Details

Object type

conceptual

Title

Easels

Artist/Maker

Tom O'Sullivan maker

Joanne Tatham maker

Culture/School

Glasgow School of Art

Place Associated

Scotland, Glasgow (place made)

Date

2016

Materials

plywood, glass, brass mirror plates, B&W photographs and digital logo

Description

Easels is a conceptual work by Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan. They have been working in collaboration since 1995, after meeting during the MFA Fine Art programme at The Glasgow School of Art in 1993.

Easels includes fifteen framed black and white photographs of artists in their studios in Glasgow, taken by the artists and each framed in an idiosyncratic hand-made wooden frame. The photographs are shown in 3 rows of 5. The fifteen framed works in Easels are accompanied by an illustration, showing a hand drawing of the title alongside a cartoon of a pencil and the Earth hugging each other. It is digitally printed as an artists’ credit label and displayed alongside the photographs. The logo may also be used to create a distinct item of “merchandise”, such as a tote bag, a T-shirt, a tea towel or a baseball cap.

Easels was first made for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2016 and shown as part of a solo exhibition by the artists at The Modern Institute. On one level Easels functions as a seemingly anthropological gaze on Glasgow’s visual art community at a moment in time, but the formal and aesthetic decisions employed by the artists disrupt interpreting the work as a piece of documentary photography. Within an international visual festival that invites people to come and ‘experience’ and celebrate this community, Easels intends to remind its viewers that narratives may not always be reliable.

“Rather than offering a straightforward representation of an art scene, Easels wants viewers to consider what it might mean to make such a representation. We want to initiate questions of a viewer, not just about artists working in Glasgow at a particular time, but about how images of such things are created and circulated, and by whom and for what reasons. In this, Easels, is characteristic of the wider interests of our art practice, within which we consider contemporary art and its activities as a phenomenon requiring investigation and analysis in itself.” Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan 2025.

Credit Line/Donor

Gifted by Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, 2025

ID Number

ICE.2025.2

Location

In storage