Ciara Phillips: Undoing It at GoMA
The first thing you notice when you step into Ciara Phillips’ Undoing It is the sheer scale of the installation. The work doesn’t hang on the gallery walls — it is the gallery walls. Saturated with layers of print, and mark-making the exhibition creates an atmosphere that seems to pulse with intensity.
With her large-scale prints, made using woodcut, etching, screenprint and monoprint techniques, Phillips has transformed GoMA’s Gallery 3 into a fully immersive environment.
These works shift between expressive abstraction and the language of process; grids, colour swatches, notations, and photographic fragments. The result is a space that feels alive with making. You can almost see the thinking unfolding before you, like pages of a sketchbook blown up to human scale and physically pressed into the room.
There’s a tactile urgency here: scraped wood, burnished copper, transferred ink. The labour of it all—the rubbing, the pressure, the layering—becomes a way of thinking in action. Phillips’ work reminds us that making art is often about repetition, doing, undoing, and doing again.
For over two decades, Ciara Phillips has been quietly revolutionising contemporary printmaking. From her early days in Glasgow’s East End to her Turner Prize nomination and international recognition, she has remained focused on process, collaboration and political care. Undoing It feels like a culmination of that ethos. A prompt to keep thinking, doing, undoing.
Ciara Phillips: Undoing It is on display at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow until 26th October 2025.