CARC X STRANGE FIELD: Let the Artist Make Art
by Darriel Patrick
1/9/2026
Location
105-109 French Street
Glasgow
G40 4EH
Labour, absurdity and survival at Strange Field
From 17 to 20 August 2026, Strange Field (Instagram) in Glasgow presented A Cat Asked My Boss to Fire Me from the Factory Because I Am a Talented Artist, an exhibition curated by Alexandra Orlova and presented in collaboration with CARC – Centre for Arts, Research and Culture.
Its deliberately improbable title introduces the exhibition through humour, but the condition it addresses is concrete. The project turns attention towards a part of artistic practice that normally remains outside the exhibition space: the labour required before an artwork reaches the wall, screen or floor.
Visitors usually encounter a finished work. What disappears behind that final form are the hours spent developing an idea, searching for materials, dealing with practical problems and financing its production. The exhibition begins with this gap between what artistic work looks like from the outside and what it actually demands from those who make it.
The work behind the artwork
At the centre of Alexandra Orlova’s curatorial premise is a familiar contradiction. Many artists live between two forms of work: the job recognised socially and economically as a “proper” occupation, and the artistic practice pursued before it, after it or alongside it.
In this sense, the exhibition is concerned not only with the production of artworks but with the professional conditions surrounding them. Time, money, rejection, other employment, anxiety and persistence become part of the wider picture.
The fantasy contained in the title offers an absurd solution to this divided existence. An outside power appears in the form of a cat – imagined as a figure capable of intervening and announcing that the artist should simply be allowed to make art.
In Orlova’s text, the cat develops into a metaphorical totem: a disruptive figure that declares anarchy in the territory of the “proper job”. The comic premise gives the exhibition room to approach the seriousness of artistic labour without reducing the project to a conventional professional argument. The joke and the difficulty remain present at the same time.
Work, absurdity and the everyday
Several works in the exhibition enter this curatorial framework particularly directly.
In Saul Auty’sView From Bridge House (2026), oil on canvas, the relationship between employment and artistic experience becomes explicit. Auty describes the painting as being inspired by his time working as a postman. From the upper floors of Bridge House, the ordinary act of delivering letters opened onto fleeting encounters with the lives of its residents and a strange sense of distance from the town below.
The workplace here is not simply a biographical fact outside the painting. It becomes material for observation and memory.
Auty’s other contribution, A Note About Rupert (2025), oil on canvas, brings the feline figure directly into view. In his accompanying text, a black cat preparing to jump exists alongside parking tickets, illness and the absurd structures of everyday life. The work asks why certain things matter so intensely against a much larger background of uncertainty.
The cat in Auty’s painting and the cat in the exhibition’s curatorial fiction are not the same proposition, but their proximity is productive. In both cases, an ordinary animal becomes entangled with questions larger than itself: control, absurdity, anxiety and the systems through which daily life is organised.
Rejection as performance
The professional life of an artist appears from another direction in Lucia Jones’s Unfortunately, on this occasion, your application has been unsuccessful... (2025), oil and acrylic on board.
Jones describes the work as a response to the “peaks and troughs” of being an artist and to a fear of rejection that can eventually become almost laughably predictable.
In the self-portrait, curtains, spotlight and costume turn anxiety into performance. Jones connects the figure to Pierrot – the melancholy clown – while also referring to the contemporary meme of repeatedly applying clown make-up as a commentary on one’s own continued behaviour.
The result moves between vulnerability and comedy. Rejection is painful, but repetition gives it a theatrical rhythm; the artist becomes both the person experiencing the situation and the person watching herself perform it.
Within an exhibition concerned with the professional realities hidden behind artistic production, Jones’s work makes one of those realities unusually visible. The application, the refusal and the decision to continue belong to the practice just as surely as the eventual artwork does.
Interior conditions
Not every work approaches labour literally. The exhibition also brings the external conditions of artistic practice into dialogue with internal states.
In Demi Gao’s Interior Weather (2026), mixed media on canvas, anxiety is built through a layered visual structure. Family history, bodily vulnerability and the sensation of being examined overlap within a single image.
