They Had Four Years 2025
Generator Projects is thrilled to present their annual graduate show ‘They Had Four Years’, featuring new work by five recent graduates from various art colleges across Scotland. This year’s exhibiting artists are: Edward Cawood (Edinburgh College of Art), Olivia Margaret Frances (Glasgow School of Art), Jungyoon Im (Glasgow School of Art), Theodora Koumbouzis (Glasgow School of Art) and Kristína Gondová (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design).
Launched in the early 2000s, They Had Four Years (TH4Y) aims to support recent graduates with the continuation and development of their arts practice after leaving art school.
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Theodora Maclellan Koumbouzis is an emerging multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow, with both Greek and Scottish heritage. Her artistic practice explores intersections between culture, social norms, and personal emotions. Through "object performance" installations, she examines how we engage with once inert and cultural objects. By considering the materials' histories and their movements, Theodora creates performances where objects themselves act in their own kind of theater. For TH4Y, Theodora is incorporating a 16mm projector fitted with a looper, which gradually erases archival footage as it runs through the machine—rendering it permanently lost. The piece is accompanied by narratives of censorship and oppression, drawn from the accounts of a Kurdish political prisoner. Through this work, Theodora addresses the tension between delicate, creative expressions and the harsh, unfeeling systems that seek to suppress them.
Olivia Margaret Frances is an artist based in Glasgow, from Wellington, New Zealand. Her practice is concerned with the screen and how it mediates our relationship with images. Working primarily with imagery sourced from online archives, Olivia often selects film stills that emphasise acts of looking. She paints primarily on corduroy, finding that the lined textile provides a dual-layer painting surface and creates a dissonance or hover between the two layers. For TH4Y, Olivia has been working on a new series of paintings that explores how the cinematic image can act as a body.
Jungyoon Im is an artist based in Glasgow. Their practice explores the relationship between conscious and unconscious thought, questioning the ambiguity of this universal experience. She focuses on the reality that may exist under the surface, bringing the subconscious into awareness through practice. Her paintings stem from dreams where she reinterprets distorted, fleeting memories, subconsciously recollecting images into physical works. For TH4Y, Jungyoon is creating a series of paintings that draw inspiration from her dreams, aiming to make sense of both familiar and strange feelings, visualising what this could look like through the act of painting.
Kristína Gondová is an artist based in Dundee. Kristína experiences the world through the movement of her body within the landscape. When she is out climbing a mountain or swimming in a river, she pays honest attention to the materials the world consists of. She celebrates the beauty of differences and repetition that occurs in the natural world by using foraged materials within her work. For TH4Y, Kristina has produced a series of functional but slightly absurd objects, such as a ceramic table, which are created from materials that she has picked up when walking along the North-East coast, mainly from found clay, sand, rocks and driftwood.
Edward Cawood is a visual artist, based between Stirling and Edinburgh, who works primarily in lens- and text- based practices. Through expansive alternative photographic process, architectural imagery and replicative ‘textual objects’, Edward’s work explores themes of site, value and industrial histories, guided by archival interaction, theoretical discourse and his own intrinsically obsessive nature. For TH4Y, Edward has studied the beehive kilns at Prestongrange. All that remains of these kilns are 11 large circles made of bricks and embedded into the ground. Edward has created 2 tiled works, one showing an archival photograph of Prestongrange’s beehive kilns, taken by Professor John R. Hume in 1966, and the second showing the site today, as photographed by the artist. Additionally, Edward has made a set of bricks, arranged in a circle, upon which a short poem referencing Prestongrange’s kiln workers is embossed.
