Making Imagined Objects was a 2-day, multi-venue conference hosted by the University of Strathclyde, in partnership with The Alasdair Gray Archive, that happened in person and online, in June of 2022, along with multiple partners from across Europe and beyond.

It was the largest international gathering yet of people interested in Gray Studies. Themed ‘Across Space & Form’, the conference encouraged speakers from radically different disciplines and backgrounds to consider Gray’s visual and literary outputs, for the first time, in conversation with each other and on an equal footing.

Ranging across critical and creative forms, rooted very much in the city of Glasgow in which many of Gray’s finest murals are embedded in the landscape, the conference included visits to:

• The Whisky Bond, including the Alasdair Gray Archive
• Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), which displays several Gray works
• The Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow (coinciding with the Museum's exhibition 'Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A World Made on Paper')
• The Oran Mor auditorium, Scotland's largest free-to-access work of art and Gray's final large mural
• The Ubiquitous Chip restaurant, which includes three Gray murals started in the 1970s
• Hillhead Subway, where Gray designed a new mural in 2010 along the back wall of the artist's local station

The conference was run as a partnership between the University of Strathclyde and the Alasdair Gray Archive, while Glass and Dallas jointly opened and closed the conference. The conference committee included scholars from Scotland, England, Croatia, France and Switzerland.