In 2023, she recalibrated her practice for the gallery in her debut solo exhibition Ongaku Tiffany at the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow. Using found objects and unconventional materials like chocolate and her own hair, she created sculptures of domestic objects – teddy bears, carriage clocks, ‘ceramic’ dogs – arranged into a pathos-laden domestic scene. Much of Sgàire’s performance work questions the validity of clothes and accessories as signifiers of the self – Ongaku Tiffany asked the same questions of the domestic space.

In her work for BUILDHOLLYWOOD, Sgàire constructs a character, a kind of self, through personal adornment, domestic interiors and photography. On the billboards, Sgàire is a hyperreal pin-up, lounging across a cacophony of animal print rugs wearing her signature make-up, ultra-long black wig and nude underwear. Her signature swirls over the top of the image like a gigantic 8”x10” of a Hollywood star.

At first glance, the image oozes a familiar kind of glamour, allure and expense – but on closer look, the beauty and effortlessness that we’re presented with is revealed as a laboured illusion, much like the endless slew of manufactured imagery that we consume on billboards and beyond. Through the work, Sgàire aims to prompt audiences to question the authenticity – and its importance or otherwise – in the images we see everyday, and confront the potentially problematic ways in which exoticism, Orientalism and objectification are present in Western beauty ideals and visual language.

As Sgàire’s BUILDHOLLYWOOD billboards launch, she speaks about the origin and development of her practice, the importance of humour in her work, and the often esoteric references on her moodboard for the project.

Can you talk a bit about your background and how you came to be an artist and performer?

I grew up queer in Northern Ireland in the noughties, so while adolescence could have been rougher, it also could have been a lot easier, at least in terms of fitting in. I spent a lot of time alone in my room as a teenager, experimenting with makeup, costume and photography and sharing some of what I was creating on the internet. I was pretty terminally online, but the internet was a kind of lifeline for me, for better or worse. It was this infinite source of escapism, fantasy and aspirational beauty – but also a place where I could experiment with identity and see different ways of existing in the world.

I started doing live performance when I was studying Fashion and Textiles at The Glasgow School of Art. My studies were a bit prescriptive and the course wasn’t the right outlet for me and all the creative energy I’d been storing up, so this interdisciplinary performance practice kind of inevitably burst forth, mostly in the form of drag and more freaky nightclub stuff! It feels like a very quintessentially queer or trans creative trajectory to find your passions and community through the internet, but also through clubbing and nightlife. Both have been really formative for my practice.

The performativity of images and objects is the conceptual basis for a lot of my work, which is why I think I ended up naturally developing a performance practice. Most of the things we see day-to-day in modern life are loaded with layers of meaning, history and significance, and it’s really interesting what you find when you take the time to dissect and analyse some of that.

How do you communicate your intersecting identities – as an Irish artist, a trans woman, a queer person – through your work?

I’m really interested in the phenomenology of personal identity and how we go about constructing and communicating it. I think when you embrace your transness, the process can really force you to tear up your notions of personal identity and start again. You start to question the rules, traditions and precedents we have established as a society on a really integral level, which makes them feel simultaneously mysterious and sacred but also totally absurd and arbitrary.

Irishness, especially where I’m from in the North, is still quite a contentious and polarising topic even today – which is insane, but it’s something that I’ve grown up with. It has shaped how I’ve come to view national identity and the extent to which we might feel obliged to hide or exaggerate it in different contexts.

Is it important to you to communicate identity through your work?

We communicate who we are, think we are, want others to think we are, through everything that we do. I guess I’m attempting to highlight this by presenting a concentrated version of those small, everyday ‘performances’ through my work, and to maybe guide audiences towards the same insights about their own lives that have benefited and liberated me so much.

Can you talk about the role of humour in your work?

