Take a peek at the work of Glasgow School of Art graduates

JAN PATIENCE

which can be manipulated like a tiny fun fair, Anderson has created the possessions of a fictional character by the name of Enargeia Crow.

Crow’s playthings, she tells us, have been bought on the back of him having “made billions from his international warehouses, shipping, storage and a fleet of delivery drivers and cyclists”. They have now been “seized in lieu of outstanding taxes by HMRC”. It’s a clever take on the excesses of contemporary global capitalism.

On that note, times are tough in artsy land and in art education, but creatives are always quick to sense the ways in which the wind of change is blowing and adapt accordingly.

The majority of students in this cohort have risen to the Covid-19 challenge and made the best of a bad job. Nothing compares to the real thing, but as Tom Graystone points out presciently, his key aim was “how to break down the boundary of the screen in a time where we are, more or less, restricted by it.”

In creating a 3D reproduction of his tenement flat for his body of work, he brings it all home to where the art is.

CAMPLE LINE in Thornhill, Dumfries and Galloway, is an oasis of contemporary art. It has reopened its doors with American artist Helen Mirra’s exhibition Acts for placing woollen and linen.

Cample Mill is a poignant location as it operated as a spinning and weaving mill before being repurposed several times throughout the last century. Standard Incomparable is a collection of 65 weavings made by weavers from 16 countries as part of a project begun by Mirra in 2015 when she was artist in residence at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum. The project was initiated by Mirra with an open call, appearing in 23 languages, for simple weavings with a particular set of qualities: “a more or less square, plain-woven piece, of a width matching the length of the weaver’s arm. Yarn of local & undyed plant and/or animal material, in seven alternating stripes (of shades or weights) the width of the weaver’s hand (incl the thumb).”

In evolving this show for CAMPLE LINE, Mirra had in mind two pieces of relatively short-lived 17th century legislation, the Burying in Woollen Acts, signed by Charles II into English law in 1666 and

1680, and the related Act for Burying in Scots Linen, passed by the Parliament of Scotland in 1686, Mirra has an enduring interest in bleachfields; open areas established in mill towns in the 17th and 18th centuries, and used for spreading semi-finished linen cloth on the ground to be purified and whitened by sunlight.

Helen Mirra, Acts for placing woollen and linen, CAMPLE LINE, Thornhill DG3 5HD, 01848 331000, https://campleline.org.uk/ Until September 19. Thursdays to Saturdays, 11am to 4pm. Entry is free but by pre-booked appointment only

ALL MEN WANT TO KNOW

Nina Bouraoui

Viking, £12.99 (ebook £7.99).

An introspective work of autobiographical fiction, Nina Bouraoui’s narrative shifts seamlessly between a confused 18-year-old in 1980s Paris, and the narrator’s childhood in Algiers, Algeria, which became independent from France in 1962.

Offering disjointed snapshots of a life torn between two competing identities, All Men Want To Know is a deeply personal exploration of cultural and personal identity, sexuality and belonging.

Written in a dreamy, lyrical style, the narrative gives a sense of unravelling as much as it does coming together.

Raw and sensual, readers will be enraptured by the narrator’s intense evocations of guilt, desire and longing, delivered in passages of beautiful, erotic poetry disguised as prose.

SCARLETT SANGSTER