Alan Currall (born 1964) is an English artist based in Scotland. [1]
Currall was born in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England, and grew up in Staffordshire and Ayrshire, Scotland. Currall studied at the Glasgow School of Art and since 1993 has been based in Glasgow and rural Dumfries & Galloway.
Much of Currall's work is video-based, shot cheaply with a tripod-mounted camera, and features Currall himself. Message to My Best Friend is Currall apparently praising his best friend to the skies ("You've got a great record collection. The way you dress is cool but funky."). Other video works have seen him asking his parents for their advice on how best to survive such disasters as a shipwreck, a plane crash and nuclear war, and reading his own will out loud.
In 2000, Currall produced Encyclopaedia with the support of the film and video umbrella. Encyclopaedia is a CD-ROM encyclopaedia with video clips by 'non-experts' who have influenced the artist in some way, such as his friends and family.
In 1998, Currall won the Richard Hough Bursary. In 2003, Currall was shortlisted for the Beck's Futures prize. In 2004, Currall was one of five selected artists for the Jerwood Artists Platform.
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist. His artistic approach had much in common with European Symbolism. His work, alongside that of his wife Margaret Macdonald, was influential on European design movements such as Art Nouveau and Secessionism and praised by great modernists such as Josef Hoffmann. Mackintosh was born in Glasgow, Scotland and died in London, England. He is among the most important figures of Modern Style.
James William Somerville is a British pop singer and songwriter from Glasgow, Scotland. He sang in the 1980s with the synth-pop groups Bronski Beat and the Communards, and has also had a solo career. He is known in particular for his powerful and soulful countertenor/falsetto singing voice. Many of his songs, such as "Smalltown Boy", contain political commentary on gay-related issues.
Kirkcudbright is a town, parish and a royal burgh from 1455 in Kirkcudbrightshire, of which it is traditionally the county town, within Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland.
Sir William Connolly is a Scottish retired comedian, actor, artist, musician, and television presenter. He is sometimes known by the Scots nickname the Big Yin. Known for his idiosyncratic and often improvised observational comedy, frequently including strong language, Connolly has topped many UK polls as the greatest stand-up comedian of all time. In 2022 he received the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Glasgow Central, usually referred to in Scotland as just Central or Central Station, is one of two principal mainline rail terminals in Glasgow, Scotland. The railway station was opened by the Caledonian Railway on 1 August 1879 and is one of 20 managed by Network Rail. It is the northern terminus of the West Coast Main Line. As well as being Glasgow's principal inter-city terminus for services to England, Central also serves the southern suburbs of the Greater Glasgow conurbation, as well as the Ayrshire and Clyde coasts. The other main station in Glasgow is Glasgow Queen Street.
BBC Scotland is a division of the BBC and the main public broadcaster in Scotland.
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Robert James Collins was an English musician best known as the original keyboardist of The Charlatans.
Alan Thornhill was a British artist and sculptor whose long association with clay developed from pottery into sculpture. His output includes pottery, small and large scale sculptures, portrait heads, paintings and drawings. His evolved methods of working enabled the dispensing of the sculptural armature to allow improvisation, whilst his portraiture challenges notions of normality through rigorous observation.
Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion, known professionally as Dalziel + Scullion, are a Scottish artist duo. Dalziel and Scullion have worked in collaboration since 1993. Their studio creates artworks in photography, video, sound, and sculpture that explore new artistic languages surrounding the subject of ecology.
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Alex Frost is a British contemporary artist, exhibiting internationally.
Carol Mary Rhodes was a Scottish artist known for paintings and drawings of landscapes and marked by human intervention. Rhodes was born in Edinburgh, but spent her infancy and youth in Serampore, India. She moved to the UK in her mid teens and studied fine art at the Glasgow School of Art. Graduating in 1982 she became politically active around issues of disarmament, feminism and social justice. Her focus returned to painting around 1990, and she developed her distinctive idiom of aerial-view, ‘man-made’ landscapes around 1994. These began to be exhibited in the United Kingdom and internationally, and entered many public collections. Rhodes’s work, and her part-time lecturing at Glasgow School of Art, was influential for younger generations of artists. In 2013 she was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.
Marianna Simnett is a Berlin-based multi-disciplinary artist who works with film, installation, drawing, and sculpture. She is best known for her large-scale video installations.
John Bacon was a vintner and the landlord at the one time important hostelry named the Brownhill Inn, which lay in open country to the south of Closeburn in Nithsdale on the Ayr to Dumfries Road. From 1788 to 1791 the poet Robert Burns spent many an evening at Bacon's inn whilst travelling on his Excise duties. A coaching stop and hostelry, the inn lay about 7 miles north of Ellisland Farm, Burns's home before the family moved into Dumfries. During their tour of August–September 1803 Dorothy Wordsworth, with her brother William Wordsworth and mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge were hosted by Bacon and his wife at their inn.
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