Featured Artist: Consuelo R. Serván: Ground Floor Gallery

The Chain – Roots, Resilience, Connection, Migration is an exhibition by Glasgow based artist Consuelo R. Servan. It is comprised of a dropdown artist book and a series of ‘intervened screen prints’ exploring shifts and sonority in colour and shape of compound chain-like structures.

This work is an abstraction, inspired by the Opuntia cactuses of the ‘rhizome’ family, a type of cactus, originally from South America, that is very resilient and spreads easily around the area where she grew up, Extremadura. Plants like irises, bamboos, ferns or many cactuses are part of this family. Rhizomes are the roots that connect horizontally and spread, without need for seeds, facilitating colonisation. This growth pattern is a central reference point in her practice and is based on the rhizomatic system explored by philosopher Gilles Delueze and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. In ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, they used this system as an analogy for non-hierarchical knowledge structures that multiply, communicate and grow easily, describing new ways to relate, connect and ‘migrate’.

The exhibition includes a series of screen prints, developed at the Print Studio as sketches and tests for the artist book. However, during the first lockdown, these prints found their own identity through the addition of graphite, gouache and coloured film. They add an important layer to the book and are aligned to its central reference of rhizomatic growth.