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Glasgow-based artist Hayley Tompkins once described her process as one of trying really to see something. Turning her gaze on everyday objects, she uses paint, photography and film to mark them, and mark them out, as things we might like to look at too. 

This exhibition brought together a selection of work made since 2007. It opened with the first ever showing of all Tompkins’s films (the earliest made in 2007, the latest in 2022) in a specially-designed new installation. Shot on a mobile phone or with the film function of a digital camera and shown hovering in the space on small, custom-built screens, the films look at the way we look, and seem to question why we look at what we do. They were joined by some of the painted everyday objects for which Tompkins is best known: paintings on shirts, chairs, and hammers, which collapse the conventional distance between a thing and a painting of a thing. The largest group of paintings on panel Tompkins has made to date – beautiful, complex abstractions exploring the material power of both colour and paint – completed the exhibition. 

Intimate and transgressive, Tompkins’s work plays with the feeling behind the mark and the energy of the art making process.

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Images: Ruth Clark