Vow and Container
Slugtown X 20 Albert Road

Installation view, Vow, 20 Albert Road, 2026. Organised by Slugtown, Newcastle.

Will Hughes, The End of Love, 2025, Art deco flame sconce glass, concrete, flame effect light bulb, grey twisted fabric cable, Dimensions variable, Edition of 3

Anaïs Comer, Po-tattoo, No. 3, 2025, Plaster, watercolour, temporary tattoo and varnish 5.5 x 6.5 x 5cm; Anaïs Comer, Po-tattoo, No. 5, 2025, Plaster, watercolour, temporary tattoo and varnish 6.5 x 11 x 6.5cm

Jade Sweeting, Stone & String, 2025, Silver gelatin print 26 x 21 cm, Edition of 10

Will Hughes, And I’ve been through so much, that sometimes it feels far. It is like a movie, played by another star, 2025, Sandblasted cast aluminium, 6 x 15 x 7 cm

Gwen Evans, Vow, 2025, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm

Vow
Anaïs Comer, Gwen Evans, Will Hughes and Jade Sweeting.
20 Albert Road
Organised by Slugtown, Newcastle
25/01 – 22/02/2026

Slugtown are pleased to present Vow, an off-site group exhibition at 20 Albert Road, Glasgow including work by Anaïs Comer, Gwen Evans, Will Hughes and Jade Sweeting.

The exhibition interrogates notions of intimacy, connection, and adoration, considering how these qualities are negotiated within contemporary life. Across diverse practices including painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, the works reflect upon how vulnerability can be both a visual strategy and a political gesture. Together, the artists foreground tenderness, devotion, and care as active positions, questioning how such gestures might resist dominant structures and open new forms of relation.

Anaïs Comer’s practice investigates interplay between pattern, form and material, and uses quotidian materials to develop a sculptural language full of sentiment and humour. In Lovebirds, Comer formalises teenage superstitious practices around romantic love – the delicate gesture of carving a heart into a tree or the surface of a school desk enlarged to the point of reverence. Repetitious and labour intensive patterns are made in biro on the plywood surface, bastardising those seen in period drama costumes, wallpapers, fabrics and embroidery. The methodical, and un-expressive approach to mark-making connects ideas of craft, mundane gestures and overlooked labour.

Alongside the wall-based work are two sculptures from her Po-tattoo series. Cast in jesmonite and hand-painted, the works appear almost extra potato. Displaying the usual blemishes and imperfections, they are heightened with additional blushes and marks to heighten their tactility. The temporary tattoos that adorn their surface personify the works, and gently humanise them. This playful intervention and elevation of the humble tuber references childhood aspiration, and moments of imaginative transformation; the fantasy of becoming a princess for a day.

Yearning and seduction are similarly present in the works of Will Hughes. Glowing gently at the end of tangled fabric cables lie several art deco flame sconces sourced while the artist was on residency in Blackpool. The town is replete with Art Deco buildings – once the symbol of sleek modernity, opulence and glamour, these buildings stand tarnished and faded by age. Entitled The End of Love, the flame sconces act as torches abandoned, discarded, yet still burning as remnants of a past love and bygone age.

Hughes also presents And I’ve been through so much, that sometimes it feels far. It is like a movie, played by another star. a fabricated aluminium peak of a cap embedded into the wall and subtly angled downwards. Suggestive of a bowed head looking down to the ground, the peak suggests an averted eyeline. For the artist, this hesitancy to meet others’ gaze has previously been adopted in an act of self- preservation shaped by a fear of judgment and the realities of being seen as a queer person living outside the gender binary.

Spanning the back wall of the gallery is a monumental black and white image by Jade Sweeting. The image is a detail from the photo The things she finds in walls I part of Sweeting’s body of work 100 Years Guarantee – documenting the daily working life of Lydia Noble, a drystone waller living and working in West Yorkshire. In the photo, Noble delicately cups an old cough sweet wrapper lifted from between the stones. Growing up amongst a family of stone masons, her family built many of the buildings and structures around the area in which she lives. Sweeting’s photographic series offers an alternative approach to portraiture that subtly explores, and challenges gendered issues and conventions by centring Noble – a woman working in traditionally male dominated field.

Presented on a more intimate scale are Inside a wall, and Stone & String, silver gelatin prints that focus specifically on Noble’s hands, tools, and additional objects found during the course of her work. Through this documentary approach, Sweeting highlights and celebrates intergenerational knowledge, traditional practices, movement, sounds, as well as the strength and skills required for this laborious work in varying weather conditions and seasons.

With an interest in the anxieties of modern relationships, Gwen Evans’ work blurs the lines between courtship, rejection and obsession. Evans draws on the visual language of nuptial portraiture (bride and groom captured in wedding attires in posed and highly styled images) to produce paintings that hover between doting depictions of a blossoming love or something altogether more sinister. Botanical symbolism is an enduring theme in historical storytelling, and Evans picks selected floral references from across centuries (such as Greek mythology, Renaissance portraiture, and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986)) in her jewel-like works. In Vow, a hand lies on the implied intimacy of a bed, delicately holding a sprig of myrtle, traditionally seen as an erotic symbol attributed to the Roman goddess Venus. Whilst in Briar, an admirer pinches a blossom from a rose bush, but is rewarded instead with a thorn.

Vow is part of a gallery exchange with 20 Albert Road – an art space in Glasgow shared by Cento, 5b and Ivory Tars. An initiative set up between friends, the programme rotates between each curatorial project, hosting exhibitions, events and discussions. 20 Albert Road will curate an exhibition at Slugtown, opening in February 2026.

