The work of Glasgow-based artist Andrew Sim explores Queer love, relationships and community-building through figurative and landscape pastel drawings. Sim uses culturally familiar ‘monsters’ such as Bigfoot and werewolves as the subject matter of their drawings, elevating them and using them as archetypal representations of aspects of Queer love and divinity. Sim’s creatures stare out from the canvas, sometimes nervously, challenging the role of the cis-het gaze in the interruption of Queer life.

The beings in Sim’s work occupy a space ‘betwix’d man and angel’ (in the words of 17th-century folklorist Robert Kirk), a space between the everyday and the divine that Queer people can often find themselves in. Sim’s work explores the stresses placed on Queer lives by the duality of the Queer experience, existing as both an isolated and idealised cultural image and an individual, as both monster and divine.

Sim’s works are often small-scale pastels on paper and this is their first exhibition of new large-scale works on canvas.

Supported by Glasgow International