Terminus

About

Man's obsession with personal geographies, self-improvement and codes of conduct is the theme of Terminus, a collaborative project between the painter Francesca Lowe (b. London 1979) and the experimental novelist Alasdair Gray (b.Glasgow 1934).

In September 2007, Riflemaker will play host to a series of acrylic ink paintings set edge-to-edge across the gallery's uneven walls. Terminus fuses Victorian preaching-maps and art symbolism. It investigates the potential of a secret moral guidance system at work within the structure of a fairground. The exhibition encourages visitors to indulge visually and mentally in a game of symbolic unravelling, as they grapple with what it means to be human. Within this interior mural, Lowe presents the 'Tree of Life'; its roots weighed down by ego, deceit, vanity and corruption while its branches offer opportunity, compassion, forgiveness and good fortune.

Alasdair Gray's 1981 masterpiece Lanark established him as a major literary voice - "one of the finest writers ever to put pen to paper in the English language" (Irvine Welsh), "the greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott" (Anthony Burgess). Lanark is a satirical, subterranean novel, a coming-of-age story set within a world which re-echoes with Dante, Kafka, Blake and Lewis Carroll. Idealistic and fantastical, it is one of the key novels of the 20th century. Lanark takes a moral viewpoint as it performs its own unravelling but Terminus may not. Lowe's canvases depict a visually stimulating journey full of thrills and temptation while Gray will make his contribution via a series of specially written texts on the same philosophical proposition.