English & Creative WritingGray Commissions Series

The Gray Commissions Series is a partnership between Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde and the Alasdair Gray Archive. Creative practitioners are commissioned to respond to an element of Gray's work, practice or approach to produce a new piece of work meaningfully connected to Gray's practice, but standing alone as a work of art in its own right.

This approach is rooted in the fact that many of Gray’s greatest works across the visual and literary arts were a creative response to existing works. Gray’s most famous quotation, for example - ‘Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’ - was adapted from a poem by the Canadian poet Dennis Lee. His murals often responded to the Book of Genesis, populating the Garden of Eden with ordinary Glaswegian faces. In Lanark, the frontispiece was a Scottish reimagining of the Abraham Bosse frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651).

Throughout his working life, Gray sought to celebrate and declare his influences, seeing them as an integral part of all making. Similarly, we encourage and support artists to creatively respond to Gray’s oeuvre, taking inspiration from Gray’s work, but making new work of their own, that can stand alone.

Who have we commissioned and what did they do?

1st International Online Alasdair Gray Conference, 2021

This commissioned new work from poet Juana Adcock (responding to paintings in Gray’s Lanark, on its 40th anniversary), jeweller Nick Harrington (who designed 4 new rings, signifying the 4 books in Lanark), as well as commissioning a Keynote from Prof. Carla Sassi of the University of Verona, Italy, which discussed Gray’s final major literary works, his translations of Dante. Adcock’s work was published as a pamphlet, Vestigial (Stewed Rhubarb Press, 2022), and was launched during the 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference 2022.

2nd International Online Alasdair Gray Conference, 2022

We commissioned two Keynote speeches. The first of these was by the internationally acclaimed writer Ali Smith, who has credited Gray with giving her ‘permission to write’. Smith wrote a creative lecture, which explored the values and consolations of literature and art, intertwining memories of reading and meeting Gray with thoughs on the legacy of that work today. The second commission constituted the first in depth look at Gray’s visual practice across his lifetime, was by Exhibitions Director at the Glasgow School of Art, Jenny Brownrigg. Brownrigg spent time researching at the Alasdair Gray Archive.

The Made Project

As part of this module, which is part of the MLitt Creative Writing at Strathclyde, we commissioned the celebrated poet and nonfiction writer Michael Pedersen to visit the Gray Archive and choose something to respond to. He wrote a new poem ‘The Armchair Monologues’ in 2022, responding to Gray’s famous green armchair, which he performed at Oran Mor as part of Gray Day 2022 and 2023. This acted as a model for students who then produced their own creative responses to texts, images and/or artefacts in the Archive.

Since then, as part of this module, the journalist and nonfiction author Chitra Ramaswamy produced Rich Things, a series of micro-essays responding to Gray's Poor Things, facing Glasgow's colonial legacy. This has since been published in Tolka Journal in Ireland. Most recently, the popular Scottish crime writer and historical novelist Denise Mina produced the short story 'We None of Us Look Like Maureen O'Hara', based on the real life of Irish writer Brendan Behan. Denise visiting The Made Project in 2024 to share her new work and discuss her process with students.