About the Artists
Gemma Dagger
Gemma Dagger (b. Dumfries, 1982) is a distinguished photographer and artist whose creative practice is rooted in narrative exploration and social research. She holds an MA in Film and Moving Image Production from the Northern Film School and a BA in Photography from the University of the West of Scotland. Exhibitions include: Clo An Tir, Trades Hall, Glasgow (2025), Eastern Ground, Strangefield, Glasgow (2023), Street Level Open, Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow (2022, 2019), Queer Constellations, MERL, Reading (2021), Skelling, Skeklers and Guizing, The Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh (2019), Focas: Document, National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar, India, An Lanntair, Stornoway, Platform, Glasgow (2018) Halloween Past and Present, Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, Cornwall (2017), Departures, Street Level Photoworks/ Hillhead Library (2016), Futureproof, Streetlevel Photoworks Glasgow (2014), As Above, So Below, South Block, Glasgow (2013).
Matthew Arthur Williams
Matthew Arthur Williams (b. 1989) is a London born artist, photographer and DJ living and working in Glasgow. Often collaborating with others, Williams’ work typically incorporates photography, moving image and sound. In his first institutional solo exhibition, Soon Come (2022) at DCA, Dundee, Williams combined archive material with filmed documentary footage, interviews with family members and self-portraiture to explore the complex histories tied to people and place, particularly those of Jamaica and Stoke-on-Trent. Recent solo shows include presentations at Stills: Centre for Photography and Primary, Nottingham both in 2025. His work has been included in the exhibitions: CONTAINER, Slugtown, Newcastle (2026), Still Glasgow at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, (2025) Lives Less Ordinary, at Two Temple Place, London (2025) Digging In Another Time, Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, at the Hunterian, Glasgow (2024), Five By Five at Incubator, London (2024) and Pictures of Us, Gathering, London (2023). Other presentations have been at Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark (2021); Edinburgh Art Festival (2021); Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2021); Schau Fenster, Berlin, Germany (2020); Taigh Chearsabhagh, North Uist (2020); Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow (2019); and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2017).
About Let it Come Down
In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the ‘bardos’ are described as a series of transitional states between death and rebirth. Experienced through a spectrum of visions, dreams and apparitions, the bardos are also said to occur within the gaps of everyday existence. Let it Come Down draws loosely on this dreamlike condition. Both Dagger and Williams conjure a world unmoored, approaching the landscape as a waiting room between sequences of time and states of mind. In his selection of photographic stills, Williams composes a spatial double-act between luminous daylight and the dark matter of the earth. Shot in the Spring of 2025 whilst walking the Borders, he engaged with the topography directly. The location in the series – the Cheviot Hills – straddles the Anglo-Scottish border between Northumberland and the Scottish Borders.
By contrast, Gemma Dagger uses her source material to create imagined places. Working on the edge of forests throughout the south-west of Dumfries and Galloway, her monochrome photographs evoke a rural idyll saturated with ancient forces. Communal rituals and choreographed movement unfold in woodlands and walled gardens, among bluebells and branches. Somnambulant daydreams exist on the edge of time.
Both series are affected by an invisible gravitational pull. In Dagger’s Kir Tree, a Fastigiata Yew stands on Neolithic terrain, its central axis drawing the viewer inexorably into orbit. Meanwhile, Williams' Further Than Here is tilted directly into the mouth of the Cheviot Hills, upending the horizon line. The descent is contrasted by Perspectives I, whose waves of light embody a ‘thin space’— the Celtic term for a place where the boundary between heaven and earth collapses.