Art reviews: Margaret Salmon | Claire Barclay | Glaswegians | The Scene from Within

Margaret Salmon: Assembly, Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow ★★★

Claire Barclay: Kinskins, Glasgow Print Studio ★★★★

Glaswegians: Cranhill Arts, Alistair McCallum & Jane Carroll, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow ★★★★

The Scene from Within, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow ★★★★

Any film by New York-born, Glasgow-based Margaret Salmon is worth seeing, so I was looking forward to her solo exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery. While it’s an interesting show, and I would expect nothing less, I’m having to overcome my disappointment that it doesn’t include any finished film work, either new or previously shown.

Assembly is a kind of work in progress, a presentation of the research and idea-gathering she has done in the process of making a new feature-length film, To A God Unknown, an assembly of ideas, images and bits and pieces of film.

It feels a bit like being allowed to snoop around her studio, to inhabit her thinking space. Images are collaged on the walls, both her own photographs and found material. There’s a table covered with objects: books, feathers, dead flowers, toys, a Star Wars storm trooper figure, a bar of chocolate from the Kamala Harris campaign. The domestic, the artistic and the political are interwoven.

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There are other assemblages of objects which feel more intentionally sculptural - she calls them “thought objects” - displayed in units used in previous exhibitions. Salmon is interested in what it means to make art as a woman and a mother, and to try to support yourself and your children through art. Trainers are a recurring theme, perhaps because of the speed at which children grow out of them. Letters about child benefit mingle with ideas boards for the new film.

Her community in Kelvinside and Maryhill is also important. There is a brightly coloured painting of a heron by Maryhill Artist Jo Sunshine, who is also the subject of one of her short films, though the film feels more like a collection of rushes: sometimes image and sound, sometimes sound only.

The film work screened in the show includes outtakes from Home, an atmospherically eerie short film she made for Channel 4’s Random Acts which prefigures some of the themes of To An Unknown God, and a “screen test” with singer Pippa Blundell, who will feature in the new film. Salmon has also gone behind the scenes at the Hunterian itself, exposing the invisible labour - by cleaners and technicians - which keeps the museum functioning.

The show will be added to (the next iteration starts on 23 September) and those able to make repeat visits might see an expanding picture. I get that Salmon is committed to showing her workings, and that “research” for an artist can be personal and intuitive. I get, too, that making film is expensive and deadlines can slip (I don’t know if that’s what has happened here). But I can’t completely shake my disappointment at not seeing finished work, either new or existing.

Claire Barclay, by contrast, never presents work that is less than finished, even in a show which is about research and experimentation. Barclay undertook a production residency at Glasgow Print Studio and KINSKINS is the result, a deep dive into the possibilities of printmaking. It is all recognisably Barclay: her abstract language of shapes and colours, her interest in and sensitivity to materials.

Using printed works on calico to divide up the gallery space and obscure sight lines, she takes the viewer on a journey, first through several print series which use the same shapes and colours in different ways, then on to individual works which gradually become more sculptural: Figments Fragments and Located Pieces are as much relief sculptures as prints.

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The big work which might be the show’s culmination is Grey Area, a multi-panel piece made from layers of black and white relief prints. While it features the same strong, simple forms, some of the pages are deliberately crumpled, becoming three-dimensional and revealing a further layer of print underneath.

Then, before you leave, if you go round clockwise, there is a small diptych which includes a photograph of a neolithic piece of cloth from Edinburgh University’s Archaeology collection. This is a kind of key: you can read references to it in mesh shapes all the way back through the show.

It feels as if there are new discoveries for Barclay here: the calico monoprint Gesture Capture has a degree of vigour and movement in it which is unusual in her work. In the series Thinskins, she captures colour, texture and sensuality which is very much like skin. The texture of oak woodblocks is beautifully rendered in her prints, another way in which they almost become three-dimensional.

Glasgow is a much photographed city, and one of the biggest collective photography projects in its history was the Glaswegians project of 1989-1991, based at Cranhill Arts. The work of these mostly anonymous photographers has not been shown since an exhibition at Tramway in 1991.

The selection now at Street Level Photoworks, Glaswegians, is as vivid as ever. This is Glasgow by Glasgow: the boxing gym, the shopkeepers, the kids, the pubs, the football terraces. The photographs are accompanied by a selection of the posters designed by Alistair McCallum & Jane Carroll, screenprinted at Cranhill Arts, which offer the political and musical context of the period: anti-poll tax protests, ANC fundraisers, a fascinating glimpse of a moment in time.

The other half of the gallery houses The Scene from Within, a collection of projects from different time periods which capture aspects of Glasgow which were about to vanish. Malcolm R Hill and Keith Ingham were part of a group of amateur photographers invited by Elspeth King, curator at the People’s Palace, to document The Calton in 1976, just before much of it was demolished. These, too, capture a moment in time: drinkers outside a pub in the Calton, Paddy’s Market in full swing, kids playing in derelict tenements, the scrap collector with his horse and cart, the Great Eastern Hotel in its days as a homeless hostel.

Mandy Edwards photographed shopkeepers in Dalmarnock and the East End in 2010, amid fears that the area would be changed by the Commonwealth Games in 2012, and revisited the project in 2024 while the city anticipated a second Games, and Gerry D’Ambrosio photographed life in one of the city’s roughest pubs.

D’Ambrosio ran a gaming machine business and was a keen amateur photographer. His work took him to pubs, including The Jungle at Cowcaddens, and when the pub was slated for demolition in the early 1970s, he started to document it with the support of the landlord and clientele.

Though he later moved to Perth, it was his hope that one day his photographs would be shown in a gallery in Glasgow. He died in May, as plans were being made for this exhibition. His candid, spontaneous pictures celebrate not only the last days of one pub but also a particular era and its culture. Without a doubt, they steal the show.

Margaret Salmon until 19 October; Claire Barclay until 4 October; Glaswegians and The Scene from Within until 5 October

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