This exhibition takes inspiration from Glasgow’s housing redevelopments and movements that span from the 60s to the 90s. Through contemporary craft, If only we had the space responds to modern and contemporary politics of housing, property rights and access to ‘space’.
The title, If We Only Had the Space, comes from a film found at the Moving Image Archive, held at the National Library of Scotland. This promotional documentary was produced in 1974 to demonstrate how improvements to Glasgow city tenements could be made with the aid of Home Improvement Grants. These grants came in response to a total lack of adequate housing in Glasgow at the time and ‘to provide the ordinary citizen with help and encouragement to make his existing home and its surroundings a more pleasant place to live.’
Through the craft of the four exhibiting makers and archive of Glasgow’s housing history, this exhibition will explore ‘the through line of creative inhabitation, the changing role of homes as places of production as well as domesticity and negotiating the right to space’.
It will feature a new commission by Jeni Allison, and works in textiles, ceramics and glass by Deirdre Nelson, Fionn Duffy and Jack Brindley, whose collective practices cross over art, design and craft. It will also include Glasgow-based archive ephemera, film footage documenting housing activist movements and redevelopment schemes from Glasgow (1960s to 1990s), and interviews with makers.
‘If only we had the space’ is curated by Rachel Ashenden, Soizig Carey, Jemima Dansey-Wright and Murray Morrant.
The exhibition will run from 17 to 26 October 2024 | 10am - 5pm.
Please note: the exhibition is not open to the public on Monday 21 and Tuesday 21 October.
Delivered in association with Craft Scotland, as part of COMPASS: Emerging Curator Programme, and Katy West, Programme Lead.
Graphic design by Lucy Watkins.
Moving image courtesy of National Library of Scotland.
Supported by Platform, Inches Carr Craft Bursaries and Creative Scotland.
SATURDAY 19 OCTOBER | PANEL DISCUSSION AND OPENING EVENT
2pm | Free but ticketed, book here
Join us for a special panel discussion with Dr Adele Patrick and Deirdre Nelson to celebrated the opening of the exhibition ‘If only we had the space’.
The phrase ‘If only we had the space’ implies making do with what you have and how you can inhabit the space within the existing walls around you. Although taken from the 1970s, it feels particularly connected to our contemporary conditions today, with another housing crisis exacerbating the wealth gap between renters, landlords, property and land owners, and an economy in recession.
We’ll hear more about Adele’s decades-long activism and experience in housing projects, including Take Root, a pioneering women’s timber frame, self build housing project. Despite developing skills in self-building honed at the Centre for Alternative Technology and Monimail Permaculture Association, being supported by Segal Method architect Mary Kelly and gaining funding and land from Molendinar Housing Association the group’s aims to self build were ultimately dashed by misogynistic councillors and excoriating tabloid press coverage that proclaimed “loony lesbians plan man-free zone”.
Known for her ability to translate social commentary into textiles, Deirdre will talk about her work featured in the exhibition. ