East End Open

Opening: 9 July, 6-8pm

Horsepower is pleased to announce the artists selected for our first open call exhibition, bringing together work by artists living and working across the east end of Glasgow.

Mike Hill, Samantha Wilson, Filip Velkovski, Madeline Mackay, olesya ilenok, Sofya Mikhaylova, Kimberley Bright, Cora Weiss, Iona Jones, Rebecca Laverty, Oscar Marcus Boyle & a live music set from medb on the opening night

We warmly invite friends, neighbours and anyone with a soft spot for the 38 bus to join us in celebrating the work being made here right now.

Thank you to everyone who submitted to the open call. There was a huge amount of generosity in what was shared and we really appreciated seeing it all.

Thursday 9 July, 6-8pm, live music from medb from 7.30pm
Exhibition runs through 26 July
Fridays and Saturdays, 12-6pm or by appointment

Mike Hill
Mike Hill is a Scottish Artist currently living in Dennistoun and studying on the MFA at the Glasgow School of Art, having previously studied on their BA Fine Art (Sculpture and Environmental Art), graduating in 2024. Hill’s works can be found in collections internationally (National Museum of Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia, Glasgow School of Art Library Special Collection) and is also sometimes found fixing clarinets. Their practice meanders around the conceptual, never quite finding a port in any fixed media to work in consistently. What binds the pieces together, however, is the use of text, be it their own words or those appropriated from a wider well of culture.

Samantha Wilson
Samantha Wilson is an artist, educator and founder of Slow Burn Studio, currently based at WASPS Hanson Street in Glasgow’s East End. She holds a BA and MFA from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and an MRes from the Royal College of Art. Key exhibitions include solo presentations Rest in Limbo at Fitzrovia Gallery, London (2024) and A Collective Public at Fabrica Braço de Prata, Lisbon (2019). Her work has also been exhibited at the London Art Biennale, Beaconsfield Contemporary Art, Mall Galleries and the Royal Scottish Academy. Alongside her exhibition practice, Wilson has undertaken residencies and socially engaged arts initiatives across India, Kenya and Portugal, including running an independent art studio and school in Lisbon between 2020–2022. She is currently developing Slow Burn Studio as an educational and artistic space within Glasgow’s East End, centred around drawing, painting and slower approaches to contemporary creative practice.

Filip Velkovski
Filip Velkovski is a Glasgow-based artist from Skopje, North Macedonia. He moved to Glasgow in 2021 to undertake the MLitt Fine Art Practice programme at The Glasgow School of Art (2021–2023). Since then, he has lived in the city’s East End, first in Dennistoun and now in Haghill. Since 2024, he has held a studio space through Outer Spaces. He graduated in Fine Art Practice in Skopje in 2013 and is a founding member of KULA, an artist collective and artist-led space. He is also a co-founder of the guerrilla art festival It’s Easier to Breathe Underground, focused on experimental and site-responsive practices. His work has been exhibited at the XII Youth Biennial at the MoCA Skopje (2018) and in programming related to Documenta 14 in Kassel (2017). He has presented three solo exhibitions, including Idioms (2020), and participated in numerous international group exhibitions, including Rising Stars, London (2022). Velkovski uses painting and embroidery to explore forms of communication that exist beyond language. The slow and tactile nature of making is central to his practice. He is interested in the subtle, often nonverbal ways people connect, misunderstand and relate to one another.

Madeline Mackay
Madeline Mackay is an artist working primarily in printmaking, new media, photography and drawing. She lived in Haghill for five years from 2020-2025 and still works at Outer Spaces City Park in the East End of Glasgow. She has exhibited in juried, group and solo exhibitions in the UK, Canada, the US, Spain and Croatia, presented and exhibited at conferences including the Impact International Print Conference, and currently lectures in Fine Art at the University of Cumbria. She also volunteers for the Society of Scottish Artists as co-Vice President. Her work reimagines the physical body as something incomplete. By reconfiguring unconventional materials (meat; body; mud; fabric) through performative rituals documented as photography, video, printmaking, drawing, collage and animation, the work disrupts perceptions of inside and outside, self and other. Rather than considering bodies as self-contained wholes neatly shrink-wrapped in skin, meat in her imagery stands in for the disobedient and porous system of organisms, physics and chemistry that we negotiate our life (and death) with.

olesya ilenok
olesya ilenok is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersection of visual and technological art. Her artwork explores the environment around us, whether it is urban, natural or social, through subjective data collection, found objects and algorithmic approaches. She delves into the sensory perception of everyday life, the relationship between individuals and their living spaces, and the narratives shaped by the environment. As a studio-holder at Outer Spaces City Park and former intern at Glasgow Ceramics Studio, olesya often uses a mix of digital and physical media to create installations, sculptures, sound and video art. Her practice has been featured in international exhibitions, festivals and residencies, including the Gyeonggi Ceramics Biennale 2024, The Listening Biennial and Cryptic Nights 2023. She is a recipient of various funding, such as Creative Scotland, VACMA and Pro Helvetia.

Sofya Mikhaylova
Sofya Mikhaylova studied Fine Art BA and lived in Dublin before moving to Glasgow in 2018. Since 2019, she has been working in the east end and recently moved to Hanson Street, WASPS, where she and six other creatives have established a studio together. Inspired by artists such as Ebecho, Dobaisova, Bethany Stead and Oda Sønderland, who reflect on life through the figure, Mikhaylova’s practice is driven by a desire to become such a woman through making. She creates images that depict soul-transforming and soul-aware moments. Her recent exhibition of her floral fantasy was co-exhibited with Sadbh O’Brien in the Southside two years ago.

Kimberley Bright
Kimberly Bright is a painter based at WASPS, Hanson Street. She studied Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, graduating in 2007. After art school she stopped making her own work and spent 15 years making artwork for the film and television industry. Three years ago she reacquainted herself with her paintbrushes and is now fully engaged in her art practice. Although graphic design definitely isn’t her passion, its logic has crept into her paintings. She is drawn to humour, pattern, lists, visual noise, other people’s trash and the quiet absurdity of everyday life. She loves collecting and arranging things, making collages and chasing the small thrill of finding something unexpectedly perfect.

Cora Weiss
Cora Weiss explores image production and compilation and their use for atmosphere construction in paint, print, photography and writing. Awarded an MFA from Glasgow School of Art (2022-24), they also hold a BA in Fine Art from Newcastle University (2018-2022). Most recent shows in Glasgow include I am happy you are here at Strange Field (2026), Dub Ft. at Salt Space Gallery (2025), Chaos Reigns at David Dale Gallery Warehouse (2023) and Swatched x Blush at the Pipe Factory (2023). They have also exhibited internationally in HFBK x GSA at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg (2023). They are currently Studio Co-ordinator and studio holder at French st, Strange Field based in Dalmarnock, an area in the East End of Glasgow that has been undergoing major changes since its use for the 2014 commonwealth games.

Iona Jones
Iona Jones is a mixed-media artist who has been based in Glasgow for the past five years, the last two in Dennistoun. She first moved to Glasgow to study Fine Art at GSA. Since graduating, she has continued to work collaboratively. She is founding member of the artist collective Pebbles from a Machine and helps run Unit 11, a public-facing studio space in Bridgeton. Being part of a public-facing collective has offered her the opportunity to create community, as well as a space that she can continue to explore her own art practice in. Her work is a nonsensical stream of consciousness, caught between the absurd and the sincere. Her role shifts from an unreliable narrator into a ringleader, mad scientist, zookeeper and nurse.

Rebecca Laverty
Rebecca Laverty is a Scottish working class artist and has lived in the East End of Glasgow for three years. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2024 and now works out of a studio on the North Side. She recently joined Disobedient Magazine as Art Editor and also works in community outreach at an arts charity in her hometown, Greenock. She’s part of Night Nurse Collective alongside Meredith Donnachie, Holly Tafe and Bradley Hudson. She loves living in the East End because of the people - like those from Greenock, they conceal nothing. They laugh and live loudly, and so does Laverty, which makes it feel like home for her. In recent years, her writing and artwork have been published by The Scottish Working Class Network and Little Institute, and she’s exhibited at R.A.T. Studios, where she’s also an alum. Through expanded drawing and painting, Laverty maps out her existence, digging imagery from the recesses of her sub-conscience. In her drawings, Jesus Christ and an ant stand next to each other with equal importance; a cat and a person share an earnest gaze. There is an absence of hierarchy and context within her subjects that ignores structure and wounds reality, revealing underneath the peculiar tendencies of the soul.

Oscar Marcus Boyle
Oscar Macrus Boyle was born in Worcester. His BA was at the Slade and he moved to Glasgow for the MLitt programme in 2021. Last year his solo show (The Land of Bread and Honey) opened at Strange Field, a collection of pastel drawings, oil-on-breadboard paintings and readymade sculptures concerning the cultural and political history of bread, a continuing theme. He has also performed in and around Glasgow as a solo musician and performance artist, as well as with the band Sports Frock and in collaboration with artists including translator Dan Caldwell, saxophonist Amie Huckstep and noise performance group Relics. In October he will open an exhibition at Strange Field with Andy Murray and Isaac Heard, “Stained Glass Space Station”, a show about the dreams of scientists. His studio is an Outer Spaces space in City Park. Every day, he sits and looks to the necropolis directly out of the window as he works.

medb
Born in Canada under the sign of Taurus, and raised by two singer-songwriters in post-conflict Northern Ireland, medb cut her teeth on tumblr bedroom pop to emerge as the multi-faceted creative powerhouse we all know and love. With a personality that is part Edie Sedgwick, part Virgin Mary, part Kylie Jenner, and a distinctive sound that has been likened to The Shop Assistants, Le Tigre, and Alvvays, you’ll know you’re listening to medb when an indescribable pang of nostalgia takes over your soul. Joining her line up are fellow Irish native "Nasty" Nico Ndlovu - one of the best drummers in Scotland, if not the world - and local cowboy "Jumping" Jack Faulds of Junk Pups fame on bass; a startling arresting and disarming trio you won't be quick to forget.