Andrew Sim (b. 1987), is a Scottish artist living and working in New York City. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Beyond The Modern Institute at 1-4 Walker’s Court, London (2023); The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2023, 2022); WINDOW by Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2023), and KARMA, New York (2019). Notable group exhibitions include ‘To be a giant and keep quiet about it’, Margot Samel, New York (2022); and ‘Heal the sick, raise the dead’, part of the Glasgow International (2021).
Two solo exhibitions of their work are currently on view at Jupiter Artland in Edinburgh, and at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, representing their largest exhibitions to date both in Scotland and the United States.
Hi Andrew! Can you tell us a bit about yourself? What was it like growing up in Glasgow?
Being from Glasgow is quite hard to describe. It’s a beautiful, very green city, with amazing museums, parks, clubs, art and culture. It also punches hugely above its weight in terms of its influence on the world. But it’s also a quite rough and gritty sort of place. There’s nowhere really like it, which is probably for the best cos one Glasgow is enough.
Growing up there was very magical in some ways. I grew up in the early nineties when the legacy of industrial decline meant that even in the west end where I lived, which was relatively affluent, there were hundreds of abandoned buildings, overgrown victorian parks, old factories and abandoned railway tunnels to play in and explore.
As I got older, those same spaces were also used for raves and parties; Glasgow had and still has a very dynamic party scene. I used to work the bar at some of those parties when I was about 16, it was quite a strange world to grow up in. The people running the parties were still kind of continuing from the rave scene of the early nineties, whereas people my age, who maybe thought they’d missed out, were waiting for something new to happen rather than party in what felt like the end of something. There was a bit of a cultural lag after the millennium, so there were a few years without much of a Queer scene. I don’t think I ever felt like I really belonged until the Queer scene in London and then Glasgow started really blowing up from around 2010 onwards.
By the time I was in my twenties, the city regenerated quite considerably but still kept its kind of edge. However recently, as with lots of the UK, the years of Tory rule have left it a bit down at heel. I have a complicated relationship with the city, I love it very much but I can’t be there any more. I was there for 35 years which is probably long enough.
What made you first approach creating art? Did you always know you wanted to pursue a career in the arts?
After quite a few years spent in the party scene in Glasgow in the mid 00s, I was going through a bit of a mental health readjustment. Some of my friends were studying at the art school so I would spend quite a lot of time there. It was such a beautiful environment, I loved the energy there and started to think it could be something I could do. I didn’t study art in school, and didn’t really have the qualifications, but they accepted me onto the sculpture and environmental art programme which was (at the time) a quite radical course that had a solid history of quite groundbreaking artists. Although now looking back, there was very little diversity of any kind amongst the faculty which impacted the types of art that was encouraged.
I know that you studied sculpture while you were in school at the Glasgow School of Arts. What made you become interested in painting?
The course very much discouraged art that was about identity. They had quite an outdated view of art in that regard and it meant that students were not really encouraged to explore their identity through their work, be that gender identity, Queer identity or cultural/ethnic identity. It seems crazy to think that at no point in art school did a tutor just say “make art about yourself. Your experiences, what you know or how you feel”. They had us running all over town going into chip shops and shopping centers trying to wring bits of authenticity out of the long suffering locals who lived near the art school. It’s quite shocking to look back on some of it. The school burned down in the end. Twice.
Once I left art school, I was able to just draw and make work that in a roundabout way was about me and my evolving gender expression and relationship to Queerness. I just drew whatever I wanted to draw and then when I looked back at it, it would make sense. I think those years from 2006-2014 were quite difficult for me. I was really struggling to find myself after a long time feeling quite lost and by working this way, it was very helpful in terms of externalizing the processes of growth and developing gender expression that I was going through. At the same time, there was lots more trans and gender nonconforming visibility. Lots more Queer and Trans club nights in Glasgow which played a big part in quite a transformational time for me.
Throughout your work, werewolves appear as recurring motifs. How and why did they first appear?
The werewolves were something I’ve always drawn. I was always terrified of them as a child for some reason, and I think through drawing them I was able to turn them into these archetypal camp creatures that were able to express all my feelings of anxiety and tension, but also Queer family and community. Lately they have become much more content and happy seeming, as I think I have. I started drawing them without hair as I was getting laser hair removal on my face. A connection I didn’t see until it was pointed out to me.
The werewolves seem to have a knowing look in their eyes – can you give us some insight into what they’re up to?
I always imagine the werewolves as friends standing in the smoking area of a gay bar, which is quite a vulnerable space as you are often on the street, wearing outfits that in the bar are great but on the street can make you a target. They cling to each other as if some passing group of drunk straight girls have shouted “omg love your outfits!” which every Queer person knows can be just a sentence or two away from a transphobic slur. As my Queer community has grown and the way I inhabit my environment has become more secure, the werewolves don’t cling to each other any more but lightly embrace. Now they are surrounded by stars, and have rainbow halos. They seem much happier.
