‘A mansion of many apartments: The visual art of Alasdair Gray’, was delivered 17 June 2022, at the ‘Making Imagined Objects‘, 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference, at University of Strathclyde.

In this keynote I aimed to move from the ‘unfinished’, the beginnings and stuff of making and materiality, through to the ‘finished’ artworks and how they inhabit the world. I examined Gray’s visual analogies in order to see how they informed on his working process and themes; and then moved through a chronology of his exhibitions from the 1960s’ to 2019 in order to place Gray as an artist, in a wider context.

This conference was hosted by the University of Strathclyde, the University of Glasgow, and the Alasdair Gray Archive, in partnership with the Glasgow School of Art, the University of Western Brittany, Aix-Marseille University, Edge Hill University, the University of Lausanne and the Tannahill Fund for the Furtherance of Scottish Literature.