Murmuration 2025/26, Artists and Partners
Intro
Our first Murmuration cohort ran from autumn 2025 into 2026. Through a process led by Strange Field, four artists working across sculpture, printmaking, textiles, ceramics and research-based practice were matched with community organisations and colleges in Glasgow’s East End. Their practices connect with themes of collective storytelling, responding to the built environment and alternative making.
The outcomes were not prescribed in advance. Each was shaped by the participants and their artist as the project developed, and every residency took a different path. The results included a public exhibition, permanent pieces for a community garden and a new partnership with a college.
Poppy Nash and PEEK
Over around six months, Poppy worked with PEEK’s young leaders aged 14 to 17. Rather than following a fixed curriculum, sessions were shaped with the young people around their own ideas, and each participant kept a sketchbook to carry on after the project ended.
The group explored photography, printmaking, creative writing, drawing, mark-making and archiving through workshops, studio visits and tours across the East End and beyond. They carried out archival research at Glasgow Women’s Library and wrote in response to their surroundings with writer and activist Joey Simmons. They also photographed personal and everyday objects with Morwenna Kearsley and experimented with intuitive mark-making with Fraser Taylor.
These ideas came together in screen-printed and digitally embroidered works made with Poppy and the local print studio Print Clan, and shown in a public exhibition. The young people experienced the full journey of a creative project, from first research through to presenting finished work.
Since the project, PEEK staff have noticed the young people starting creative activities on their own, continuing to work in their sketchbooks, and confidently questioning artists about their work at exhibitions.
“When I take part, I feel excited, interested and I’ve loved meeting artists with different interests.”
PEEK participant
Poppy Nash
Poppy Nash is an interdisciplinary artist working across textiles, printmaking, archival research and protest. She uses the materiality of craft to explore agency, care and resistance, informed by her experience of chronic illness and disability.
Camille Biddell × Bridgeton Community Learning Campus
From September 2025, Camille led a community clay programme with up to fifteen adults with connections to the East End, meeting on Fridays at Bridgeton Community Learning Campus. Across fifteen workshops she drew on her interest in heritage, the histories of objects, and storytelling through texture, form and mark-making.
The group began in the Barras, using sketchbooks and instant cameras to record textures and shapes around Strange Field’s temporary space. Back at the campus, they learned to print marks from slips on plaster onto clay slabs and to build by coiling. They also made their own ceramic stamps from textures gathered in local green spaces, which became a shared visual language across their pots, tiles and sculptures. Guest artists widened the group’s approaches: Grazyna Adrian led playful, collaged sculptural heads, and Silvie Cristofoli led a raku firing in the garden.
In the final block, the group designed and made two large pieces for the community garden, a bird bath and a flower basin. Both were inspired by the birds and wildlife that share the space, and they tell stories about the East End and the group’s relationship with the garden.
The residency has since grown into the ongoing Art & Garden Programme. Kelvin College students have led sessions, and the group is now building a bestiary-inspired pizza oven with artist Ezra Bernico of Kiln Klub as a permanent community resource for the garden.
Camille Biddell
Camille Biddell is an artist, potter and teacher making sculptural pottery rooted in traditional ceramic processes. Her work playfully reimagines the history and origins of objects, questioning ideas of function, ritual, heritage and place.
Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin × Glasgow Kelvin College
Gabrielle spent seven months as artist in residence with Art & Design students at Glasgow Kelvin College’s Haghill Campus. Students had direct access to a practising artist working towards a major public commission, at the same time as they were developing their own proposals for public art across the city. Through tutorials, crits, talks and skills workshops, they followed Gabrielle’s process from commission brief to finished artwork.
The residency sat alongside a wider programme with the college. HND students designed and delivered their first community workshops with PEEK, The Halliday Foundation, Bridgeton Community Learning Campus, St Mungo’s Secondary and Whitehill Secondary, reaching more than 80 participants. Seventeen of their workshop plans are now held in the Strange Exchange library as free resources for other arts educators.
The residency became the foundation of an ongoing industry partnership between Strange Field and Glasgow Kelvin College’s Art & Design department.
“Gabrielle was absolutely fab, so kind and understanding, and brilliantly talented. She showed us a unique style of printing that was unknown to me.”
Glasgow Kelvin College student
Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin
Gabrielle Lockwood Estrin is an artist and educator whose practice works in the expanded field of painting. She builds sculptural constructions from reconstituted drawings and prints that push against the limits of the flat surface.
Eva Jack × The Halliday Foundation
The Halliday Foundation is a charity supporting families with experiences of homelessness. Eva worked with its youngest participants, children aged 5 to 11 from Bridgeton and Dalmarnock, offering them a creative outlet within a supportive environment.
Eva Jack
Eva Jack is an artist and educator who works with archival material through drawing, writing, moving image and more. Her practice centres on walking, collecting, archiving and storytelling as ways of understanding landscape and belonging.