A Qing Dynasty jade pattern, a blurred face, a dental X-ray and an image originating in dental treatment occupy the same pictorial field. The artist describes the central figure as exaggerated, humorous and theatrical, while the apparent movement of the figure, scarf and bird remains trapped within the flat picture plane.
The effect is a form of suspension in which dramatic fear and dark humour coexist.
Distance, translation and return
Jaeyoun Lee’s Nourished by Your Coldness (2026), acrylic on wood panel, begins from the helplessness of watching a relationship reach a point that could no longer be changed.
The artist describes turning to conversations with AI while still in the relationship, then revisiting and analysing those conversations after the separation. AI was used again to translate mental images into visual form, creating a temporary distance from the emotions involved. Those images were later brought back into painting.
The process moves through avoidance, mediation and return. Plant-like forms, structures resembling a fish’s spine and an underwater atmosphere suggest transformation and adaptation. In the artist’s account, the work reflects on how anxiety and helplessness rooted in relationships can remain as conditions that continue to change a person rather than ending simply in exhaustion.
When an ordinary object becomes strange
Rebecca Rae’s Pizza (2025) takes another route. Made in silicone, the work recreates a pizza whose origin was itself almost implausibly ordinary: a hot pizza encountered on the side of the road after a night out.
The object passed through several stages of reproduction – clay, vacuum forming and finally silicone – becoming, in the artist’s words, a “replica of a replica”.
By changing the material and embracing silicone’s softness and instability, Rae makes a familiar object behave incorrectly. Pizza is still recognisable as pizza, but it has become materially unreliable.
Rae situates the work within a practice rooted in absurdity and humour, using the everyday as a source of what she describes as the odd and beautiful within the world. Here absurdity is not simply a joke added to an artwork. It becomes a method of looking again at what has become too familiar to notice.
Different media, different answers
Elsewhere, the exhibition extends its questions through markedly different media.
Marcello Mazzella’s Employment Status (2026) introduces the language of work directly through its title and printed form. Choin Lee’s Fals Sun (2026) uses steel and a plastic light diffuser. Kate Street’s Nesting Season (2024) combines a book, collage, feather, glass paper weights, a found bracelet, bath plug chain, nylon, fluorescent paper and hooks. Sophie Keith’s The Bad Thing (2026) extends the exhibition into video performance.
Across the documented works, oil painting appears beside acrylic, mixed media, print, silicone, sculptural materials, found objects and video performance.
This material range matters because there is no single visual answer to the exhibition’s central question. For one artist, professional life appears through a former job; for another, through rejection. Elsewhere, the works move through anxiety, relationships, absurdity, repetition and the transformation of an everyday object.
The exhibition at Strange Field
Presented at Strange Field, 105–109 French Street in Glasgow, the exhibition brought these different artistic languages into a shared physical context.
At Strange Field, paintings and mixed-media works appeared against the venue’s exposed surfaces, alongside sculptural objects and video. The display does not require the works to look alike in order to belong to the same curatorial conversation. Their differences make the exhibition’s premise broader: the conditions around artistic practice can enter a work directly, indirectly, materially, psychologically or through humour.
Curatorial perspective
As curator, Alexandra Orlova places the professional circumstances of art-making inside the exhibition without separating them from the imaginative, emotional or absurd dimensions of artistic practice.
The project begins with an economic and professional reality – the hidden labour behind art and the divided lives of artists who maintain other employment – but it does not translate that condition into a single documentary statement.
Instead, the fantasy of the cat becomes a way of holding contradictions together.
The exhibition can be read through its deliberately comic title, but the title leads back repeatedly to material questions: Who has the time to make art? What work remains invisible when an exhibition opens? What does persistence look like when artistic practice has to coexist with other forms of labour? And what kinds of images, objects and private strategies allow an artist to continue?
There is no miraculous cat waiting outside every workplace. The exhibition’s premise depends on that impossibility. Precisely because the solution is fictional, the circumstances that produced the fantasy become more visible.
Exhibition Facts
Exhibition:A Cat Asked My Boss to Fire Me from the Factory Because I Am a Talented Artist
Curator: Alexandra Orlova
Dates: 17–20 August 2026
Venue: Strange Field, 105–109 French Street, Glasgow, G40 4EH
Presented in collaboration with: CARC – Centre for Arts, Research and Culture