The State We’re In

stateSome of the best cartoons emerging from the General Election are on display at the Leiper Fine Art in Glasgow

There are original works by Chris Cairns, Iain Green, Greg Moodie, Terry Anderson, Gary Barker, Steve Bright and Lorna Miller (Morning Star & Bella).

It’s a great chance to see and even acquire a little piece of Scottish history at this exciting time.

The show is open from Tuesday to Friday from 11.00am to 5.00pm, Saturday and Sunday from 12.00 to 5.00pm and will run until 11 May.

117 West George Street, Glasgow G2 1QR, telephone 0141 204 2372

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  1. Anon says:

    Severed heads!
    None to clever.

  2. Anon says:

    “too” apologies

  3. Lorna Miller says:

    Thanks for your comment Anon. Do you also think that Shakespeare was none too clever when he used the phrase “off with his head” in Henry the VI Part III in 1592

    Queen Margaret:
    “Off with his head, and set in on York gates;
    So York may overlook the town of York.”

    Or Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (published 1865)

    “The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting ‘Off with his head!’ or ‘Off with her head!’ about once in a minute.

    That was my reference.

    1. Anon says:

      I’m just concerned that this is just the type of ammunition that the Brits will use against us. “Vile nationalists demand opponents be beheaded” etc, etc,
      I’m pretty hardline and certainly no shrinking violet, but found this image distasteful.
      Shakespeare and Carroll references, a tad disingenuous.

  4. rab dornan says:

    must go and see that!

  5. Lorna Miller says:

    That’s a good point Anon, thanks for sharing your concern. By “Brits” do you mean the national media? It seems to me they’re doing a good job without needing my wee cartoon to reload their rifles with. It is a distasteful image, you’re right!

    I am 100% sincere about the thoughts behind the work I created. You can challenge anything but your view of the world is yours and mine is mine. We could have an interesting discussion about how my mind works as an artist. The long history of carnivalesque and subversion in art. How I use symbolism in my work. But to be honest sometimes it’s a mystery to me. Have you ever had a dream where the most shocking images flash into your consciousness and haunt you? Why does that happen? What does it mean? Is it wrong to put that on paper?

    For all of my life “off with their heads” was an innocent and funny term. What has changed? Is it because it’s in the media all the time in the most horrific way that any of us have ever had the horror of knowing about? Does this mean the term has a different meaning? Or is it just the visual representation of the term? Is a photo or a film more distasteful that a cartoon?

    I hear a lot of people saying they don’t believe the media. But you believe the media enough to form and opinion about something. So, what in the media is real and what is not? What should be influencing us and what should not?

    I have just come back from a working trip to France where I saw the original painting of Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb”. It was incredible and shocking and I’ve enjoyed reading up on all the ways this painting influenced others and struck up conversation and debate.

    How does faith survive when there is so much lack of faith in our methods of sharing news and information? When people are communicating on a large public scale through social media in a way that we never were able to before and the majority of it is emotionally immature insults or worse threats and hateful rhetoric to fellow human beings.

    I learned, about 20 years ago, that I have no control over the response to any piece of art I make when I made a comic that I thought was worthy, sad and poignant about sectarian bullying in a primary school. A friend told me they thought it was funny. It was something about the way the narrative was so relentlessly awful that it made him laugh.

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