The Little Award Show

Group exhibition
Below the Caledonian Railway Bridge
2nd November 2024

Matthew Casey
Rebecca Laverty
Theodore Stevenson
Kaiying Qian
Jessie Laithwaite

The Little Award Show presents small-scale artworks by five graduates from the 2024 Fine Art Degree Show at the Glasgow School of Art. The group comprises Jessie Laithwaite, Rebecca Laverty, Matthew Casey, Kaiying Qian, and Theodore Stevenson, alumni from Painting and Printmaking, Fine Art Photography, and Sculpture and Environmental Art.

The exhibition brings together a variety of practices and themes, all united by an interest in smallness — how it distorts our perspectives, creates intimacy, emotion, and intrigue.

Matthew Casey’s enchanting paintings produce fairytale realms, featuring ethereal, spirit-like creatures gazing over landscapes they are destined to explore. Using a muted colour palette of deep blues and ochres, Casey creates dreamlike atmospheres that captivate and intrigue.

Theodore Stevenson is an artist who collects and archives found objects like discarded car parts, broken bike locks, pins, and screws with the curiosity of a magpie. He transforms these components into new art objects, challenging their original functions and renewing their value.

Kaiying Qian explores themes of home and culture rooted in her Chinese heritage. Using photojournalism and archival photography, she delves into her family history, reflecting on time, nostalgia, ageing, and cultural communication within East Asian households.

Rebecca Laverty specialises in expanded drawing. Her mark-making features layers of lines, built up and scored down, reflecting the psychologically obsessive and distressed themes in her work. In her degree show, she explored her skin as a surface to live on, zooming in on the microorganisms that inhabit its vast landscape.

Accompanying the body of work exhibited in The Little Award Show, she writes:

“My drawings evidence an escape. Reality is harsh: I excoriate its surface, piercing existence and peeking through the hole, as though I’m lifting a rock to see the bugs underneath. I wish that my eyes were microscopes; I want to see what the ant sees— my body as a mere landscape, a backdrop, devoid of subjectivity and complexity. Occupied instead of occupying, experienced instead of experiencing— what a relief to live on me, and not inside me.“

‘On me as I die is a life just as huge’
Coloured pencil on paper

Jessie Laithwaite is a Glasgow based multi-disciplinary artist. She enjoys making art that is fun and allows for open interpretation.
This work is an ode to the ant. Jessie writes about the piece: “I think ants are clever and strong and hardworking and peaceful and kind and social and I think these are all things I want to be. I think their social structure is fascinating and I think they are beautiful, and I think we can learn a lot about ourselves by studying them.”

Little Ants II
11 x 5 x 8 mm
2024
3D Printed Eco Resin

The Little Institute

The Little Institute