Coffee-Table Notes

CCA, Glasgow until October 13th Four stars Grace Schwindt turns things inside out in her new video installation, which flits its way across five screens arranged in a circle as a group therapy session might be. Onscreen, four figures stand, sit or dance in a field beside five similar screens. One woman looks dressed for mourning, occasionally invoking lines from what might be a eulogy or prayer, or else hanging up a piece of black material as a false window. Another woman throws shapes, while a horse stands as passively as the old man in a chair who says nothing in a way that nevertheless speaks volumes as much as his trumpet playing does. Is this Heaven? Given the film’s roots in the work of 1970s radical German anti-psychiatrity group The Socialists Patients Collective (SPK), probably not, though in its portrait of a world conjured up by an old man’s memory that takes a leap beyond the clinical confines of a medical institution, it could be. With the film’s title and scrip

“I’ve got my children glued to the TV,” says Hannah Lavery cheerily as she talks about The Drift, her autobiographical solo play she performs in a short cross-country tour next month. It’s September school holiday, and, while one child is on a playdate, the other two are lost in a world of X-Box. They may be quiet, but they’re comfortably within reach. This wasn’t always the case for Lavery when she was their age, at least not in terms of her dad, who left her and her mother when she was three. This became the starting point for The Drift, an angry and unflinchingly honest elegy to her absent father, who died in 2017, leaving behind a considerable weight of familial baggage. “It’s been a strange journey,” says Lavery. “I wrote the play as a series of poems, and I was running this tiny fringe venue on the Royal Mile in the waiting room of my step-father’s shop. There was an empty slot in the afternoon, and I thought I’d do it once and put it away. I was brave and quite vulnerab

Accessibility is important for Gaelynn Lea, the American violinist and singer-songwriter who plays her first ever dates in Scotland next week. This isn’t so much the case with her work, which has moved from the looped back-woods folk airs of her 2015 album, All the Roads That Lead Us Home, to the just as beautiful but more fleshed out songs on Learning How to Stay, released in 2018. The accessibility Lea talks about is more to do with the venues she plays. Having been born with osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disease, which causes complications in the development of bones and limbs, anywhere with stairs is understandably off limits. “It makes it really difficult to find places to play,” Lea says down the line from her home in Duluth, Minnesota, “but by talking about the lack of accessible spaces, hopefully people will think about it more and do something about it.” Lea cites Attitude is Everything, a non-profit organisation founded to improve deaf and disab