music, she has worked in LGBTQ+ community development in Edinburgh for over 14 years, where she lives with her wife and 5 year old.
Louise Dickson Masterclass
Louise Dickson (she/her)
Following graduating Duncan of Jordanstone with a BA in Fine Art in 2019, I am currently Assistant Curator at V&A Dundee. My practice takes a people-centred approach which prioritises access, agency and empathy. I value collaboration, working with others and storytelling, and believe museums can be sites of social justice through small acts of activism.
Dominic Bilton Masterclass
Dominic Bilton (he/him)
Dominic is a project producer, working primarily on the Whitworth’s adult public programme, and a socially engaged curator. He co-curated (with Imogen Holmes-Roe) the exhibition, (Un)Defining Queer in collaboration with the charity LGBT Foundation in Manchester. He is currently working on the new socially engaged exhibition, Recoverist Curators in collaboration with the ‘recoverist’ arts organisation, Portraits of Recovery.
Dominic developed the project Queering the Whitworth providing a framework for the Whitworth’s LGBTQIA+ focused programming. His writing can be found in the journal Stages, which is published by Liverpool Biennial, and he has co-edited the upcoming special edition of the journal Art and the Public Sphere: Queer(ing) art, curation and collaboration.
Dominic has taught on the MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies: Curating Art module at the University of Manchester, where he also supervises MA dissertations. His current research interests are in the innovative approaches to socially engaged museum practice, Arte Útil and Constituent Museum practice.
Playlist
Listen to the music from Small Town Boys here.
Photos from Small Town Boys
