Glasgow exhibition is 'living archive' to Gorbals artist

Several decades later, the building – now a contemporary arts and cultural centre – is hosting a beautiful, thought-provoking exhibition of work by her daughter Maud.

You are my kindred spirit, which runs until March 2025, is a moving “full-circle” moment for the family of the Scottish-Ghanaian poet and artist, who died in 2008 and despite nationwide acclaim, remains relatively unknown in her home city.

A gallery assistant with a portrait of Maud Sulter (Image: Mike Simmonds)

Maud was born in the Gorbals in 1960, and began her career as a writer and award-winning poet, expanding her craft to include photography and visual art.

Her work is included in libraries and galleries around the UK, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate, the Scottish Parliament and the National Portrait Gallery.

Maud Sulter (Image: © Estate of Maud Sulter. Image courtesy of Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow)

Much of the exhibition at Tramway, which is the biggest show to date of her work in Scotland, explores Maud’s family archive and her Scottish and Ghanaian heritage. It also showcases her rarely seen moving image and spoken word archives.

Maud described herself as Glaswegian Ghanaian, and used the Scots vernacular and old Scots language to explore themes of family, diaspora, history, story, and memoir.

Inside the tram works (Image: Glasgow City Archive)

The ironically titled No Oxbridge Spires (1998) features Maud videoing her mother, her aunt and two children Ama and Efie, walking in the Gorbals, coming to a stop outside Maud’s boarded up childhood home, while the grainy footage of My Father's House (1996) documents Maud's father's funeral rites in Ghana.

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Maud constantly returned to her family album to retrieve both happy and disquieting memories of growing up in Scotland, and the exhibition features photographs of Elsie alongside pictures of the family's early life in the Gorbals.

Newly qualified clippies (Image: Newsquest)

At the age of 17, Maud left Glasgow to attend the London College of Fashion, later graduating with MA in Photographic Studies at the University of Derby. She was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to photograph several children’s writers, and used a special Polaroid machine which produced 20” x 24” photographs.

This was also the medium for a series of portraits she made of Scottish cultural figures in the summer of 2002, and ten of her portraits of writers were toured round Scotland by the Scottish Poetry Library in 2003 and 2004. Glasgow acquired her portrait of Edwin Morgan from this series.

Maud worked hard to highlight inequalities, both historical and contemporary. She came to prominence as one of 11 women exhibited in the Thin Black Line in 1986, a significant breakthrough for contemporary Black and Asian art in a British public gallery.

Sadly, Maud died of cancer in 2008, aged just 47, survived by her three children. She was one of the first three women to be honoured at Glasgow Women’s Library’s annual Open the Door event – a festival of Scottish Women’s Writing in 2017.

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Maud was also an activist, curator and organiser, contributing significantly to the cultural landscape through her exhibitions, publishing and curatorial initiatives. Her expansive, multi-faceted practice sought to address the erasure and representation of Black women in the histories of art, the media and photography.

“This whole notion of the disappeared, I think, is something that runs through my work,” she once said.

“I’m very interested in absence and presence in the way that particularly Black women’s experience and Black women’s contribution to culture is so often erased and marginalized.”

Family for Maud extended beyond immediate relatives, and she devoted her career to forging new platforms for artists.  

The Tramway exhibition celebrates Maud Sulter’s work as a ‘living archive’, featuring a dynamic live programme of events over the course of the exhibition curated by researcher and writer, Pelumi Odubanjo, including poetry readings, events, talks and screenings.