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Vow was an off-site group exhibition at 20 Albert Road, Glasgow including work by Anaïs Comer, Gwen Evans, Will Hughes and Jade Sweeting.

The exhibition interrogates notions of intimacy, connection, and adoration, considering how these qualities are negotiated within contemporary life. Across diverse practices including painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, the works reflect upon how vulnerability can be both a visual strategy and a political gesture. Together, the artists foreground tenderness, devotion, and care as active positions, questioning how such gestures might resist dominant structures and open new forms of relation.

Title

Vow

Artists

Anaïs Comer, Gwen Evans, Jade Sweeting, Will Hughes

Dates

24.01.2026 – 22.02.2026

Location

20 Albert Road, Glasgow, UK

Link

Click here

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Anaïs Comer’s practice investigates interplay between pattern, form and material, and uses quotidian materials to develop a sculptural language full of sentiment and humour. In Lovebirds, Comer formalises teenage superstitious practices around romantic love – the delicate gesture of carving a heart into a tree or the surface of a school desk enlarged to the point of reverence. Repetitious and labour intensive patterns are made in biro on the plywood surface, bastardising those seen in period drama costumes, wallpapers, fabrics and embroidery. The methodical, and un-expressive approach to mark-making connects ideas of craft, mundane gestures and overlooked labour.

Alongside the wall-based work are two sculptures from her Po-tattoo series. Cast in jesmonite and hand-painted, the works appear almost extra potato. Displaying the usual blemishes and imperfections, they are heightened with additional blushes and marks to heighten their tactility. The temporary tattoos that adorn their surface personify the works, and gently humanise them. This playful intervention and elevation of the humble tuber references childhood aspiration, and moments of imaginative transformation; the fantasy of becoming a princess for a day.

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Yearning and seduction are similarly present in the works of Will Hughes. Glowing gently at the end of tangled fabric cables lie several art deco flame sconces sourced while the artist was on residency in Blackpool. The town is replete with Art Deco buildings – once the symbol of sleek modernity, opulence and glamour, these buildings stand tarnished and faded by age. Entitled The End of Love, the flame sconces act as torches abandoned, discarded, yet still burning as remnants of a past love and bygone age.

Hughes also presents And I’ve been through so much, that sometimes it feels far. It is like a movie, played by another star. a fabricated aluminium peak of a cap embedded into the wall and subtly angled downwards. Suggestive of a bowed head looking down to the ground, the peak suggests an averted eyeline. For the artist, this hesitancy to meet others’ gaze has previously been adopted in an act of self-preservation shaped by a fear of judgment and the realities of being seen as a queer person living outside the gender binary.

Spanning the back wall of the gallery is a monumental black and white image by Jade Sweeting. The image is a detail from the photo The things she finds in walls I part of Sweeting’s body of work 100 Years Guarantee – documenting the daily working life of Lydia Noble, a drystone waller living and working in West Yorkshire. In the photo, Noble delicately cups an old cough sweet wrapper lifted from between the stones. Growing up amongst a family of stone masons, her family built many of the buildings and structures around the area in which she lives. Sweeting’s photographic series offers an alternative approach to portraiture that subtly explores, and challenges gendered issues and conventions by centring Noble – a woman working in traditionally male dominated field.

Presented on a more intimate scale are Inside a wall, and Stone & String, silver gelatin prints that focus specifically on Noble’s hands, tools, and additional objects found during the course of her work. Through this documentary approach, Sweeting highlights and celebrates intergenerational knowledge, traditional practices, movement, sounds, as well as the strength and skills required for this laborious work in varying weather conditions and seasons.

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