FORMAT Issue 87 April - June 2026
A structuring and organising of the way things are going to be; a predetermined and given configuration; a ready framing.
14th July 2026
The story of British housing as seen through film is one of ubiquitous and enduring apartheid. Yet, have the filmmakers themselves been immune to that social ill? Johnny Rodger gives an intersectional reading of housing and film with a prompt for plenty viewing as well as reading.
19th April 2026
A story about contracts and commodities - all too resonant of the contemporary realities of geopolitics and the multinational corporate interests - New York prize-winning novelist and short story-writer, Michael Washburn, details the momentum of a dirty business.
19th April 2026
A sustained, penetrating and profound study of the forms in Dali's early work and informed deduction and speculation on their provenance by art critic Dmitriy Soliterman.
SOURCE Issue 86 December 2025 - February 2026
The provenance or the cause; that from which everything flows.
(The front cover photo is of The Glasgow Wellspring. Artwork by Joanna Kessel in collaboration with Angus Farquhar, Aproxima Arts and James Johnson, getMade Design.)
RELATION Issue 85 July - September 2025
Art can create relations to, and reveal relations within the world.
INTUITIVE Issue 84 April – May 2025
Of a proceeding and/or arriving optimally without direct, conscious objective calculation or rationalisation.
THINKBELT Issue 83 December - February 2025
A section running through the whole, where a realm of meditation, reflection, consideration , imagination, invention, assessment and, above all, of wit is privileged and enabled and someway fastened to the real and actual.
PROPAGANDA Issue 82 November-December 2024
Spread the word, Propaganda is back in town: this time it’s the good stuff. - And it’s wearing all its own clothes, said the Emperor.
SCOPE Issue 81 June - August 2024
What comes into view: what, given the conditions, the possibilities and the necessities, can the work aim for?
PARTISAN Issue 80 January - March 2024
NOTE Issue 79 October - December 2023
A unit or small part, indicating or otherwise relating to a larger whole or compound. How do we note the apparently bigger story here.
THROUGH Issue 78 June - August 2023
We work our way through … through campaigns, processes, translations, texts etc … Does through always have a notion of end? Can ‘through’ be clean or is it necessarily engaged, on its way, with the impure, the rotten, the mistaken, the useless, the meaningless, the inconsequent, the unsorted or the plain wrong? What is in sight with ‘through’..?
DWELLING Issue 77 April - June 2023
An act and a site. How and where do we dwell? How long do we 'stay' on, in or with something for it to be a dwelling?
CROP Issue 76 January - March 2023
Like cleave, this word has a para- and hetero-doxical range. Thus, it makes for a theme subject to many meanings, interpretations and connotations - but always denoting some kind of production or projected result, and always with the presence of, within, limited to, or bursting out from some framework or limit.
POST Issue 75 October-November 2022
Put it out there; a length of material supporting, or marking some position, some take, some acknowledgement; let it stand, let it have, or cause a duration, maintain a situation, cause a reaction, beyond, after or caused by.
INSTITUTION Issue 74 June-July 2022
When and how does something become an institution? Who decides what is an institution? As Derrida once wrote, literature is that institution which questions the very possibility of institution.
GROUND - Issue 73. March - April 2022
Ground is a curiously ambiguous term in English, meaning at once foundation or base upon which something can be built or created against, the material earth upon which we walk, and the past tense of the verb to grind, to pulverise, or make down into a basic element with which to work.
PROOF - Issue 72. January - February 2022
We are living in the age of the test. We need proof before we can do anything. We need proof to make any claim on the world. We need proof just to be. Can we bear the weight of all these proofs?
CLIMATE - Issue 71. November - December 2021
It is with great pleasure that I introduce this special edition of The Drouth for the Glasgow COP. When The Drouth was founded in 2001 climate change was a relatively minor worry for governments and scientists. It was widely assumed that by the time we reached the 2020s it would have been dealt with in the spirit of liberal enlightenment and technological adjustment.
In the time since it has become clear just how wicked of a problem climate change is, and how it has come to define our lives and will continue to do so for a century at least. The totality of climate change also means that the responses to it must come from all quarters, and here we are very happy to have contributions from the fields of photography, landscape art, architecture, journalism, and history in keeping with the best spirit of The Drouth.
Dominic Hinde, Guest Editor
RECOVER - Issue 70. September - October 2021
What is the condition of our being and our knowing of it, when we recover? Can we ever get back to that original, that wonted position? What do we get back, and would we even want to get back?
FIGURE - Issue 69. July - August 2021
If matter is only potential until it is given or takes form then how should we understand ‘figure’? Is it a calculation of the thing without the presence of its actual body? Go figure.
LEGACY - Issue 68. May - June 2021
We’re in an age of great changes -some have happened already and we’re feeling the shift, and we’re on the cusp of some others. What will be the legacy to the future, what have we brought with us from the past and what must we leave behind now?
