School of Fine Art Sculpture & Environmental Art
Solomon Pawlyn
My practice is an attempt to understand the things that I find confusing, hilarious or sad which weirdly often go hand in hand in hand. When I was younger, I hated conceptual art. I found it impossible to digest and exclusionary. When I got to art school I realised that I wasn’t really much of a maker. To be honest I’m better at convincing people to make things for me. Maybe it was out of bitterness that I embraced conceptual art as a sort of creative survival. I want to inhabit these conceptual spaces and theories and attack them head on, recontextualising them in something so far removed it becomes ridiculous. I want to make sense of them by rooting them in something palatable to me like my own life. Hopefully this makes them palatable to the people that view my art. Humour is ever present. Probably a coping mechanism but it can make my work at the least mildly entertaining. At the moment I work in mixed media installation in Glasgow. I’ve developed a lot of work using visual sound over the last two years. you could say my work is somewhere between structuralist, post structuralist and semiotic but I don’t really know what those mean.
Icarus Affection
My degree show piece ‘Icarus Affection’ is a mixed media exploration into my experience of being groomed when I was a teenager, after downloading the gay dating app Grindr. This project started in collaboration with two gay men, both of whom i met on the app. This collaboration was only beknownst to one of them, Photographer Josh McNaughton, who took the photograph of me face down on the floor. at the same time i was working on this project josh had been working on a project of his own photographing gay men he had met on Grindr. I don’t know the name of the other man i collaborated with. The only things i know about him are that he’s 182.88 cm tall, 77kg heavy, married and under the impression that I’m a virginal classics student who loves father and son role-play. I corresponded with this man for about a week and eventually convinced him to send me a voice note of himself reading out an excerpt from Ovid’s Metamorphosis which poetically details the flight and fall of Icarus. He only agreed to do this as a part of an intense role-play episode which really tested my commitment to art. Over the following two months, I developed an installation working from the photograph, voice note, and myth—an approach informed by structuralist theories of myth as frameworks through which personal and collective meaning is constructed. The work engages with a formative period in my life that, in retrospect, operates as a kind of mythic structure: a narrative moment that shaped the trajectory of the following five years and my emergence a gay man.
Since coming out at 18, I’ve seen a lot of gay men, and while each has had his own story, a recurring theme I’ve noticed—both in their experiences and in my own—is a formative first sexual encounter that was, in some way, scarring. Often, this involved a significantly older man. I began to reflect on how these early encounters, happening at a time when someone is particularly impressionable, can quietly shape their understanding of sex, intimacy, and self. My own experience of being groomed on Grindr at sixteen marked the beginning of a process that shaped how I came to see myself as a gay man over the following years. What struck me most was how common this narrative was—how many others had similar stories. This sense of universality brought me to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist theory of myth, particularly the idea that myths are built from recurring patterns that help us make sense of personal and collective experience. His framework helped guide the development of the work. What has lingered for me, since completing the piece, is the cyclical nature of trauma in the queer community: the older men who pursue younger, vulnerable boys were often in those boys’ positions themselves, years earlier. In that way, the same story is replayed again and again—shifting in detail, but remaining eerily familiar, like a modern myth retold across generations.
Ibizan Epiphany & Ascension
Ibizan Epiphany is a five-part installation that follows on from my previous sculpture exploring the linear trajectory of language. This piece shifts focus to Ibizan party culture, expanding on my idea that it can be seen as a kind of neopilgrimage. I started noticing strong parallels between religious or historical pilgrimages and the way Brits travel to Ibiza, often repeating the same rituals, chasing a sense of transformation, release, or belonging—just in a very different setting.
The installation plays with these comparisons through five elements:
Cymatic Laser on Cyanotype – A cyanotype print shows laser-generated cymatic patterns from the spoken word “pilgrimage.” It’s mounted high on the wall, referencing the star followed by the three wise men—a kind of symbolic guide for this modern, hedonistic journey.
VIP Last Supper – A huge fabric print of a photo I took in a VIP area in Ibiza. It reminded me of The Last Supper—not in a literal sense, but in the way it captured this weird mix of performance, reverence, and group dynamics that often show up in nightlife spaces.
Modern Nativity Gifts – My take on the traditional offerings of gold, frankincense, and myrrh—updated for Ibiza: Superdrug earrings, Dior Sauvage, and pink coke. These are the new symbols of value, status, and initiation within this scene.
Babe Shrine – A small shrine made with poppers, a photo of a british lady outside Café Mambo, and a Tumblr quote. It’s a tribute to the sincerity and absurdity that coexist in nightlife and online spaces.
Cymatic Hymn Mix – Shown on an old monitor, this video loop features cymatic visuals from a sound mix I made combining the hymn “God Leads Us Along” with “Ibiza” by The Manor. It’s a clash of the sacred and the profane, and it sort of captures the spiritual chaos of the whole thing.
A lot of this was loosely informed by Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ideas about myth—how the same kinds of stories and patterns repeat across cultures, even if the symbols change. Ibizan Epiphany looks at how those patterns show up in places we don’t usually think of as “spiritual,” and how nightlife can hold its own kind of ritual, meaning, and myth-making.
Ibizan Ascension is a continuation of the ideas I explored in Ibizan Epiphany, this time digging deeper into the subtle religious undertones of Ibiza’s party culture. The work still uses cymatic patterns to explore how sound and language carry mythic weight—pulling from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea of mythemes (core building blocks of myth) and translating them into a more chaotic, sunburned context. The piece was also partially inspired by a surreal moment when I saw Luca Bish in Ibiza airport while me and my flatmate Flo were having a pint from Burger King. That kind of low-stakes transcendence sits right at the heart of this work.
The installation is made up of five parts:
Ryanair ascension – Found footage of people getting mash up on a flight to Ibiza is overlaid with an audio reading of 2 Kings 2:2, a passage describing the prophet Elijah ascending to heaven. It’s shown on an old crt monitor.
Rio de Janeiro Filter Screen – I poured molten glass wax over a printed image of a Renaissance painting depicting Elijah’s ascension. This version survived after two others cracked in the process, which somehow felt right. It acts as a kind of warped filter—half religious icon, half club bathroom mirror.
flaming charriot – In the Bible, Elijah gets taken up in a fiery chariot. In this version, it’s a plaster cast of a rolled up €10 note i found in my pocket on new years day. surrounded by a fire emoji shape made from leftover pink coke from Ibizan Epiphany. It’s part relic, part iconography, part evidence.
Pink Chariot – I scanned the same €10 note used in the cast and printed it onto a laser-cut wooden chariot. Drawing the shape in Illustrator nearly broke me, but it brings together divine transport and tourist economy in one strange object.
Cymatic Map – A series of cyanotype prints work almost like a blueprint or map of the sculpture’s ideas. They stand in for the theoretical threads running through the work—language, repetition, ritual, and the transformation of the everyday into the mythic. this was my first time trying to use cymatics in this way.
Ibizan Ascension continues to play with the idea that modern mythologies don’t happen in temples or texts—they happen in airports, on party flights, and in weird, glowing moments that feel bigger than they should. And Luca Bish, if you ever see this: do not fumble Grace.
F word
this is a sculpture i made looking at the etymology of the f-slur (f*ggot). In my eyes its king of like the ghosts of past, present and future/eternal. the past is represented by the bundle of sticks, the present is represented by a photo of me after i got home from heaven for the first time circa 2021, and the eternal is represented by a sound pattern i created from the spoken word. its funny to me how all of these things can be grouped under the umbrella term that I’ve heard since I was 11 or something.
