We are excited to announce that Erin McGrath, HUSS, Jennifer Honnan, Robyn Woolston and Rylan Gleave have been commissioned to create new pieces of work in response to this year’s festival theme, ‘Comfort & Disturb’.
This year’s commissions will explore bipolar disorder, post-natal depression, disability, displacement, and living with a brain tumour diagnosis, each from a deeply personal perspective rooted in lived experience. The work includes two short films, a sound piece, a comic, and a textile artwork. The commissions will be showcased on our website and, in some cases, at events during the festival. You can read more about the individual artists below.
The themes these commissions are exploring may be challenging, for the artists themselves as well as audiences, and the five artists will be offered support by the SMHAF team throughout the creative process.
We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who applied to this commission. We received over 250 applications this year – more than ever before – and there were so many compelling proposals that we wish we could have supported. We are committed to supporting a diverse range of artists to explore mental health through their work and we hope we can find ways to support your work in the future.
About the Artists
Robyn Woolston
Robyn Woolston is an interdisciplinary artist who makes work “navigating the thresholds where material, memory, and ecology converge”, often working outside of galleries in landscapes, archives, and national parks. Robyn plans to make an artist film in response to a recent brain tumour diagnosis, drawing parallels between her own health crisis and the climate emergency, and inviting viewers into “the quiet, sometimes disorienting space where devastation and beauty co-exist”.
The work journeys through the visceral experience of living within a body, and mind, that has become both familiar and yet foreign. Referencing the unseen membranes of the self (the meninges or brain lining), the film mirrors a planet in crisis. Just as the brain tumour disrupts the internal ecosystem of the self, so too does climate change disrupt the symbiotic balance of the Earth.
HUSS
HUSS is a Glasgow based Arab artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans performance, film, moving image, and sound, blending personal and political themes. He is developing a short film composed of fragments shot during his final visit home to Cairo just before he was outed and forced into exile, alongside archival material sent from his family home.
The film is an act of reclamation, transforming what was once discarded into a queer Arab utopia shaped by memory, longing, and the refusal to forget. It offers comfort in the act of returning to the archive while holding space for the psychological disturbance of displacement, loss, and the grief of becoming unrecognisable to the place you once called home.
Rylan Gleave
Rylan Gleave is an award-winning composer and vocalist making music under the name All Men Unto Me as well as with Paraorchestra, avant-metal outfit Ashenspire, Berlin based jazz-punk class-work, and Chamber Music Scotland. He plans to make a new audio work using the broken and detuned sounds of a 1960s Gemini transistor organ, an old instrument whose access needs mirrors the artist’s own life experiences with disabilities, neurodivergence, and mental ill-health, through a trans and queer lens.
I believe this piece will be an uncomfortable listen for some, being incredibly sparse at times, but with a through-line of tenacity and hope that illuminates the warmth of community.
Erin McGrath
Erin McGrath is a Glasgow born artist who works with illustration, comics and animation. She plans to make a comic exploring her experience of new motherhood, post-natal depression and care giving, using notes and sketches she made in the year after giving birth.
New motherhood for me was a time of extreme inner conflict where my comfort felt demanded of me and my inner voice was shocked and unfamiliar. The impulse to hide what I felt during that time is entirely connected to a sense of shame and a societal understanding of what a new parent should be feeling or saying. I took huge comfort and inspiration in finding other mothers’ experiences in art and film yet I am still battling entrenched ideas of artwork about motherhood being somehow unwelcome or unworthy. I would like to smash these notions out of my psyche by making this work.
Jennifer Honnan
Jennifer Honnan is a printed textile designer based in Paisley, working under the alias Pure Barkin. Her work draws on her personal experiences with bipolar disorder, aiming to connect with others through honest storytelling and wearable art. Jennifer plans to make a textile artwork incorporating imagery and text from personal diary entries and illustrations created during various mood episodes; depressive, manic, hypomanic, and baseline.
Through this work, I hope to provide solace to those who can relate, and perhaps a deeper understanding for those who cannot. The comforting aspect of this piece may lie in the emotional familiarity it offers some viewers, even in the depressive or hypomanic states, while others may find these same elements unsettling. To heighten this contrast, the print may be transferred onto a traditionally comforting textile item, such as a vintage quilt or bed sheet, drawing on the tension between the soft, nostalgic fabric and the emotionally raw imagery.
