'Tactical Scene' is a solo presentation of artworks at Govan Project Space, Glasgow. The overarching subject of the exhibition is the ways in which Modernist art and design appeared in Northern Ireland in the postwar period. Examples utilised to articulate this includes furniture by the English designer Rodney Kinsman, purchased for the newly completed wing of Ulster Museum in 1972, abstract artworks from the late 1960s by Roy Johnston, an artist little known outside of Ireland, and the now criminalised practice of kerbstone painting employed in council estates throughout Northern Ireland to signal sectarian affiliations. This aesthetic could be understood as functioning in a number of ways: as a form of paternalistic intervention from the British state, as a welcome means to escape a narrow conception of Irish art as one rooted in the natural landscape, or as an international tendency capable of being inflected with regional characteristics. These are competing positions that are brought into dialogue with one another here, so as to better consider their complex inter-relation.

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