Anna Lawrence Snail Trail — boardroomcommitteeroom

Artist studios and gallery
7 Water Row, Govan
Glasgow

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Past Exhibitions
2026
Toby Messenger Systems in Collapse2025
Olivia Wiles West Side Story
Catriona Beckett The Guild of Abstraction and Image Making
Anna Lawrence Snail Trail
Sam Della-Valle Big Women Little Men
Ali Farrelly a mean diameter
2024Anna Metzger Teether
John Fletcher Acid Reflux
Scott Leeming Didn’t we have a good time?
Gabriella Day The best parts only
[Studio holders] MEETING 2
Amanda Seibæk & Zane Drees For Satin Bowerbirds
Kate Holford That unquestionable bloom
Amelia Barratt Cool Ground
2023
Anna Metzger, Maya Levy, Alfie Sellers The Ceiling So Far
Kirstie Lackie TV Dinners
[Group] A sense of urgency
[Studio holders] MEETING
Charlie Hodgson Trade Winds
Antonio Parker-Rees & Phoebe Kerr
Niall McCallum Path Users
[Group] World of Wonder
Orla Kane Star face
Jameela Stenheden Gordon-King in jest
Dora Padfield & Liv Fox and now the light is on it

Anna Lawrence Snail Trail

Home

19 - 27th April 2025

You’re stretched like a canvas around this room – your mouth opening to receive us. All perception begins in the oral cavity[1]. Your fractured memories are butting together to form a constellation of textures. We’re patiently waiting fast and slow to see how this one falls. Does it begin or end on the surface? Calling forward a memory of touch. A hand on the back, frozen – this image will last a lifetime. Many like these, condensed and accumulated, conglomerate. Muscle held tight and rising to the surface, years later, a history of borders and walls. Walls within walls and the traces of walking between them. Held aloft as if a historical fact.

We’re using a somatic roadmap to find our way back to the cellar. We walk down the stairs made from planks of old wood. When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths{2]. In the cellar we become the walls, our arms stretch five times their length, our diaphragm becomes a cave. The dampness becomes the atmosphere of our body. We hold this image here like a photograph, evidence for a historic recollection. A reminder that things can stick and haunt you. All the stuff we tried to throw away keeps coming back. The things we don’t want any more have a way of finding us.

Remembering a dyshidrotic eczema diagnosis in Rome. Tiny blisters accumulate to form a mothership. They disappear and then rise to the surface in moments of pressure. Skin’s memory is burdened with the unconscious[3]. I look at your skin and think about touch. The border of skin and the designation of a boundary. Porous surface filtering out what? I look back at the roadmap and see I’ve made a wrong turn. I keep turning and turning in here, like a de-threaded screw. I think of your hand dancing, performing a gesture it knows well – creating a choreography from memory. Even the eye touches[4].

From this perspective there’s some logic to it. Disparate fragments somehow piece together a fabric. Living forms collide to remind us we’re breathing. The foot of a snail leaves silvery mucus on a stone. A hand on a surface imparts a sheen of sweat. The violence of bodies comprehended by an ugly yardstick. You remember your own topology now, a relief that we’ve decided any shape will do. Any shape is the shape, you can relax with that.

You recall your own image – drag it forward from an ancient story. You remember it houses a history of sensation – a fact you sometimes hate. Yet here it is, suddenly resplendent with a new light. No – that is utter shit. What is inscribed is not always by choice and can be a blurring of fact and fiction. Things that both have and haven’t happened are relevant. Colour, health, labour – the conditions that compound to inscribe us from without and within. Memories made tangible from an inner reception to an outer perception. Words lodge and reverberate… flap within the breast of their target[5].

Back to the cellar where our whole body currently resides. We’re calling forward a perception that decentres the ocular and activates the entire body. Vision reveals what touch already knows[6]. The cellar is subterranean. Shadows on the wall – expanding and morphing with changing perspectives. The creatures moving about in the cellar are slower, less scampering, more mysterious[7]. Lurking, strange, precipitating in the corner. Detritus packed in a box and locked in a room, calls to mind a gothic scene, suspended for who knows how long. Before we got here and after we leave.

Let’s go because my body is open. Sometimes mapping can be a kind of shedding. Not everything needs to be shared. You are this room, taking a breath.

– Kate Power,
April 2025

[1] Spitz, Rene. Eye of the Senses

[2] Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space

[3] Prosser, Jay. Skin memories in Thinking Through the Skin, ed. Ahmed, Sara & Stacey, Jackie

[4] Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: architecture and the senses

[5] Riley, Denise. Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect

[6] Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: architecture and the senses

[7] Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space

Anna Lawrence is a multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow. Using a playful and irreverent approach, her work explores the weighted ideas of grief, mental health, and memory. Her background in film studies and curation informs her approach to both personal and collective narratives within her visual work. Transformation sits at the centre of her practice: surfaces are altered, layered, or partially removed, leaving traces that speak to absence as much as presence.