Meet Govanhill Baths’ Culture Collective Artists
As part of a national Culture Collective scheme, we’ve been hosting five wonderful artists who have been working with the Govanhill community. Over the next few months, we’ll be revealing some of the wonderful things they’ve been working on and some of the workshops they’ll be holding within the community, so keep your eyes peeled for more details!
In the meantime please meet…
Mark Bleakley
Formally trained in visual arts Mark graduated from Newcastle University in 2013 with a Ba Fine Art. His practice is rooted in social dance through Bboying (Breakdancing) and more recently House dance. He is interested in creating spaces or situations for artists and audiences to come together to share space and explore ideas mutually. His work explores how We handle things; people, objects and how objects handle Us through: environments, architecture, and social structures.
Recent exhibitions and performances include: Platform 2020, Edinburgh art festival, UR- Prototyping, CCA Glasgow (2019) Future Fictions festival (2019); Hospitalfields, Processions with Katie Miller (2019); How we handle Things, Rhubaba Gallery and Studios (2019); Schema chapters I-III, research commission, Talbot Rice Gallery and associated venues (2018).
Mark Bleakley lives and works in Glasgow.
Ros Fraser
Ros is a radio and digital artist, interested in the intimacy of audio and the ability of projections and sound to transport us. Her sound work spans installations, documentary, podcast series and film. She wants to create sound design that feels visceral, playful and fosters empathy.
A serial question asker, Ros’s past sound topics have explored; what happens to our brain chemistry when we listen to music? How will we date and fall in love 20 years from now? And what does it take to speak out?
Alongside this, Ros has developed hologram and light show projects, working with Montreal’s Digital Arts Festival; Chromatic as well as community groups. Self-taught, Ros uses open-source softwares to make work, and wants to demystify what it means to use tech. Her aim is to bring people along with her to feel encouraged to experiment and self-express, using sound and light.
Mina Heydari-Waite
Mina Heydari-Waite is British-Iranian artist and facilitator living and working in Govanhill. Central to her artistic practice is an interest in the reciprocal relationships between places and communities, their histories and their emergent futures. Past work has included installation, sculpture, video, print, performance, text and sound, often undertaken in a variety of community and collaborative contexts.
Mina currently has a solo show at Collective Gallery (Edinburgh), In sleep it made itself present to them (2021). She is the Engagement Coordinator for A Moment’s Peace, a participatory arts organisation in Glasgow, and is working as an Independent Facilitator for a Glasgow Artist Moving Image Studios research project, supporting a working group to develop a response to initial proposals for the redevelopment of Govanhill Picture House. In 2020 Mina was selected to be part of Collective Gallery’s Satellites Programme and in 2019 she was a recipient of the Jerwood New Work Fund for her work همسفر.
Linus James Rowe
Linus is an artist based in Glasgow. Their practice intersects several overlapping disciplines, including academic folklore studies, folk music, foraging, botany, environmental restoration, queer theory, history and experimental archaeology. They are particularly interested in using their practice to explore two ideas: ’re-seeding mythologies’ and ‘the re-enchantment of the world’.
Linus works with social theories of history and the changing nature of human relationships to the natural world – as well as the evidence for this across time. They are keen to explore the roles of social hauntings, narrative, folklore, ‘realms of memory’ and story-telling in facilitating ways to engage with potential futures, and access elusive traces of a past that has gone untold. In order to work effectively across these areas, Linus has also undertaken training and education in environmental surveying, ethnobotany, permaculture practices and a qualification in Phytological Medicine (European Herbal Medicine).
Linus believes that artists working in communities and the ecological world can fit into a neglected niche in western social and historical understandings of the landscape – the void where the cunning people, the peasant rebels and the women labelled witches once stood on unenclosed land. They use gender neutral pronouns.
Felipe Bustos Sierra
Felipe Bustos Sierra is a BAFTA-winning Chilean-Belgian filmmaker based in the southside of Glasgow. His debut feature-length documentary, “Nae Pasaran”, won the Best Feature award at the 2018 BAFTA Scotland Awards where he was also nominated for Best Director (Factual). He is the founder and creative director of Debasers Films, an independent film company based in Glasgow. He’s currently working on “Kenmure Street”, a new feature documentary and a year-long project with the Govanhill Baths Community Trust Culture Collective.
His short fiction and documentary films have screened at over 100 international film festivals. He’s a member of Eurodoc and a Berlinale Talent Campus and the EIFF Talent Lab alumni.
The Documentation Department:
Bircan Birol – Video Maker, bircanbirol6@gmail.com
Jude McKechnie – Writer, admin@govanhillbaths.com
Erika Stevenson – Photographer, hello@erikascamera.co.uk
Arts Manager
Tim Nunn – tim@govanhillbaths.com
Tim Nunn is an arts producer and curator, writer and consultant. He has a passion for dance as an art-form, photography as a means of self-exploration and learning. From 2012 to 2018 Tim programmed Tramway in Glasgow and created an internationally renowned core programme of dance and the biennial Dance International Glasgow (DIG) festival.
Based in London then Glasgow from 2003 he has produced national and international theatrical and exhibition tours, large scale site-specific work and been published as a writer and photographer. He is a proficient fundraiser achieving income of £1.3 million for his projects in the last ten years. From 2005 to 2012 Tim was the Specialist Advisor for performing arts to the Cultural Enterprise Office.
Tim has been an arts producer and curator with, amongst others, the Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, Battersea Arts Centre, Central School of Speech and Drama, the NHS, various environmental campaigning organisations and three years as Project Director for the outreach team at the London Royal Academy of Arts.
Before working full-time in the arts Tim was a professional international human rights campaigner including eight years as director of the Tibet campaign.
