Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Art
 

Suds McKenna

A black ink drawing of a crowd of people on a white, torn-out sketchbook page. Most of the figures are pictured from the neck or shoulders up and have cartoonish, exaggerated features. They are rendered in scratchy pen lines with cross-hatched shading or no shading at all. The figures are densely packed together with some emerging out of an indistinct shadowy backdrop
Suds McKenna, Untitled, 2023
Courtesy of the artist
suspended on a curved wire frame hung from ceiling knitted cardigans with extra long arms, in a room with wooden flooring, fireplace, wooden sash windows and dark green walls
Emelia Kerr Beale, Trust for Support, 2022
Installation view, Edinburgh Art Festival 2022, French Institute, Edinburgh
Photograph: Sally Jubb
A cast aluminium lamb is posed leaping. The lamb has shiny markings across its body and a rough salty surface. There is a small pink gash in the side of the lamb. The lamb sits in front of a white painted wood background
Jonny Walker, I slipped through the veil, 2022
Courtesy of the artist
A coloured pencil drawing depicting a woman with curly hair and a green dress. In her hand she holds a wine glass which is spilling red liquid. Over her left shoulder a swan with teeth bites a lock of her hair.
Josie Perry, Tamara and the Swan, 2022
Courtesy of the artist and San Mei Gallery, London. Photo by Jack Elliot Edwards

The images shown above represent the Glasgow International 2024 project that Suds McKenna is participating in, as well as the artist’s individual practice.

Suds McKenna is an Irish artist working across drawing, painting, print and sculpture. His work depicts both individual and social bodies in addressing ideas of commonality, performativity and Queer world-building. Through the citation of popular cultural forms, he explores referentiality as an act of outreach and connectedness, while understanding the performative as a gesture of boundlessness, Queer autonomy, reclamation and recovery. With a primary focus on the figure, these works often call upon industrialised image-making traditions such as that of cartoon and illustrative media, as means of evoking shared memory and experience. McKenna graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2016. Exhibited work includes SAM’S EDEN at CCA Derry, A familiar plough into the knot of a tie at CCA Intermedia Gallery Glasgow, A many-voiced argument with life at Market Gallery Glasgow and Platform: 2019 at Edinburgh Art Festival. His illustrations have also featured in SAM'S EDEN #2, Letters to Assynt #2, Communal Leisure #4 and various issues of Elephant Magazine.

Projects

  • Programme
    Suds McKenna
    Where a castle meets the sky
    The Pipe Factory
    A coloured pencil drawing depicting a woman with curly hair and a green dress. In her hand she holds a wine glass which is spilling red liquid. Over her left shoulder a swan with teeth bites a lock of her hair.