Glasgow-based painter Michael Fullerton is presenting a two-part exhibition that critically examines the politics of portraiture. The first section features 11 oil portraits of male asylum seekers he lived alongside while working as live-in staff at the Hilltop Hotel in Carlisle. These works, painted in a traditional style, depict the men with care against ambiguous landscapes, deliberately restricting personal information to names and origins, highlighting their status within systems of power.
Fullerton's practice uses the conservative form of traditional portraiture to interrogate representation, power, and responsibility. The exhibition matters for its direct engagement with dehumanizing rhetoric faced by refugees, while simultaneously questioning the ethical limits of an artist's ability to capture another's image. The second part of the show, featuring screenprints of figures like Alan Turing, extends this analysis to how images are used by institutions and in broader cultural narratives.