Gallery 3
25 November 2023 – 30 June 2024

Wednesday is Cobalt blue, Friday is Cadmium red features acrylic paintings on canvas, framed prints, shaped acrylic canvas works and a wall drawing. This show is a deeply personal culmination of recent work that makes a powerful statement about who Ainsley is as an artist living in Glasgow and draws strands together from nearly 50 years of art practice.

This exhibition is the first major institutional show in the city for Sam Ainsley since her 1987 solo exhibition Why I Choose Red at the Third Eye Centre, now CCA: Centre for Contemporary Art. This solo show was named after Hugh McDiarmid’s intensely political poem ‘Why I Choose Red’. Where the final line reads “….But, best reason of all, a man in a red shirt can neither hide nor retreat.” – to Ainsley’s mind the man in this poem is also equally woman. Red reappears in this new exhibition and for the artist represents passion, joy and love, but also fire, blood and the colour of revolution. Her work is joyous, bold and celebrates passion and imagination – but it is always profoundly politically and socially conscious, and this resonates through the titles and visual references in her work.

Wednesday is Cobalt blue, Friday is Cadmium red has been supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.

An important show for Ainsley, Wednesday is Cobalt blue, Friday is Cadmium red arrives on a wave of interest in her work since her solo show at An Tobar, Tobermory in 2017. In the last 12 months alone she has had solo presentations at the Royal Scottish Academy, Leeds Arts University, and is included in the major Tate Britain group show Women in Revolt! which opened on 7 November 2023.

Sam said: “I am really excited to be working with GoMA for my first one person exhibition in Glasgow since ‘Why I Choose Red’ in 1987. I feel it encapsulates almost all of the concerns and ideas I have worked with for many years- it is a sort of summation of a life-time’s work.”

Sam Ainsley’s interest in the human body (especially the female body, however abstracted) and its relationship to the world in which we live has been at the core of her work and has remained constant despite shifts in the focus of her attention over the years:

“My parallel interest in relationships between the natural world and the human body, maps and mapping has also been consistent as has a fascination with scale; both the microscopic world (the very small) and the macroscopic (very large ie. the world seen from above). The relationship of our bodies to landscape and the man-made world ie. trees seen as the lungs of a city, rivers as arteries and so on has long fascinated me. Many of my works are also influenced by literature, poetry and geo-politics. The body has become a kind of landscape for me, familiar and with powerful memories. Imagining the body as a landscape or as a mirror of the world that sustains us can be difficult in the centre of a city, but I try to relate these thoughts to the man-made world too.”

PRESS
SCOTTISH FIELD
Herald Scotland 27 November 2023
The Times – Five Things to do in Scotland this week
Herald Scotland – My Cultural Life 8 December 2023
The Sunday Post 17 December 2023 
Scottish Art News 10 January 2024

About the artist

Sam Ainsley was born in North Shields, England in 1950 and completed her foundation course at the Jacob Kramer College, Leeds (1973) before studying painting at Newcastle Polytechnic (1974 -77). After graduating from Newcastle, Ainsley spent a year in postgraduate study at Edinburgh College of Art. When she completed her post-graduate diploma there in 1978, an Andrew Grant fellowship award allowed her to teach part-time in the same department for a year.

Sam Ainsley has forged a remarkable career within the visual arts sector, nationally and internationally. She is an artist and teacher, and until 2005 she was Head of the MFA Programme at Glasgow School of Art. From 1985 to 1991 she taught on the Environmental Art programme under David Harding’s leadership, after which she co-founded the Master of Fine Art course. She has since worked collaboratively with David Harding and Sandy Moffat as AHM and continues to work independently in her studio. She is a respected and published spokeswoman for the visual arts, and her work is held in public and private collections nationally and internationally. Ainsley has contributed to a broad range of visual arts initiatives in Scotland and has served as a Board member on many arts organisations. 

Recent solo exhibitions include: Out of Redness Comes Kindness (2023), Vernon Street Gallery, Leeds; Sam Ainsley (2023), WINDOW, Perth; Stories Real and Imagined (2022), Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh; Alternating Currents (2019), Islensk Grafik, Reykjavik, Iceland; Sam Ainsley (2017) An Tobar, Tobermory, Mull

Group exhibitions include: Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception (2023), Dovecot, Edinburgh; Transforming Tradition; Scottish Women Artists (2022), Sainsbury Centre, Norwich; On John Berger (2022), Zembla Gallery, Hawick; New Scots, RSA Edinburgh, Atlas of Encounters at I Space Gallery, Chicago and Athens, Live your questions now and Studio 58 Mackintosh Museum, GSA and After Growth and Form at Glasgow Print Studio. Ainsley was also represented in two exhibitions in Edinburgh and Glasgow to mark the 30th anniversary of The Vigorous Imagination, a landmark exhibition held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1987. She was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy and was inducted into the “Outstanding Women of Scotland” by the Saltire Society in 2017.