The Glasgow School of Art

Lunchtime Talk: Alan Grieve
Thursday 18 September, Reid gallery, 1pm

Scottish Bothies - Unlikely Stories Mostly

Fife-based artist Alan Grieve takes you on a journey from Ben Alder bothy, deep in the Grampian mountains, to Inshriach Bothy at the foot of the Cairngorms and explains how remote Highland shelters have helped shape his art practice. This trip, spanning 20 years of Alan’s life, will be neatly condensed into a half-hour talk and is likely to feature Pictish cave drawings, a woman who can knit the future, Sorley Maclean and a golf ball that once belonged to Oscar Pistorius.

"Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no doubt that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misinformed, an infinite realm of nontruths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal." Milan Kundera.

Alan Grieve works in existing and purpose-built social spaces, creating events that sit somewhere between performance and dialogical artforms. Here, he begins a process based on social interaction and trust - the cornerstones of oral culture - collecting stories and objects that he uses to help create darkly funny, frequently scatalogical and often moving new narratives. He re-tells and remixes everyday tales, deliberately subverting the cosy conviviality of his own practice.

Part of the Programme ‘In a place like that’, Reid Gallery, 16-21 September 2014