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Eh? Aye! The Artwork of Lorna Miller
Glasgow School of Art
I FIRST met Lorna Miller over a decade ago on a bike ride along the Forth and Clyde Canal. It was the first run of what a bunch of us had hoped to become a new Clarion club. Blethering as we rode, I heard she’d recently returned to Glasgow from Hastings, and did cartoons. I was suitably impressed, but oh my ignorance!
Eh? Aye! The Artwork of Lorna Miller at the Glasgow School of Art is another return — she graduated from there back in 1994 — but the exhibition of her work begins far, far earlier.
We begin at the beginning, with a photograph of a three-year-old Lorna deep in concentration, pencil in hand and clearly lost in the creation taking shape on the paper in front of her. Alongside in the glass case, Funny Book — her first comic — sale price 15p with free Scarlet Red poster (not the banner of socialism on this occasion, one of a group of colour-based characters).
You can read too much into the creations of an eight-year-old, but two things appear clear. Lorna could draw, and she already knew how to take a sample.
On then to her exploration of Berlin as the anti-fascist protection dyke began to crumble, to the “Witch” comic book series where the eye for the details of the ridiculousness of this world — its grotesques and injustices — were brought together with an ever sharpening wit and draftswomanship, ready to be packaged and sent right back into it as reflection.
It feels odd to see these things in cases, but they are the artefacts of a journey that I can’t help but think would be even harder to make today than it undoubtedly was then.
By 2014 Lorna had become the first woman to have a position created for her in that most old-boy of old boys’ clubs, Private Eye. She went on to illustrate their Rotten Boroughs column, the ineptitude and desperation of local government providing fertile ground for the parody. These, and what followed in the Guardian, Bella Caledonia, and our very own Morning Star adorn the walls from here on in.
From the mouth of Blair doubling as the gate to hell, and businessmen organising social cleansing of our town and cities, all the way to the crowning glory that is Sir Keir Starmer as a giant, coiled, turd — this is serious, this is playful, this is alive!
The Morning Star itself makes a guest appearance — a feature on Lorna’s inspirational Glasgow May Day posters that did so much to revive our day over the last decade or so.
Lorna told me that her days of political cartoons are coming to an end. From staple of the daily printing press, the political cartoon became an early victim of savage cuts in the industry.
Go and see what you’re missing inside — the joy in challenge, the colour of merciless play, the oxygen of dissent.
Demand more of it too — you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
Runs until March 27. Free admission. For more information see: gsaexhibitions.co.uk