I think it’s really important! Levity bordering on facetiousness is an essential counterbalance to the loftier, heavier stuff that I want to understand and confront in my work. I cringe if I catch myself taking myself too seriously while trying to communicate big ideas in my work, as if I have some special insight or authority. I don’t! I’m an idiot and a clown and an entertainer disguised as an artist. Embracing existential absurdity in the face of scary ideas helps me to digest and understand them, and to get the point across to an audience. The world is totally awful sometimes but it’s also extremely stupid and I think it’s important to be able to make fun of that in the right way.

You’re well-known as a performer, but you are also a talented costume designer and make-up artist. Where did you learn these skills and how do you continue to push them in your work?

I learned through a mix of my Fashion and Textiles training, but also just through, like… doing it! At art school, I used to hate having to sew French seams and linings and all this shit that no-one was going to see, because I just wanted to make an impact and get the point across with as broad a stroke as I could get away with. I like turning trash into treasure – kind of for sustainability and consumption reasons, but also because I’m fucking poor and maybe also a bit lazy! There’s an interesting naivety in a conspicuously slap-dash but still really cunty costume. Some might call that very convenient, but you have to work smarter not harder!

Your practice primarily consisted of performance-based work until Ongaku Tiffany, your exhibition of sculptures at the CCA Intermedia Gallery in Glasgow last year. What motivated this move into other mediums?

The pandemic really turned my life upside down as it did for everyone. I went from making a living through events, live performance and modelling work to suddenly having those opportunities off the table. I just had to start again. In the end it felt really important and healthy to be exploring ways of making work and being alive that didn’t involve being photographed and dressed up – not exploiting my body for profit and gain. There was something a bit cringe and hollow about being this accidental online influencer figure, or someone whose body of work consists of undocumented ephemeral looks and performances but no actual substance. I don’t really think or believe that, but at the time I felt it hard.

This all really motivated me to utilise the bigger ideas I had, and take the risk of branching into something less glamorous or attention-garnering. During that time I felt forced (but also keen) to sit with my ideas and develop them in private. It was such a blessing in disguise because it granted me access to what felt like a traditional, wholesome artistic process which was labour-driven in a really different way. The work – or at least the ideas – for Ongaku Tiffany all manifested during the pandemic and while it was scary to show it all, it felt like a really necessary departure.

Can you talk through the work you have made for the BUILDHOLLYWOOD campaign? What kind of ideas were you working with?

When BUILDHOLLYWOOD reached out I was instantly excited by the opportunity to work in the billboard format, given the ideas I explore through my work. There’s something very fun but also quite malevolent about big public advertisements: unnatural manufactured images that are thrown at us without context or consent when we’re out in public.

The goal was to create a hyperreal Victorian pin-up, this anachronistic beauty who embodies all these different contradictions. She’s put a lot of effort into looking effortless. The whole set is a manufactured simulation of something organic and relaxed.

The final images were shot at PONYBOY in Glasgow in September by my friend and really talented photographer Spit Turner. It was so fun to collaborate with them as well as Reece and Dill from PONYBOY who always pull out all the stops with their events and furnish me with all the bundles of hair a girl could dream of!

How has Glasgow and its queer communities helped shape your practice?

I think in a lot of ways, what I said about Irishness applies to Glasgow as well. The west coast of Scotland sometimes feels like an extension of Ireland to me – there’s a close connection between the two and they face a lot of the same issues.

Are there any hidden gems in the city that you would like to recommend?

Well if I recommended them, they would no longer be hidden… and I love to gatekeep!!

What has been your highlight of the Glasgow art/cultural scene in the past year or so?

Maybe not a very niche choice but I loved Delaine Le Bas’s show Delainia at Tramway. The maximalism, freedom, pure rage and creativity was very inspiring – it sparked huge joy for me.

To be honest, a lot of the past year has been dominated by the ongoing genocide and atrocities in Palestine. I’ve been really angry and let down by how a lot of Scottish creative institutions have reacted (or not) to what’s been going on, so it’s been really heartening to see and take part in some of the work that Art Workers for Palestine Scotland have been doing over the past year.

How does the work speak to the tension between authenticity and artifice?

