Featured Exhibitions

Viewfinder

Sam O'Donnell

WASPS – The Briggait

06/02/2026 - 10/04/2026

Installation view, Viewfinder, Sam O’Donnell, The Briggait, 2026

Vent, Sam O’Donnell, 2026

Maiden, Sam O’Donnell, 2026

Drying Time, Sam O’Donnell, 2026

Otherside, Sam O’Donnell, 2026

Eraser, Sam O’Donnell, 2026

Stall, Sam O’Donnell, 2026

Bodywork, Sam O’Donnell, 2026

Watcher, Sam O’Donnell, 2026

Pane, Sam O’Donnell, 2026

Viewfinder
Sam O’Donnell
The Briggait
06.02 – 10.04.26

In Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher (1999), a young boy leaves his shitty Glasgow neighbourhood and takes a local bus all the way to the end of its route. He ends up in a housing estate, still under construction. It’s clean and mysterious. We follow him into a kitchen, the sink cabinet standing away from the wall, the drywall squared-off with compound. There’s a wheat field beyond the window. Pearly blue and gold, divided two to one. He walks to the window and climbs up and out the frame. (There was no glass). Escaping the world, he runs toward it.

Drying Time (2024) is a painting of laundry seen through a window – off to one side, as if passing by in the parallax of a 30mph car journey. There’s a small section of peeled-back skin on the side of my thumb the same colour as the walls. It too is shiny, pink and dry. If I look closely there are hairline tissue striations running vertically like brush drags. It’s mildly painful. There are artifacts around the bed, the cuticle, evidence of damage and repair. Next to this, the breadth of the nail: milky colours through a keratin lens. The thumb can be a kind of viewfinder, stuck out to measure whatever’s in front of you. A caricature of a painter: the world receives a thumbs-up, but one of your eyes is screwed shut.

Eraser (2025) shows what we always called a rubber sitting on a table with a pencil nearby. The rubber has the nose of a shuttle pod. The table might as well be a kind of coastal sea port. It suggests sand, grey skies and tides, piers and breakers. The eraser itself has been worn down like a pebble. Next to this the tip of the pencil is alarmingly sharp and brittle. Rock-paper-scissors. Rubbers stabbed with lead. Childhood fascination with opposites, the making of a thing and its cancellation. The realization that you can also write with the rubber-end.

Vent (2024), is in the same classroom colour range as Eraser’s pencil. Yellows and reds and greens and blues in lines and blocks that bring with them names like Staedtler, Crayola, Berol, the markings on gym hall floors. There’s a big letter “A” among the shapes, speaking of beginnings, openings, overtures; the pre-lingual. Problems of categorization (“A” what?). The confusion of things seen out of windows by small people. Is that white sky or paint?

Bodywork (2025). Some kind of automotive frame. The black fuzzy-felty interior of a car boot, or the brushy inkwork of old comics, Dan Dare or Barbarella by way of Corto Maltese. Rocketship red. Reflected buildings chewed up, tucked and folded into one another. The image licking itself like a cat.

Pane (2024) feels like it’s happening in the lower deck of a barge or a small riverboat, the water level close to the bottom of the window. But maybe it’s just rippled glass and there’s no water at all. (Remove the grid – it’s water again). The information in the picture is divided into separate boxes which together present a whole, yet each of the four panes is incompatible with its neighbour. It all adds up until it doesn’t. (Are there trees and branches in the largest of them, or does it just look that way because we’re looking at what we’re looking through?). Painting decides how much information we get. Even what’s selected in a selected view gets forever viewfindered, all the way down. To frame is to select, to select is to discard. To discard is to rebuild, regroup, recover. Do I have to say the drying racks look like stretchers?

Watcher (2025). Shapes in a window, on a window, through a window, of a window. Reflection or view? Inside or out? Day or night? Broken or whole? Both and neither. We’re wired to filter out this kind of confusion and ambiguity but we love to pack it back in. Why?

– Jamie Limond

Photo credit: Sam O’Donnell

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