KEITH BRUCE speaks to two guest artists who have brought Mexico's
Day of the Dead images to Glasgow
THE grinning skeletons that are the familiar image of Mexico's Day of the Dead celebrations seem appropriately happy. The two artists who created them and many other images are fulsome in their praise of Glasgow and the people they have met here. Magda Audifred confesses she is somewhat reluctant to go home.
She and Wayne Healey yesterday took off for Los Angeles after a three-week stay in Glasgow as guests of Glasgow Print Studio. The visit was the reciprocal leg of an exchange which began in 1994 for the UK/LA festival. The twinning arrangement was brokered by the British Council between GPS and Self Help Graphics in East LA.
Scots Ashley Cook and Janie Nicholl benefited from an enthusiasm for things Scottish from an initially sceptical organisation. Self Help, which is run by San Francisco nun Sister Karen Boccadero, is in the heart of the Latino/Chicano quarter of the city and its members saw too many parallels between mainstream American art and work in Britain. Only in Scotland did they expect to find a similar independence of vision.
While Cook and Nicholl saw huge contrasts between their own country and the Mexican-descended community - particularly in the popular attitude to death - their hosts saw similarities in the sense of cultural identity. It may have been a extended process, but a continuing link was forged.
``Everybody has been very welcoming and there is some really good stuff here,'' said Healey. ``We did lots of swapping of work on Saturday so I'm taking a lot of Scottish prints home and leaving a few pieces here.''
While Audifred has moved to Los Angeles from Mexico City where she studied art, Healey learned about art from his family. While he considers himself Chicano, his name gives away Irish ancestry and he has Scots and Dutch blood too, he claims.
``My grandmother was actually born in Texas. But people say that LA is the second biggest city in Mexico,'' he said. He now works chiefly on public art projects - and is anxious to return to the city after seeing some of the work being done in the Gorbals - while Audifred survives on sales of her work twice or three times a year from her Long Beach studio.
Most of her work, however, she does at Self Help. Although she works in other media, she always returns to print-making. It and the Glasgow studio are alike in terms of both workshop and gallery space, she said, except that Self Help - in the way of America - is open 24 hours a day.
``We do not have lithography and etching. It has been my first experience of that and it has been very exciting. But apart from that the facilties are very similar.''
in November that similarity will be even more pronounced when Glasgow Print Studio mounts its own Day of the Dead exhibition in association with Self Help. Cook is curating the Glasgow end of a show which will be reflected by another concurrently at Self Help.
This time the exchange will be of work as well as artists. Fourth generation altar-builder Ofelia Esparza will be constructing a massive centrepiece while professional paper cutter Margaret Sosa will be making the traditional figures. Print studio members have been invited to submit work and ultimately 20 works will go to LA while 30 from Self Help are shown in Glasgow.
Hand in hand with the exhibition will be an educational outreach programme giving schools guidance with basic print-making techniques - as well as bringing back into use print-making equipment that is lying idle. That dour Scots attitude to death is comprehensively under attack.
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