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Owain McGilvary

Profile Picture of Owain McGilvary

Owain McGilvary

  • Lecturer in Painting & Printmaking
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Job Title
Lecturer in Painting & Printmaking
School or Academic Area
School of Fine Art
Email
o.mcgilvary@gsa.ac.uk
Professional Address
Stow Building, 43 Shamrock St, Glasgow G4 9LD

Biography

I work with video, drawing, collage and painting, activating the intersections between these disciplines in installation contexts. My practice pays close attention to personal, national archives and social encounters that centre marginalised and misunderstood subcultures. I have worked with amateur wrestlers, drag queens, publicans, genderqueer punk musicians, translators, writers and poets to develop collaborative, multilingual installations that combine moving image essays with cut-and-paste collage interventions. I tend to embrace a lo-fi, experimental approach to shooting and editing, favouring handheld footage, abrupt montage and glitched images. This formal vocabulary allows the work to remain porous, reflecting process, rumour and misremembering, rather than the compliance of cinematic polish.

My approach to making is queer in form and method. It legitimates desire, parasociality, fannish attachment and non-linear association as valuable modes of knowledge production. Rather than aiming for narrative authority or tidy historiography, the work seeks out slippages, contradictions and informal archives where unofficial histories are held.

Previous projects have assembled new archives of amateur photography from a demolished North Welsh gay bar, made speculative narrative interventions within the collection of National Museum Cardiff, and co-produced a video portrait of a collective of women and non-binary wrestlers. These projects explore how histories are formed through desire, and how collaboration offers a strategy for subverting and pluralising the institutional record.Through collage—on paper, in sequence and in the edit— I experiment with how subcultural materials might be ruptured, repeated or recomposed through affective devotion.

Latest Additions

  1. McGilvary, Owain and Huw, Dylan (2024) Fel gwacter. Mostyn, Llandudno, Wales, 5 Oct 2024 - 25 Jan 2025
  2. McGilvary, Owain and Cameron, Bobbi (2024) I'm attended as a portal myself. 5 Florence Street, 7-23 June 2024
  3. Coutts, Nicky, Rogers, Henry, Hannah, Michelle, Hodson, Elizabeth, Murray, Liz, Šik, Becky, Topping, Jane, McKee, Francis and McGilvary, Owain (2023) Queereal Secretions. Annex Gallery, Stow Building, The Glasgow School of Art, 13 November - 15 December 2023

Most Viewed Items

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1Fel gwacter14763
2I'm attended as a portal myself11638