The Victorian beauty ideal was one of purity and natural-ness; hair was worn long, makeup avoided, skin kept unblemished by the sun. I’ve always envisioned my drag ‘character’ (if you could call it that) to be this super natural, no-makeup-makeup kind of woman – the fun comes from sticking as much shit to my face and using as much makeup and hair as possible to become her. I love being an embodiment of that contradiction, the “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap” kind of thing. That balance and juxtaposition is really central to all of my work!

These ideas are also embodied in the tiger and leopard skins. Tiger ‘print’ is a really potent symbol of the ways that images can travel up this ladder of abstraction in our visual culture and pick up all this semiotic baggage and meaning along the way. It starts off as the fur of a wild, untamed, dangerous animal before it is captured, killed, flayed and displayed for its beauty and rarity. It becomes a status symbol but also a visual representation of violence and man’s subjugation of nature. Historically and geopolitically it can also be seen as a symbol of colonialism, Orientalism and exoticism. Although it is just a pattern of black and orange stripes, tiger print says all of these things to us when we see it in an image, which really spoke to the point I wanted to make with this work. Every image we see, especially in art and advertising, has undergone a similar process of abstraction and that’s important to consider and really interesting to dissect.

I made the tiger’s head I’m posing with in some of the images out of my own hair. I have been on a bit of a hair journey over the past couple of years so I had all this red, blonde and black hair that I thought would work perfectly for a tiger! It’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever made.

The work is suggestive of a lot of different kinds of imagery – ‘70s Vanity Fair editorials, Hollywood 8 x 10”s, soft-porn pin-ups – which you have subverted. Were there any specific visual references that you used as inspiration?

There was quite a range of stuff on the moodboards. I was interested in the differences between representations of beauty, sexuality, glamour and opulence in photography or art from different eras and wanted to create an image which married some of them together.

For some reason, my mind went straight to Gok Wan’s How To Look Good Naked. He would basically take these women who didn’t like how they looked naked and give them a wardrobe makeover, and at the end they’d do this glamorous nude photoshoot and the final image would be projected onto the side of a building in central London for the public to give their thoughts on. There was something very interesting about this larger-than-life public format being used to display these cheesy pin-up images. I wanted to do my own version but really play with the tropes and artifice of glamour photography.

I was really inspired by the 1970s work of the photographer Irina Ionesco; inky, gothic black and white photos of kohl-eyed women against super rich backgrounds of flowers, furs and lace, with a weird, sleazy sexuality. Also portraits of Victorian women showing off their floor length hair, and glamour shots of women posing with taxidermy heads of tigers and leopards. At the centre of the moodboard was a 1958 photograph of Marilyn Monroe by Richard Avedon, from a series of her as iconic screen actresses. In this one she’s Theda Bara as Cleopatra, dressed in a mad gold bikini and straddling a couch draped in real tiger skins. It’s a really busy but powerful image that draws together all these tropes of Orientalism, eroticism and exoticism and I’ve have always found it really fascinating.

How do you think your work changes when it’s presented outdoors, rather than in a club setting? 

I don’t know if it changes so much – I’m still trying to do the same things just to a different audience and through different means. In the club, the audience has usually come expecting to see the drag or performance that you’re going to show them. They know the rules, the language, the tradition, the etiquette. They’re usually queer too, so they receive the commentary that drag and drag-adjacent art is trying to make in a more nuanced way. With the billboards, I want whoever sees them to be inspired to ask themselves some questions. Who is that glamorous vision/monster? Do I love her or hate her? Why? What does that say about me? What is she trying to say? Why is this image making me feel the way I feel?

Are there any particular sites where you are looking forward to seeing your work?

The Barras is maybe my favourite place in Glasgow so I’m quite excited to see the work go up next to the Barrowlands sign! The market is hallowed ground for me, full of important local history, but also mad objects and ephemera with murky provenances that feels really relevant to this project.

What are you working on next?

I’m taking part in a group show called URGENCIES at the CCA in Derry in January. I’m really excited to be making and exhibiting more work in Ireland alongside some really exciting artists.