Horses, monkey puzzle trees, and birds also appear as some of your signature motifs. Can you tell us a bit more about where they come from?
The other motifs that appear in my work all have similar origins. Usually I have thought about an image, a horse, say, for a long time. Then one day it feels like the right time.
Usually when looking back it makes sense why it was at that time. I started drawing horses at a residency in the country in Italy. I was able to dress how I wanted and present how I wanted all day, as it was in a remote and relatively private area.
The horses I think represent for me a much more tranquil gender euphoria, away from the cis gaze. Unlike the werewolves, they’re not so anxious. And they don’t stare back out of the canvas in the same way. I had thought about giving them wings for a long time, I think when I started to feel freer and more mobile then that’s when I gave them wings.
The monkey puzzle trees are all based on a real tree that grows by my parents house in Glasgow. I’ve seen it grow my whole life since it was a sapling. I remember learning to ride my bike beside it. It is on a piece of grass you’re not allowed to walk on so I’ve never been close to it. When I leave a place, that’s when I draw the plants or trees from there. When I left Glasgow I drew lots of monkey puzzle trees.
When I left London I drew lots of Yuccas. I think it’s a way of staying rooted to a place. The plants always have spring growth on them, which makes sense I think with moving though a place and then leaving while still staying partially rooted there. The Yuccas have new growth on top and are shedding dead leaves at the bottom. But it’s the dead leaves that give way for the trunk to grow, leaving those ridges all the way up. I was always obsessed with that way of growing as a child so it makes sense that it’s entered my work.
When I left Glasgow I did two versions of the monkey puzzle. One I sent to NYC to go into a show at Anton’s window space and one for an exhibition in Glasgow. I think I was trying to root myself between the two places, connecting them with a psychic tunnel or something.
Your works often evolve depending on your location and personal journey. In your major NYC solo exhibition debut, Two pink birds with a gold nest, at Anton Kern Gallery, you present twelve new paintings that introduce new variations to your signature motifs. What new elements might we see presented in the show?
In the show at Anton Kern, the work is much more brightly coloured: the Glasgow monkey puzzles have become rainbow coloured, the werewolves are now surrounded by stars, which I think can be read as club lights, or flashbulbs as well as stars. The work seems much more frenetic. The two werewolves embracing surrounded by stars makes me think of a polaroid of someone’s parents in Times Square in the 70s or something. Which is maybe how I imagine my future children looking back, romanticizing mine and my partners move here. I think that the narrative or line running through a life is something I find quite comforting and I think lots of the works mark different stages of my life in a way that makes sense to me.
Through the process of externalizing these images as artworks that operate in the physical realm, connections to your evolving gender presentation and desire for queer placemaking seem to reveal themselves. How does this speak to larger themes of mobility, transformation, growth, and rootedness? In what ways do you see your subjects as an extension of yourself?
I think my work has always charted the process of extracting myself from Glasgow and of moving to new places while still building a sense of community and or rootedness. The birds I always drew have now got very big and have nests and some have eggs. Me and my partner are getting married in a few weeks and are talking about having children so I’m sure that has something to do with it. I don’t necessarily think that someone would need to know all this to engage with the work. I think that all of that is there, and I pour all of that into the form of the work, and if that gives it a glow of authenticity or makes it engaging then maybe that can spur people to want to find out more about it and about what it means to me.
Can you tell us more about your creation process and how you apply the pan pastels onto the canvas?
The pastels themselves are really interesting also, they are compressed powder pigment that is a bit like makeup, you put it on with sponges. It goes on very opaque in one layer which means you can treat it more like paint. You can change areas very quickly and erase bits which you couldn’t do with stick pastels. It also means that you can work on canvas, as the thin layer of pigment means you can fix it with a spray varnish so you don’t need to glaze them which you would have to with stick pastels. This means I can work much bigger as there is no glass to weigh it all down.
What’s next for you?
After this show, and a show running concurrently at Jupiter Artland in Scotland, I am planning to produce some sculptures of the work. They will be painted aluminum, life sized or larger and sealed so they can go outside. I’m really excited to see the works three-dimensionally.
The first will be a sunflower with lots of heads that will (hopefully) be 13 feet tall which is being commissioned for the sculpture park at Jupiter Artland. The original sunflower is one I saw in Germany in 2017 during quite a stressful residency and then also a similar one I saw in Italy also at a residency but in 2021.
I think as the images in my work become 3D sculptures, that frees the canvas work to become flatter, more complex images. The works in the Anton show for the first time, and are not life-sized, some are scaled down as with the horses and some are scaled up as with the birds. This feels like a very productive time for me. The move to New York has been really wonderful and challenging and I think the work I have been producing reflects that, although I don’t think that will be clear until I’m looking back on it all.