CREATIVE COMMISSIONS

Reimagining Scotland's creative landscape: transformation and possibility

We're put a commission call out for four artists to create new work responding to our research themes, to be exhibited at the Creative Balance Wellbeing Festival on taking place in September in Glasgow.

The brief

We invited people to respond creatively to the prompt: Reimagining Scotland's creative landscape: transformation and possibility.

Work could explore experiences of wellbeing, envision new spaces built by and for our communities, imagine what support and connection could look like, or take the prompt somewhere we haven't anticipated. We're looking for work that is hopeful and speaks to what could be.


THE AWARDEES

  • Bea (they/them) is a Deaf, queer, non-binary, mixed race Scottish-Thai creative based in Glasgow. Bea is mostly a writer, director, actor, theatre maker, filmmaker, artist and access consultant, and they occasionally perform as their drag ego, Mimi King. Much of Bea’s work is rooted in social commentary and social justice, often explored through either a highly stylised approach or a comedic lens.

  • Kelly Zou is a visual artist based in Edinburgh, working primarily through drawing and painting. Her practice explores memory, displacement, and emotional landscapes, shaped by her experience of moving between places and cultures. 

    Working with layered rice paper and fabric, alongside calligraphic mark-making, she creates scroll-based installations that hold fragmented and overlapping narratives. Her concept of “unscrollable” forms reflects how memory and history resist linear reading, remaining partial, obscured, and unresolved. 

    Kelly has exhibited across the UK and internationally. Recent projects include The Weight of Memory: Unscrollable Histories with ANGUSalive Museums and Galleries. Alongside her studio practice, she works with communities through drawing-based workshops and collaborative projects.

  • Through use of sound, moving image and projection, Mourad Kourbaj interacts with his surroundings. His work touches on themes of place and collective memory through a variety of mediums and has a curious and exploratory approach. Having graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2022 he has gone on to be a part of various international residencies in Italy and Georgia and recently completed a 9 month course in Madrid with a particular focus on analogue 16mm film. His upbringing in a Syrian and Argentine household influences his approach and thinking in his practice, allowing space for a diverse mixture of backgrounds and experiences to infuse into his work.

  • Andrés N. Ordorica is a queer Latinx writer based in Edinburgh. His writing seeks to illuminate love and loss while unpacking what it means to be from ni de aquí, ni de allá. He is the author of the poetry collection At Least This I Know and Holy Boys and the novel How We Named the Stars.