As part of our researcher spotlight series, we highlight individual researchers and their work in more detail.
Our current Featured Researcher is Cicely Farrer (she/her).
The title of her thesis is: Performing Politics at the Glasgow School of Art: Art, Gender and Activism in the Archives
HEI: University of St Andrews Collaborative Doctoral Award with Glasgow School of Art Archives & Collections.
Supervisors: Dr Shona Kallestrup, Dr Catherine Spencer, Michelle Kaye, and Polly Christie
Below, Cicely gives a synopsis of her thesis and reflects on her research, her experiences as a doctoral researcher, and the lessons she has learned during this time.
About Cicely’s Research:
I am a second year PhD student in the School of Art History at University of St Andrews. My project ‘Performing Politics at the Glasgow School of Art: Art, Gender and Activism in the Archives’ looks at how women and gender non-conforming artists affiliated with the school, performed and organized, activism in their art and in their lives. Based on my pre-PhD interest in the CND activism of artists at Greenham Common Women’s Peace camp in the 1980s, I chose to focus my research on artists’ activism associated with gender struggle and anti-militarism in a trans-temporal project spanning the 20th century.
My project is a collaborative doctoral award with the Glasgow School of Art Archives & Collections, whose holdings span the school’s history with records dating back to before its founding in 1845. The collection includes artworks, objects, sketchbooks, student records, minute books, drawings, photographs, textiles, costumes, designs, books and letters. In the GSA collection, I have mapped materials and ephemera, from 1900 onward through an object-led methodology, locating the traces and fragments of activism associated with the staff and students. I have recorded some of my research on their blog here: https://gsaarchives.net/2025/03/performing-politics-at-the-glasgow-school-of-art/ and an example of how this object-led method has unfolded based on the sketchbook of former student Mary Ramsay here: https://gsaarchives.net/2025/09/militarism-justice-dissent/
My focus in year two is on the Scottish artists Helen Biggar and Bet Low, who were both involved in political campaigning in Glasgow between the 1930s and 1950s. Their activism was part of a much wider popular movement amongst artists and academics in Europe against fascism and against war; toward socialist and left-wing political imaginaries. In mapping Low and Biggar’s activist art and political organizing work, Glasgow School of Art appears as one hub amidst the overlapping networks in the city, and more widely in Britain. Although a few years apart in age, Low and Biggar were part of many of the same artist circles, formed out of the Glasgow School of Art, and both actively participated in projects with the political arts organisation Glasgow Unity Theatre. The two artists’ commonalities help me to consider the question: What does an art school offer activists in terms of space, facility, personal network, materials and skill sets, toward the collective activist cause?
At present, I am most excited about a new discovery in my research from the collections of Bet Low at Glasgow University Special Collections. These are a set of twenty-four issues of The Young Socialist with lino-print cover designs by Bet Low and her husband Tom MacDonald showing child-centred scenes of life in Glasgow in the early 1950s. This little joyful newsletter was the young person’s publication of the Socialist Sunday Schools in Glasgow and features numerous poems, letters, photos and art works relating to political organizing, anti-war activism and alternative education in the city. In these instances, we see Low’s skill set as an artist, developed through her education at GSA and integration in a network of political artists, directly support the work of illustrating for a political cause.
The next phase of my research will look to the 1980s, at a point of heightened gender activism in the Glasgow art scene and widespread popularity of the CND movement. I have ideas of what I will find and materials I hope to work with, but there are still a lot of unknowns and that is an exciting prospect.
What sparked your interest in this subject?
Prior to starting the PhD, I worked as a curator and arts administrator in contemporary art institutions in Scotland for ten years. In 2017, I co-programmed a performance-based summer school of workshops and presentations with artist Gordon Douglas at Hospitalfield where we posed the question “Should our art perform our politics or should we be channelling our political ideas through action?” Since then, this question has informed much of my curatorial and writing practice. I see my PhD project as an extension of this initial research question from 2017, except rather than looking forward through contemporary practice, this project looks back, to learn about some of the political campaigning and radical dreaming of artists in Scotland in the 20th century.
What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about your subject?
When researching art histories or social histories outside of the well visited geographical ‘centres’, there are many hidden stories waiting to be revisited or re-animated, sited in public archives. I am interested in my subject because of its contemporary resonance for art and museum practitioners in Scotland today, and I am interest in ways of translating its political potency for a 2026 digital audience. In November 2025, I presented at a symposium Power for the People: Art, Protest and the Archives of Activism organized by the Henry Moore Institute and Bradford City of Culture 2025 in Saltaire. It was a productive space for me to understand the shared struggles art and activism of the past in relationg to today. One conclusion I came away with, based on some of the presenters of both contemporary and historical activist projects, was the fragility of activist histories in archives and the further dangers that the digital spaces pose into terms of conservation of the ephemeral work of activist organising.
What’s the most surprising thing your research has taught you about yourself?
In the past I’ve resisted doing a PhD as I didn’t believe that I had the resilience. I’m still only 18 months into the project but I’ve found that the research really drives me forward. I’ve also learnt to be more comfortable in a space of ‘not knowing yet’ – an inherent part of the journey of developing the project.
Which researcher would you particularly like to spotlight?
I’d like to highlight two researchers:
Alison Scott an artist, researcher and art-worker based in Angus.
Bex Šik an artist and researcher based in Glasgow.
We recently developed the SGSAH workshop event together ‘Creative Citizenship in the Archives: Engaging with Activist Histories’ with Dr Catherine Spencer for the Citizenship, Culture and Ethics Hub on the creative re-use and reanimation of activist archives in public collections. I learnt a lot from both Alison and Bex in the process as well as from partners at Glasgow Women’s Library and National Library of Scotland. We’ll be sharing more on the SGSAH blog about how this went soon.
