Jack Arts

Remembering Glasgow’s mediaeval first mother at Glasgow International 2024

Every two years Glasgow’s museums, galleries and artist-run spaces come together to present an incredible array of contemporary arts projects spanning exhibition, research, publication and performance for Glasgow International.

For the festival, artist-led publisher Rosie’s Disobedient Press has commissioned Teneu, a book project featuring Helen Charman, Adrien Howard, Francis Jones, Mason Leaver-Yap, Joey Simons, Joanna Stawnicka, Lisette May Monroe, and Martha Adonai Williams, with illustrations by Sasha Staicu.

The Glasgow-based publisher’s work centres on writing from marginalised perspectives with a focus on queer, working class and feminist writers, and this project explores the mythology of Teneu, also known as St. Enoch, Glasgow’s forgotten mediaeval first mother and parent to St. Mungo, the city’s patron saint. St. Enoch is rumoured to be buried under Glasgow city centre’s largest shopping centre, a dominating glass pyramid building and the only thing in the city that bears her name.

Alongside delivering a promotional campaign for the publication around the city, we were excited to work with Rosie’s Disobedient Press to platform elements of the publication at our dedicated art site on West Graham Street. The lightboxes presented a series of illustrated ornaments by Staicu that feature throughout the publication, alongside lines taken from the commissioned texts in English and Gaelic.

‘I have been an outsider to Scottishness before I wedged myself into it and I remember finding out that the thistle is the national plant of Scotland. I saw the thistle with an outsider’s eyes and felt moved that such a thorny unapproachable plant would be treated with fondness. In time it became invisible to me again – too omnipresent to register as real. When I was working on the cover I thought of how a thistle is like an inverted rose – feminine but violent, persistent, cultivating of self, defender of its own right to exist. It became unfamiliar to me again, and in this way I saw it as new. I pictured the urban legend of Teneu being buried under the eponymous St Enoch. I pictured her legend and legacy permeating it, the dirt under it, the sky above it. I pictured her entering and stretching any frame she is in, the cover frame, the triangle. Glasgow as a structure of frames into which her network of stems and roots and thorns and flowers will inevitably grow.

In drawing the ornaments I thought of roots, of esoteric trinkets, of objects that just through their present invoke a different time, of objects that are timeless. Symmetry felt really important – of two sides meeting in the middle or growing from the centre outwards, of balance.’ – Sasha Staicu

You can find out more on the project and explore the full Glasgow International 2024 programme here.