Esther Gamsu: MEDIUM @ David Dale Gallery, Glasgow

“Art School? No, Boring Bearurcratic [sic] Overpriced Hellscape!”

These are the words that greet visitors at MEDIUM, scrawled in loose red handwriting across a framed print outside the inner entrance to the gallery. For a moment, I mistake it for a hastily written whiteboard notice announcing who’s showing inside, and it even takes me several more looks for the altered spelling to register. This sets the tone of the exhibition, which feels like an in-joke, possessing layers of the easily mistakeable and an air of comedy only fully appreciated on closer inspection.

Inside, Esther Gamsu’s exhibition unfolds centrally as a set of three sculptures, each a translation of a domestic miniature into something almost, but not quite, human-sized. The gallery’s bare-brick interior and industrial columns set the stage for these modest monuments: a red wooden-framed bed, complete with a matching striped linen, stands slightly elevated, its stacked frames recalling something akin to an irimoya roofed building, accompanied by the other two iterations, depicting a washing machine and small rug.

Each sculpture begins with a piece of dollhouse furniture, meticulously rebuilt again and again, each iteration larger than the last until the object teeters on the edge of usefulness, rendering its initial function useless as it strives towards something beyond itself, evoking familiar themes of success and desire in Gamsu’s work. This process of repetition and addition makes explicit the meticulous labour behind each piece, and her dedication to understanding the objects she replicates is evident through the exquisite attention to detail present across each of the enlarging replicas, simple though they may appear at first glance.

These works sit alongside a window installation: an alternative first impression, depending on which direction you’re visiting from, comprised of faceless chrome stickers, scaled up from photos taken of those which cover the car windows of children's seats, all but covering one of the gallery windows with the implication of sharks, horses, and love hearts.

Looking for guidance, I find an exhibition text in the format of a pink handout that details, without explanation, a psychic’s cold read on Gamsu. I’m met with a double page spread of personal judgements and assumptions, various statements jumping out at me, such as: “You’re on the 30 hump, right? So, this is you wanting to get married, wanting to get babies, wanting to work, wanting to…” Taken rather literally, the exhibition text pokes fun at those of us seeking absolute clarity around the artist’s intentions, but instead invites us to engage with the artwork on display as a personal encounter. Without the benefit of hearing from Gamsu directly, how clear this context would be I am not sure, which is seemingly, and I think successfully, the point. The ambiguity is central to the artist’s work. 

Esther Gamsu, Medium, David Dale Gallery (2025). Image courtesy the artist and David Dale Gallery, Glasgow. Photo: Max Slaven

A highlight, the exhibition poster’s covergirl and a soft spot amidst the harder forms, is the rug. The hide of a blue-eyed stuffed toy, a bear, gazing upwards and outwards with a glossed-over sheen, a little sorry for itself and its counterparts of shifting size. This instills a strange life into the space, a presence I remain aware of throughout.

A sense of restraint is consistent across this small presentation of works. An unexpected air of discipline inhabits the space, negotiating pockets of humour and moments that flick between sincerity and softness, as Gamsu’s processual labour is made so evidently clear through the immaculate recreation and enlargement of these objects that possess a charming quality enough in themselves to pose a potential pitfall of the unnecessary, but which she challenges through a clear and utter dedication to a craft of remaking and rethinking.

The exhibition as a whole speaks to the maturing of Gamsu’s practice, one oozing with a satirical elegance that she handles with clever consideration and patience, enabling her to enact developed depictions of how replica and repetition can behave.

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Esther Gamsu: MEDIUM, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, until 29 Nov. Open Fri and Sat, 12-5pm