Catriona Beckett The Guild of Abstraction

Artist studios and gallery
7 Water Row, Govan
Glasgow

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Past Exhibitions
2026
Toby Messenger Systems in Collapse2025
Olivia Wiles West Side Story
Catriona Beckett The Guild of Abstraction and Image Making
Anna Lawrence Snail Trail
Sam Della-Valle Big Women Little Men
Ali Farrelly a mean diameter
2024Anna Metzger Teether
John Fletcher Acid Reflux
Scott Leeming Didn’t we have a good time?
Gabriella Day The best parts only
[Studio holders] MEETING 2
Amanda Seibæk & Zane Drees For Satin Bowerbirds
Kate Holford That unquestionable bloom
Amelia Barratt Cool Ground
2023
Anna Metzger, Maya Levy, Alfie Sellers The Ceiling So Far
Kirstie Lackie TV Dinners
[Group] A sense of urgency
[Studio holders] MEETING
Charlie Hodgson Trade Winds
Antonio Parker-Rees & Phoebe Kerr
Niall McCallum Path Users
[Group] World of Wonder
Orla Kane Star face
Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King in jest
Dora Padfield & Liv Fox and now the light is on it

Catriona Beckett The Guild of Abstraction and Image Making

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20 September - 5 October 2025

Catriona Beckett is a visual artist working at the intersection of two modes of creativity: process-based image making and writing for performative events. Catriona utilises both playfulness and intent, experimenting with paint to create compositions that remain surprising through the use of different processes; layering colors and washes to build up compositions and sporadic, automatic drawings.In her performance practice, thematic concerns associated with painting are extended into poetic, surreal, and informative narratives. Catriona delves into opening up the meaning of abstraction and its subsequent layers – unknowability, chance, playfulness, transformation – to create fictions, often engaging with feminism and political movements.

For Boardroom Committee Room, Catriona presents The Guild of Abstraction and Image Making. This series of works on wooden board and paper employ encaustic wax and water based paints, exploring a dialogue between material and form. On the late night opening a performance takes place which sees a representative from the fictitious guild relay minutes from a recent meeting. A community of painters, The Guild of Abstraction and Image Making operate through mutual aid, the sovereignty of their craft, and a critical linkage between abstraction and grassroots democracy. You can view the exhibition handout here.

Reflections at Twilight

I want to understand an art that demands the disordering of the world’s restrictions… away from desire’s contemporary expression in commodity and violence.
Doug Ashford[1]

My daughter had to take her first breath in this world? This sentiment, the psychoanalyst in me says, is a failure of desire. We must still find the way to want to hear what they will say, to know that there is, while we are here, something left to say, something that hasn’t yet been heard.
Jamieson Webster[2]

By refusing to depict reality, an abstraction allows for something that wasn’t here before to creep into the light. Some creature can emerge, be it political or emotional, trivial or shattering. In refracting light through a glass of water, as I do for my infant child in play, a numinous apparition occurs. Perhaps this is physics, like abstract paint too is pigment and energy, but it is also a flash of of an otherwise overflowing, a shift in what we know to be true. I have always been preoccupied by work (as in: doing the work, the object of the work) which undoes solid ground - that which asks more questions than it provides. Work that does not allow anyone to say the world must be this or that. As light glimmers against the white walls of our rented flat, I see pink and orange and green and blue, the colours of Catriona’s paintings showing themselves in my memory. Something other, something else, something slipping through fingers but surely there; a dream.

Through engaging with Catriona’s paintings and the further reaches of her practice, I have been learning about how art is a form of caring labour. It is a simple declaration: art is made for “the love of [one’s] community, not for the maximalised profit in an unknown market.”[3] In this statement I uncover the soft fleshy heart of Boardroom Committee Room, which was a gift to all of us who have encountered it since its founding. A place which teeters on the edge of instability, but which was founded on love and joy and generosity of spirit, and so holds on fast to existence. Stays alive unstable, experimental, provisional. It glimmers in the twilight of “commodity and violence” as a space for each other. I am new here still, forever arriving, and I am only just learning.

So, this short reflective text, much like the refracted light through my water glass glinting for the future sights of a child, is a romantic declaration: we are here because we love each other, and because it is the only way to endure. Not an escape, but as Jamieson Webster writes, a “sustained transformation of anxiety, and then an extension of the symptom into the world… a mode of gathering bodies in protest that can hold at the point of extreme pressure from the outside… as much a new pattern for breathing as it is a new language for life.”[4] Or I’ll put it this way, through the collective words of Catriona’s Guild Circle: “a member makes a painting because they want their community to have a good aesthetic experience in the same way that a builder, in the builders guild, builds a bridge so people can get to the other side.”[5]

– Kate Holford, Curator
September 2025

[1] Ashford, Doug (2013) Empathy and Abstraction, (Excerpts). Maastricht: Marres.

[2] Webster, Jamieson (2025) On Breathing. London: Peninsula Press. p.217.

[3] From the script for the performance The Guild of Abstraction and Image Making, Boardroom Committee Room, 21st September 2025.

[4] Webster, Jamieson (2025) On Breathing. London: Peninsula Press. p.74.

[5] From the script for the performance The Guild of Abstraction and Image Making, Boardroom Committee Room, 21st September 2025.

Performance writtten by Catriona Beckett.
Performed by Anna Tiia Sorjonen, 21st September 2025.