![\"Luke](\"https:\/\/londoncult.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cockayne-luke_tree-museum_2026_grandmas-casserole_strange-field-glasgow_install-05_photo-choin-lee.jpg\")
<\/a>The exhibition took place at Strange Field, a former brick-red weaving factory in Glasgow\u2019s East End. It unfolded around a central work, Luke Cockayne\u2019s installation Tree Museum<\/em> (2026): a wobbly, circular structure functioning as a \u2018museum\u2019 for found, ordinary materials, such as branches, feathers, wool and ropes. Cockayne resorted to humour to provoke the authority of museum institutions in deciding which objects should acquire cultural value. At the same time, the work proposed a more generous possibility: that the dull, overlooked and apparently purposeless might deserve to be looked at, collected and cared for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The transformation of the insignificant into something profoundly meaningful was also pursued in Elizabeth Riddell\u2019s Backcourt Liz<\/em> (2026), in which a local heroine of the Glasgow household was elevated into a civic icon. Riddell\u2019s work operated between affection, nostalgia and absurdity, asking who and what becomes worthy of commemoration. Similarly, in Imogen Cowan\u2019s film Questo Ti Volevo Dire<\/em> (2025), family stories and superstitious rituals served as mechanisms to delay the anxiety of an inevitable separation within the family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Glenn\u2019s Story Time, Hold for 2x<\/em> (2026) employed humour to address a traumatic healthcare experience. The artist adopted TikTok’s personal storytelling as a strategy for relief and exorcism of bodily pain. The adopted comic approach also allowed her to address the social taboo of speaking publicly about women’s healthcare and eventually served a wider social function \u2013 to operate as an empathetic device for other women who share her same experience.<\/p>\n\n\n The loss of certainty and control was also at play in Margarita Shuvaeva\u2019s St Peter<\/em> (2025). The artist, however, did not resort to humour to address anxiety, but embraced contingency as part of the artistic process \u2013 the paint, kept deliberately diluted, exceeded the control of the gesture and began to drip. Going beyond representation, Shuvaeva created spaces that captured the structures and tensions of forms, where the vividly perceived gradually dissolved: an unfolding towards the unknown, in which the artist herself became a medium, a carrier through which the work took shape.<\/p>\n\n\n While Anna Solomko recurred to Augmented Reality to unsettle reality and animate a mural, Vlada Markinadova employed painting to explore how we project familiarity into the outside through our stories, memories, or associations. Markinadova deliberately used the artistic medium as a site where perception was re-activated. Spanning painting, drawing and sculpture, her practice develops around a research thread in which viewers are invited to complete the fragmented, the incomplete and the blurred with their own memories. In Transparent<\/em>, the painted landscape played with the idea of an abstract, generic image as a space the viewer could enter, finding comfort in a scene that became familiar through the act of projecting personal memories.<\/p>\n\n\n<\/a><\/a>