It seems fitting on International Women’s Day 2016 to shout about upcoming solo presentations at GoMA by amazing women artists. First up for GI2016 are two shows for the acclaimed Directors Programme with Cosima Von Bonin in Gallery 1,  Who’s Exploiting Who in the Deep Blue Sea?,  and Tessa Lynch in Gallery 3, Painter’s Table.

Von Bonin’s exhibition Who’s Exploiting Who In The Deep Sea? (opening 8 April until 7 August) brings together a series of works from 2006 onwards exploring the artist’s affection for the creatures of the sea. Working with textiles, music, sculpture, performance, video and painting, her practice is varied and often collaborative in nature.

The artist’s cast of characters are a host of contradictions – approachable creatures who are reminiscent of childhood companions are not what they seem. Weaving together humour with melancholy, these sculptures have ambiguous roles and feelings. Von Bonin is able to use these creatures as agents to explore art history, popular culture and craft, to destabilise perceived constructions of feminism. She has created her own crew to explore the deep sea, where, as an analogy of the human condition it is a true place of the unknown.

The exhibition is co-curated by GI 2016 Director Sarah McCrory and SculptureCenter Curator Ruba Katrib. The exhibition will open in September at SculptureCenter.

Tessa Lynch works predominantly with sculpture and performance. Projects develop from research concerned with the emotional impact of the built environment and the questionable existence of the female flâneur, which refers to a man who saunters around observing society, or ‘flâneuse’.

Lynch describes her new exhibition Painter’s Table (opening 8 April until 12 June) as an architectural drama: a collection of new sculptural works which loosely mimic the objects, scenarios and histories found on her daily commute. The mundane examination of this regular transition from home life to work life generates a self-portrait, exposing what it is to be a female artist living in this city.

Frequently using performance as an active framework for making, Lynch has shared her commute with writers Jenny Richards and Rhona Warwick Paterson to create a new text and performance work. Similar to how a map allows one to navigate city roads and streets, the text offers viewers a script through which one can navigate this installation.

This show includes accompanying performances on Saturday 23 April and booking is required.

Also in GI2016, as part of the Across the City programme, is a performance with the artist Ilana Halperin, FELT EVENTS. GoMA and the artist Ilana Halperin invite a small audience to the Fossil Grove in Glasgow, where Halperin will deliver an intimate spoken-word performance amongst the 330 million year old fossilised tree stumps of an ancient forest. Saxophonist Raymond MacDonald will join the artist on the fossil floor for a geologic call and response.

Halperin’s title, FELT EVENTS refers both to the term seismologists use to describe earthquakes and to an early body of work she made in 1998 shortly after moving to Scotland from New York. For the Fossil Grove event, Halperin and MacDonald will re-visit a performance they gave at the mouth of Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa in May 2014.

GoMA is working with the artist Ilana Halperin to realise this performance with saxophonist Raymond MacDonald. FELT EVENTS was first conceived with Comar in 2014 while Halperin was in residence with the venue for GENERATION. The opportunity to work with Comar and Halperin has developed through planning for the upcoming screening of Halperin’s film The Center for Short Lived Phenomena (1973/2003) and Physical Geology (new land mass/fast time) (2009), the final work in the moving image programme for the exhibition Ripples on the Pond (screening 11 March – 24 April 2016) and through discussion with the artist about Victoria Park (Fossil Grove), a work that was acquired by Glasgow Museums in 2007. The event also coincides with the re-opening of Fossil Grove for the season in 2016.

Winter Trees, 2013, Jacqueline Donachie,  Mixed media installation © Jacqueline Donachie, 2015, Photo Alan Dimmick, Courtesy of Patricia Fleming Projects

The final solo presentation to talk about is the upcoming exhibition by Jacqueline Donachie Deep in the Heart of Your Brain, opening to the public on 20 May 2016. Deep in the Heart of Your Brain is an exciting new commission with GoMA, supported by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award. This solo exhibition by Donachie will include sculpture and drawings made in the last five years alongside new works developed out of a period of research with a group of women affected by myotonic dystrophy and made in collaboration with the UK Patient Registry at The John Walton Muscular Dystrophy Research Centre in Newcastle. Donachie has also received support to work with GoMA on this exhibition and for further research from the National Lottery through the Creative Scotland Open Project Fund.

We are very excited about these shows by brilliant women artists coming up. You can also visit GoMA today on International Women’s Day 2016 to see the exhibition of women artists in the Glasgow Museums’ collection: Ripples on the Pond, with over 40 women artists represented. The exhibition is designed as a conversation between works by women on paper and moving image to explore the genealogy of women artist’s practice in the city. It takes as the starting point recent acquisitions from the Glasgow Women’s Library 21 Revolutions series, relating them to other works from collection and sparking questions about gender and media choice in relation to women’s practice and visibility. The final event for this exhibition is on 21 April. This screening of works by Rosalind Nashashibi is programmed by Modern Edinburgh Film School with the support of LUX Scotland and LUX.

Ripples on the Pond was supported and developed by  Affiliate: Thinking Collections (a University of Glasgow programme funded by Creative Scotland) and Modern Edinburgh Film School, along with LUX Scotland and Glasgow Women’s Library.