4_past projects

In November, 2019, MUCK (Shona Robin MacPherson & India Boxall) and The Nature Library hosted a silent walk from
Project Cafe to Cowlairs Park in Glasgow.

Before walking, workshop goers were invited to select some of the copies of texts to take with them and read to themselves in order to motivate critical thought whilst on the silent walk.
Walkers were asked to record field notes in the form of writing to informally discuss after the walk.

Upon reaching the park, we sought to converse on notions of adrift-ness in a structured landscape, informed silences, field notes, nuanced knowledge that can be found when listening to your surroundings and the importance of The Nature Library in Glasgow within the context of our current epoch.

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit weaves the reader through a calm tangle of scientific observation, colour theory, invisible histories and personal anecdotes. This workshop encouraged using Solnit’s nuanced perspective to inform us of the necessity to listen to a landscape. Donna Haraway uses the term "Situated Knowledges" as a radical approach to noticing and documenting claims to knowledge that are ignored or left out of linear, and often white-washed, accounts of global history.

Copies of sections of Solnit’s text will be available at The Nature Library, currently hosted by Project Cafe, Glasgow.
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MUCK would like to thank all workshop-goers, The Nature Library
and Project Cafe, Glasgow.

During the easing of Covid-19 lockdown restrictions
in the summer of 2020, MUCK was approached
by online zine Horrid Covid! to produce a
commissioned text in response to the theme of the fifth issue: in sickness and in health

India Boxall invited Niamh Moloney
to engage in a digital discourse on Niamh's text Drawing on The Body, which lives in
MUCK's online library and in other pockets of the web.

India gathered a carrier bag of references for humans who want to seek out critical thought on health, illness, and the question: are we all sick under capitalism?

𝖆𝖗𝖊 𝖜𝖊 𝖆𝖑𝖑 𝖘𝖎𝖈𝖐 𝖚𝖓𝖉𝖊𝖗 𝖈𝖆𝖕𝖎𝖙𝖆𝖑𝖎𝖘𝖒?

MUCK (Must Use Critical Knowledge) and aTE collaborated to bring together a number of textual prompts to instigate questions around the possibility of Earth’s recovery and eventual demise, in relation to multispecies interconnectivity. Taking place in isolation, artists around the world were invited to provide accompanying sound works reflecting on their own territories, the fantasy of other places and the excitements and restrictions of proximity and distance, prior to and beyond time of Covid-19.

An interactive feed, Stream invites workshop goers to respond to themes presented in the work of Matty Rimmer, MUCK’s gathering of research and selected source materials from The Nature Library.
A live feed of a biotope artwork situated in the Botanical Gardens, Glasgow took place on 16 Nicholson Street Gallery & Collective's Facebook account. Utilising the platform’s real time collection of data as a fluid method of establishing a waterfall/stream of comments that comprise a collective text.

The comments act as a feed in themselves - the visual and the textual feeding into each other to form new overlaps in knowledge - the natural environment entangling with domestic space through technological apparatus - ecological narratives of scarcity and pollution transmitted into your living room...

𝕾𝖙𝖗𝖊𝖆𝖒

𝕱𝖎𝖊𝖑𝖉 𝖓𝖔𝖙𝖊𝖘 𝖔𝖓 𝖆𝖉𝖗𝖎𝖋𝖙-𝖓𝖊𝖘𝖘

𝕸𝖀𝕮𝕶 𝖝 𝖆𝕿𝕰 𝖘𝖔𝖚𝖓𝖉 𝖑𝖎𝖇𝖗𝖆𝖗𝖞

Giving Voice To was a two-part workshop designed and facilitated in response to Pardes, a sculptural installation by artist Jyll Bradlet at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh.

Embodied drawing, rhizomic word flows, & voicing/reading aloud/hearing in uni(s)on gave way to folding, tearing, spiraling, redacting, cutting & shifting: these layers becoming a held space for new connectivity and emergence across disciplines ~ for ourselves, each other, more-than-humans, & our materials, all lit softly under the warm green canopy of Pardes.

Threaded through our forays were source materials collected together as a choral library, underpinning a future iteration of MUCK's encounter with the installation.

Special thanks to Freya Yeates & Fruitmarket Gallery for inviting us.

to hold, from below was a two day guided workshop that centred on themes of nourishment in our climate-chaos-pandemic-realism. In unison with In Session, Embassy Gallery, and hosted at WHALE Arts, our workshops sought to ask:

How do we, as creative people, guide ourselves and each other through this chaos and ensure that we nourish ourselves and our practices in the process?

MUCK’s hope for to hold, from below was that the cohort would channel their previous experiences into an activated space held in unison by all bodies and minds entering the WHALE Arts venue. In a hope to level hierarchical facilitation methods, we tried to negotiate the workshop context through guided chats about sustainability (what hasn’t sustained you and why? How can we use imagination to negotiate sustainability for our present selves and each other and the planet? Is “sustainability” a good enough word for this action?) and porous activities that sought to engage with the site specificity of the venue.

We incorporated breathing exercises alongside experimental drawing and writing practices, in an effort to engage with the language and terminology rippling around themes of sustainability and resilience. These words were tugged at, pulled apart, and reassembled via recalling embodied memories to invite imaginative presences. Uncovering the etymological roots of these weighty words enabled us to illuminate their meanings, inviting us to identify with their resonances in new ways. In the final few hours of day two, we dedicated time to exploring how to write a collective text using the new words we had conjured during the previous sessions.

The texts encompass the idea of a floating or expanding glossary, one that permits a disturbance of language, vocabulary, and semantics to suspend power relations, gesturing to bold, alternative knowledges.

to hold, from below was an exercise in repositioning the self in response to the possibility of such a glossary: a vocabularic tool that can be summoned to engage in the world with a kind of care, in the hope of encouraging a collective nourishment.

The workshop was held in July, 2021.

Images courtesy of In Session

𝖙𝖔 𝖍𝖔𝖑𝖉,
𝖋𝖗𝖔𝖒 𝖇𝖊𝖑𝖔𝖜

𝕲𝖎𝖛𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖛𝖔𝖎𝖈𝖊 𝖙𝖔

People Make Animals was a 4-part workshop series, facilitated in collaboration with artist and friend Matty Rimmer at Glasgow Zine Library between 2022-23.

Conversations around anthropomorphism have led us to ask the question: why do we care about some animals more than others? Through drawing, cut & paste, free flow conversation, sticker- and zine-making, we sought to further entangle this question with broader themes of ecocriticism and anti-capitalism.