From Jan-Apr 2025, 16 Collective will host resident artists Suds McKenna and Luke Shand in our new temporary Trongate space, with support and space for their self-directed residencies. We have invited the artists to respond to the site of 173 Trongate, which we currently occupy through partnership with OuterSpaces, near the mediaeval city centre of Trongate, former site of a market square and forum. The programme centres themes of queering public spaces through artistic explorations of dissent, public address and vocality that reclaim and reimagine social spaces from/with marginalised bodies.

Luke Shand seeks to reanimate queer histories through his artistic practice. Using painting and installation queer histories are reactivated through processes that bring together existing archival materials and auto-fictional elements. Through his work he attempts to enmesh remnants of the autobiographical with archival relics to inform new understandings of queer histories. He Frankensteins together queer, Scottish, and personal histories into congealed fragments. This is funnelled through the genre of horror as a strategy to challenge misrepresentation of the monstrous queer, and to ultimately surface the underlying queer intimacy. His work critiques the neglect of queer ephemera in institutional collections.

Shand plans to work on converting parts of his installation work from his recent MLitt Degree Show entitled “Drifters” into a new body of work currently titled “Capsules”. The work would move from installation into more condensed, intimate works on board which would physically collage fragments of queer, Scottish, personal and horror histories. Shand will research Scottish queer nightlife histories through archival visits to the Scot. National Records and interviews with activists and researchers. Scans and facsimiles of archival material and other traces of this research will appear throughout “Capsules”.

Suds McKenna is an Irish artist based in Glasgow. McKenna presents work across drawing, painting, print and sculpture, depicting both individual and social bodies in addressing ideas of selfhood, performativity, commonality and Queer world-building. Through the citation of popular cultural forms his work explores referentiality as an act of outreach and connectedness, while understanding the performative as a gesture of boundlessness; of Queer autonomy, reclamation and recovery. With a primary focus on the figurative form, these works tend to call upon industrialised image-making traditions – namely cartoon and illustrative media – as means of evoking shared memory and experience. 

McKenna’s residency will continue his artistic focus on queer conviviality, researching visual cultures of fairgrounds, caricatures, etching, and airbrushing. He will undertake a period of research and development in airbrushing techniques within etching, using acrylic aquatint – a non-toxic and safer alternative to traditional rosin aquatint – alongside collaborator Flo Eckersly. His aim in this work is to investigate a personal urge for connectedness, while employing languages of ubiquity and industrialisation as tools for asserting agency – centring the queer body and experience within these image-making traditions.

Each artist will design and host a public event inviting audiences and communities to engage with their research and practice.