FRONTIER - Issue 67. February - April 2021
Frontier is the edgiest of terms -apt for our days. It is indeed a terminus, but also a new beginning again. A line, a mark - ‘the marches’ - a liminal place. Like ‘border’ it calls a halt and keeps out - its consistency, the how and the why of its exclusionary practice probably account for its proliferation of names. But isn’t frontier also specifically a pushing forward of the limits, an advance to embrace the other… isn’t it?
CIVIC - Issue 66. December - February 20/21
How fares the civic spirit in the bellicose brayings of Brexit? Beyond that ‘local’ difficulty however, we might wonder how meaningful remains the notion of the civic realm in the age of globalisation and the mega-city? Has it been rendered obsolete by new demographic and technological realities? It seems somewhat ironic that action against the global pandemic has arguably been mobilized more effectively at a civic level, but will that have enduring political and moral effects?
Room
Issue 65: September-October 2020
Room. A space, an aspiration, a void, a container. How do we find our place in the world? Do we accommodate, or carve it out - and at what cost? Simple questions with answers that are anything but binary.
Hollow
Issue 64: July-September 2020
As successive crises shake every political, social and economic structure, how can a species mired in mutually hostile echo chambers unite, collaborate and act? As common ground crumbles and our foundations built with the effluent of rancid systems and buried sins implode we ask - is the Hollow that is waiting for us a desolation... or an opportunity?
Bonds are being shaken up, loosened, broken off – but not just in the way the Marxists and the Noble Savages imagine… Bonds between individuals and their fellows, between populations and their territory, between human beings and institutions, between folk and their habits, between sensibilities and bodies, between government and citizens… The virus is not by any means the sole cause or instigator of these great changes, the form of our bonds is changing necessarily, and it’s not clear in whose, or what grip we remain.
7th June 2020
Having quietly endured almost twenty years of managed decline, writes Hailey Maxwell, it is crucial that we consider the possibility that the Peoples’ Palace on Glasgow Green – a valuable civic asset and monument to Scottish history and working-class life may presently be at real risk of being neutralised, misappropriated and entirely co-opted into a neoliberal agenda. Spaces and places which were once public are being repurposed and reimagined not for the benefit of the citizen but for the property developer, the multi-national corporation and the tourist.
29th May 2020
In part two of her extended essay on the prejudices and stigma still faced by contemporary Travellers, Candace Thomas challenges the callousness both casual - and causal - of media and policy makers in a way very recently, proven to rattle those in power: checking the facts and recovering reality.
15th May 2020
Artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) was a man of many contradictions: a writer of words and a conceiver of objects, a collaborator and a fighter. Acutely conscious of the presence of history, he was witty and urbane, yet lived in rural isolation, making a barren Scots hillside into a garden and invoking his revolutionary heroes there. Greg Thomas examines his performative relations with the functionaries of the art world, and assesses the ethical worth and creative achievements Finlay worked into those bureaucratic processes apparently so devoid of artistic potential.
9th May 2020
It's a story very familiar to anyone from a Traveller culture; with depressing familiarity sections of the British media dust off every shopsoiled prejudice and trope to demonise a culture already far off on the margins. But as researcher and activist Candace Thomas explains, Travellers are no longer inclined to suffer in silence.
1st May 2020
Some apparent tendencies and possibilities in political thinking have already emerged in the pandemic situation –as seen by current commentators in blogs, opinion columns etc – can they be viewed a broader political and historical context yet?
24th April 2020
Perpetrating an aura of unreality may be useful, writes Owen Dudley Edwards, in conceiving of the bonds that have connected and codified these island nations... Jsfmboe, Fohmboe and Tdpumboe...
18th April 2020
In the teeth of the Coronavirus pandemic, politicians and pundits insist that ‘we’re all in it together’. Yet as deaths climb, it is all too clear that equality in infection does not translate to equality in recovery. In this clear-eyed report by Human Rights researcher and advocate Shannon Torrens, we look to Syria, where this dynamic is set to play out on a truly awful scale.
26th March 2020
If photography is the temporal art of the gaze, what is its condition at the edge, or the limit of space? What bonds, what risk of naming can secure it from being drawn off in the 'undertow'? Frances Scott walks the native territory.
Should we be worried about ‘Will’ and its manipulations? – ‘the settled will of the people’? The notion of will is inextricably connected to the operations of power, control, intention, desire, instigation and determination… In the age of Modi, Trump, Salvini and Brexit with their influence throughout the media, with all their manipulations into our personal and social lives, it must be time to examine what is ‘will’ and how does it work?
On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we launched our new The Drouth online platform with the first ten-week theme ‘Federation’. In a world where a majority in England wanted to leave the European Union, where there are questions concerning federations, unions and subsidiarity in Scotland, Catalonia, Kashmir, where the US President wants to build a wall between his country and Mexico and where the Israelis already built one to contain the Palestinians, our artists, activists and writers, including those on Los Angeles, India, Scotland, ex-Soviet Union/Russia/Lithuania, Colombia and Brazil, Ireland and UK, take a long look at union, federation, separation, distinction and segregation.
