Comfort & Disturb
Artist Commissions 2025
Our 2025 festival theme, Comfort & Disturb, references the famous Cesar A Cruz quote about art as activism, the idea that “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. It is a simple expression of the power of art both to challenge and to console, often having a transformative effect on people and societies.
Four artists – Erin McGrath, HUSS, Robyn Woolston and Rylan Gleave – have created new work for our 2025 SMHAF artist commissions, exploring this theme across different art forms.
Their artworks explore post-natal depression, disability, displacement, and living with a brain tumour diagnosis, each from a deeply personal perspective rooted in lived experience. The work consists of two short films, a sound piece, and a comic.
Commissioned Artworks
Swell by Robyn Woolston
SISTOR by Rylan Gleave
Erin McGrath
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.
