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"Paint what you're looking at right now, out the window." A group of 12 students stands in the glass-walled first floor of the Sutnar Faculty. Owain McGilvary, a visual artist and teacher of painting and printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art, creates experimental projects that combine painting, film, collage, and installation. He is interested in unofficial histories and archives and in questions of identity, and has also collaborated with marginalized communities. His work has been shown at international exhibitions and film festivals, including Glasgow International, Mostyn Gallery and the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival. In the interview, he talks about his first impressions of Pilsen, the relationship between painting and other media, and working with archives.

You're spending this week in Pilsen. Have you already discovered something here that caught your attention or inspired you?
Kofola! It’s delicious!
What’s struck me the most about being in Plzen is the art school and the surrounding area. Glasgow is an inspiring place to be an artist, but a city of that scale sometimes can feel overly noisy. Navigating through constant movement - this quietness at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty has shown me that periods of quiet in solitude peripherally from a city center are key to an artistic process.

You work with painting, film, collage and installation. What does working with different media allow you to do that one medium cannot? Isn't painting good enough?
I quite like this question. Painting is, of course, good enough for me, though working in a multidisciplinary way allows further learning from other things. I am increasingly thinking about the relationship between painting and filmmaking. This notion of time is so implicit. Watching paint dry and change through time, editing a film is looking at literal time constantly. Of course, when artists began to experiment with film, they would film on celluloid. I don’t see what I make as too far from each other. I’m interested in the sensorial experience of art, and I think the interaction of different media is a way to do so.

Your workshop is called Expanded Painting. What does that term mean to you?
This is something we consider in the Painting & Printmaking degree course at The Glasgow School of Art. This notion can also be called Painting in an expanded field. In the course, we are interested in discourses surrounding the act of painting and printmaking, which, in many ways, boil down to the image. I often ask my students what it means to create a certain image. Why are they in this colour? Why are they interacting in this way? Why use another image within your work? What do you want the audience to feel? I talk a lot about feelings and compulsion in the course - this is true for the students at ArtCamp. What if painting were sculpture, or seemingly not either of those things? The discourse comes back to painting, though, which allows room for poetics and expansion in innovating what painting might mean to you.

What does your world look like? What phenomena do you describe in your work?
This is a big question, thank you. I have largely worked within a localized context. A few years ago, I collaborated with a group of women and non-binary amateur wrestlers who operated near my apartment in Glasgow. I entered with a fixed idea of what I wanted to produce, but after spending time with them and getting to know them as people, so much more was at play in their identities as wrestlers. They were also teachers, mothers, college students, nurses, a scientist. It brought up a lot of questions of identity and intent. Why do we lead our lives the way we do? It becomes very complicated but also very human to me, which always thrills me when collaborating in fields outside of my own expertise.

You often work with archives. Why are they important to you? What do they say about the world, life, people?
My practice so far has worked within national museum archives, but also this notion of ‘unofficial archives’ - internet ones or self-made archives in a sense. I think I fell into working with archives because I’m simply interested in images. Something I spoke about at the very beginning of ArtCamp to the students was the idea that images, in a contemporary sense, are stressful. One moment we could be looking at images of puppies, the next an image of war and destruction, then looking at contemporary art. This is constant, I think, and I wonder about the sheer weight we feel from the stuff in this world. Archives are meant to speak to a nation's identity or history. There are limits here, as there are likely to be contradictions to these histories. Things that happened because of gossip that hadn’t been recorded, which could muddy the whole story. I’m really interested in what that can do!

You've said you're interested in unofficial histories. What kinds of stories do you mean, and why are they important for contemporary art?
Largely, I mean, self-made archives or those that aren’t part of an official institution. Often, these archives can contradict established histories, which can be endlessly annoying, but that’s precisely why I like them. The gay bar project, for example, was an interesting challenge in ethically working with semi-public images. It required, of course, asking the photographer for permission, but it was impossible to ask the people in the photographs themselves, as there are so many. I opted for abstraction as a method. In the video I made ’Seeing Red’ (2024), the images were experimented with to such a degree that it wasn’t possible to identify anyone and were left illegible. To go back to ‘why multidisciplinary’ - I think this is how the interaction of other works and ways of working allows something new to unfold.

What's the one most important thing you hope participants remember from your workshop?
I really, really hope that they feel inspired and confident to question what a painting can be. We worked with drawing, sculpture, and collage in my ArtCamp course, but the discussions always came back to the act of painting. I hope they are ready to challenge their teachers, each other and themselves with their developing practices.