Anaïs Comer (b. 1996, London, UK) lives and works in London, UK. She studied her BA in Fine Art Central Saint Martins and participated in the Central Saint Martins’ Associate Studio Programme (2019-2021). Recent exhibitions include: Running Through London, Twilight Contemporary; Great Expectations, General Assembly, London, UK; The Improbable Truth, Kupfer Projects, London, UK; Ai Mi Tagai, White Conduit Projects, London, UK; Dreamlands Part II, OHSH Projects, London, UK; Marx on the Table, Folkestone Fringe, Folkestone, UK; invisible city, UK Mexican Arts Society, London, UK; Ai Mi Tagai, Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo, Japan; Sounding Off 2.0, VITRINE Digital, Online; The Destrier, Freehold Projects, Leeds, UK.

Gwen Evans (b. 1996, Bodelwyddan, Wales) lives and works in Manchester, UK. A graduate of Manchester School of Art (2018), her most recent solo presentation TRYST marked the inaugural exhibition at William Hine Gallery, London. Her work was also the subject of a solo institutional display, CIPHER at HOME, Manchester in 2023, following being awarded the Granada Foundation Gallery prize. Selected exhibitions include: More News About Flowers, Division of Labour, Manchester, UK; Manifestations, Pink, Manchester, UK; CIPHER, HOME, Manchester, UK; Bankley Exchanges, Bankley Gallery, Manchester, UK; Manchester Open, HOME, Manchester, UK; Open, The Royal Cambrian Academy, Conwy, UK; Talking Sense, Portico Library, Manchester, UK; Upside Down Bucket, OA Studios, Salford, UK; Twice As Nice, Ps Mirabel, Manchester, UK.

Will Hughes (b. 1993,UK) lives and works in Stockton-on-Tees, UK, They received a BA in Fine Art from Bath Spa University in 2018. Recent exhibitions include: Desire Lines: Art, People & Possibilities, MIMA, Middlesbrough, UK; Uz Uz Uz, Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds, UK; Groundhoppers, Glue, Berlin, DE; Wink Wink, The Whitaker, Lancashire, UK; La La La, La La La La, La La La, La La La La La, Abingdon Project Space, Blackpool, UK; Looking Good and Feeling Fine, Platform A, Middlesbrough, UK; Loss and Looking, BALTIC39, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. In 2025 Will won The Tees Valley Visual Artist of the Year, and has been part of Sculpture Network, Yorkshire Sculpture International. They have undertaken residencies at Glue, Berlin, DE; VARC, Northumberland, UK and BB15, Linz, AT.

Jade Sweeting (b.1987, Middlesbrough) lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She studied her BA in Printmaking at Northumbria University in 2010. Recent exhibitions include A Hundred Year Guarantee, Four Corners, London, UK; The Secret Lives of Bottle of Notes: Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, MIMA, Middlesbrough, UK; MIMA 900 Miles (from Home), NGCA, Sunderland, UK; Still Moving, Workplace, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK; Deep Down Body Thirst, Glasgow International, Glasgow, UK. She has co-curated exhibitions including On Our Backs: An Archive, The NewBridge Project, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK and her works is held in public collections including BALTIC, Gateshead; MIMA Middlesbrough, Carolina Coast University, South Carolina, and Sir William Gray House, Hartlepool.

Installation view, Container, Slugtown, Newcastle, 2026. Organised by 20 Albert Road.

Renata Ottati, apt. #2, Calle 9no y la principal Guayaquil, Ecuador, 2025, Steel, doorbell, 1:20 minutes audio, 32 x 31 x 6 cm

Jennifer Bailey, Art room, 2001/2022, Scale model, fruit, MDF, melamine, polythene, paper, Blu-Tac, LED lights, sticker, 15 x 26 x 26 cm

Charlie Hammond, Wheelie Bin Chair (The kerbside grey, mixed recycling), 2026, Wheelie bin, found frame, 80 x 58 x 48 cm

Aman Sandhu, Less Resistance, series of prayers wheels constructed from tin cans from all of my service jobs in Glasgow, 2019, 30 x 15 x 20 cm

Matthew Arthur Williams, objects are closer than they appear, 2024, Photographic print on crystal archive paper, 54 x 64 cm

Ewan Murray, Container, 2024, Oil on board, 30 x 37 cm

Rhianna Turnbull, Selfridges, 2024, Photographic print in aluminium frame, 51 x 41 cm

Stuart Middleton, Next Door, 2025, HD video with sound, 2’27”

Niall McCallum, Untitled, 2024/2026, Acrylic fridge magnets, scanned Glasgow exhibition handouts printed on paper (2018-2024), fridge ephemera from 19 Keir Street as of 21.1.26, 85 x 50 x 57 cm

Container
Jennifer Bailey, Charlie Hammond, Niall McCallum, Stuart Middleton, Ewan Murray, Renata Ottati, Aman Sandhu, Rhianna Turnbull, Matthew Arthur Williams
Slugtown, Newcastle
Organised by 20 Albert Road
07/02 – 07/03/26

The title is borrowed from Ewan Murray’s painting of the same name. It refers to a motif shared across the works in the show, as well as the function of exhibition space itself. The artworks variously allude to entry and occupation of spaces, and the arrangement of objects within them – be those unusual, utopian or prosaic. They often refer to activities which run alongside or help maintain an art practice but are not always shared openly: family, a service industry job, commuting, living space, and travel.

The nine artists included in the show share a close relationship to Glasgow, either currently working there or having lived there for a large part of their lives. As such the notion of participation within a small art scene is also in question – the city as container.

The exhibition is part of a gallery exchange with Slugtown. Slugtown is a non-profit art gallery and CIC based in Newcastle upon Tyne working with artists to produce exhibitions and events, and running workshops to engage new audiences in contemporary art. Vow, an exhibition organised by Slugtown, is currently open at 20 Albert Road.

Photo credit: Matt Antoniak.

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