Window Series 2: Aly Gear

For the second showing of our Window Series exhibition format, we have invited Glasgow-based artist Aly Gear to present her work Theft During the Lairdic Era 1707-1886 in the window of our space at 13 Ross Street throughout the month of August. Open from Thursday 1st August 2024, 11am to 5pm every week from Tuesday to Saturday.

Aly Gear is an ancestor of a long lineage of Foula crofters, and of Foula’s last merchant laird – a tangle from which her work as a researcher began. At Market Gallery she will be showing Theft During the Lairdic Era 1707-1886 which is a windowbook and a paperback made of plastic, cloth, lights, Foula hills, neoromantic lairdic poetry, a court trancsript of the testimonial (that ended the Foula lairdom), green ink, and anonymized court records of the lairdic era petty theft in Shetland. These court records constitute some of the only written stories about the Shetland crofters from during the lairdom.

Theft during the Lairdic era 1707-1886 began as an archaeo-textual project that excavates stories from Shetland’s archival records of petty theft. These legal records are some of the only written materials documenting the lives of the crofters who lived during the 179 years of feudally engineered scarcity and social control within the systems of property law and labour compensation that were created by the British ruling class and imposed by Shetland’s merchant lairds.

Artist Biography: Aly Gear is a researcher/artist/writer from (Foula) Shetland and the USA with a background in media arts, music composition, North American DIY noise, and sustainable food systems design. Lately she’s excited about things like: polyvocal narratological design, electronic nontextual essay performance systems, human-scale qualitative data parsing histories/futures, and methodologies for troubling ways that knowledge production textualities are inscribed with hegemonies at the design level. She is working towards the creation of a research toolkit via a practice of troubling 18th century knowledge production techniques that were used against Shetland by the British ruling class. Recent residencies include: Prattsville Art Center (NY), Gamli Skóli (Iceland), & KuBa: Kulturbahnhof (Karstädt). Recent shows include: International Noise Conference (Miami), Judson Church Memorial Dance Center (NYC), HGB (Leipzig), & Salem Access Television (Boston). Find more of her work here: aly-gear.online.

All photographs by Erika Stevenson