Sgàire Wood on Jupiter Rising: ‘I want it to be a narcotic experience’
Sgàire Wood is on double duties at Jupiter Artland this summer, with the opening of her latest exhibition and curation of the Jupiter Rising X EAF festival. She talks hard choices, heraldry and hedonism with Greg Thomas
‘I’ve attended Jupiter Rising for years and always loved the psychedelic effect of being there, in this absurd sculpture garden in the middle of the countryside, casually walking past peacocks and sheep and goats.’ Artist and model Sgàire Wood is talking about her plans for Jupiter Artland’s high-summer festival of art and music over a Zoom connection that won’t show her face. Instead, a sparkly red heart with oversized cartoon eyes appears in the middle of my screen. A very appropriate avatar.
Jupiter Rising is a night of ‘wild, experimental performance’, ‘unmissable music and artists’, and ‘late-night dancing in the woodland’. That’s according to Kim McAleese, director of Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) with which Jupiter Rising annually pairs up. Held at Jupiter Artland sculpture park in West Lothian, in the grounds of country pile Bonnington House, the event represents a crossover between the fine art scene and the world of drag and performance, with which Wood (whose first name is pronounced ‘scara as in mascara’) is more familiar. She moved to Glasgow 13 years ago to study fashion and textiles at art school but, she says, ‘I very quickly realised I wouldn’t be fulfilled in that space and made my practice in nightlife and events spaces, particularly queer spaces.’
Since then, the Irish-born artist has become both a much-loved fixture of Glasgow’s cultural landscape and something of a burgeoning celebrity. Using her body as a canvas, like Leigh Bowery before her, Wood makes herself over into a range of fantastical, surreal, creepy and erotically charged alter egos. One of her signature moves involves painting huge, porcelain-doll eyes over the tops of her cheekbones, her face transformed into something from a toy-shop slasher flick. A quick Google search reveals a 2020 video on Vogue’s website showing the artist’s ‘Camp Babydoll Extreme Beauty Transformation’. Last year she graced the cover of AnOther magazine modelling Prada. Amid it all, she’s carved a furrow as a performer and club organiser, notably setting up Bonjour, a profit-sharing and worker-run queer club in Saltmarket.
Big talent and big success notwithstanding, there’s a tiny note of diffidence in the way Wood talks about the brief from Jupiter Artland. Curating is not necessarily ‘my wheelhouse’, she says. She felt unsure for a while whether to ‘make the festival this big conceptual thing’. In the end, however, she decided she’d rather ‘make sure people can feel what I’ve loved about Jupiter Rising in the past and to share the work of performers that I love, who are also my friends’.
That means the nod has been given to Poisonous Relationship, the musical project of multimedia artist Jamie Crewe, and to Princessa Mangione III, the stage name of writer Shola von Reinhold whose novel Lote was a breakout success in 2020. ‘That will be an amazing spectacle. She plays the harp, often with wind (literal wind) accompaniment, blowing her hair around.’ Wood will revive her audience-led Sgàireoke sessions from previous festivals, with DJ sets in the woodlands from Plantainchipps and Junglehussi, the latter a persona of photographer Matthew Arthur Williams.
Congenially enough, Wood’s exhibition at Jupiter Artland opens the week before the Jupiter Rising X EAF bash. Titled In Pride, In Piety, In Vigilance, it will explore themes from medieval heraldry while considering the ways in which we assign human qualities to non-human life. ‘Being involved with Jupiter Rising in the past is part of what allowed me to validate what I do as an artform,’ Wood says, ‘to the point where it is now evolving into a more traditional contemporary art practice. That’s kind of what the show represents.’ Still, she’ll be taking the night of the festival as a chance to ‘party and let loose. I want it to be a narcotic experience!’
Sgàire Wood: In Pride, In Piety, In Vigilance, 14 August–18 October; Jupiter Rising X EAF, 22 August, 5pm; both at Jupiter Artland, Wilkieston; Main picture: Spit Turner.