A workshop talk and tour of mirrors and portraits in Pollok House, Glasgow. Part of the residential research project Cabinet Interventions. For an audience of other participating artists, invited guest, the staff of Pollok House and visiting public.

My contribution to a day of three workshops by artists participating in the residential research project, Cabinet Interventions. The other artists presenting at this workshop were Shauna McMullan and Sarah Forrest. I led a guided tour around selected rooms of Pollok House and used examples from the collection of mirrors and portraits to explore relationships between representation, self-image, vanity and time-travel. This questioned the nature of the photographic image versus the painted. It questioned the paradox of Nicolaas Henneman’s Talbotypes of etchings for John Stirling-Maxwell’s Annals of the Artists of Spain. Using the example of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, uncertainty around the wave-particle duality of light was alluded to, and the imaginative pathway this offers into the idea of time-travel through mirrors.

Invited attendees were: Participating artists Alan Currall, Sarah Forrest, Shauna McMullan, Jim Harold, Ruth Barker, Shona Macnaughton, Duncan Marquiss, Susan Brind, Joanna Peace; project co-ordinator, Grace Johnston; documentary photographer, Tine Bek; National Trust for Scotland (NTS) Property Manager, Karen Cornfield; NTS Education Officer, Dr. Joseph Murray and NTS regional curator, Emma Inglis. The workshop was also freely accessible to the visiting public.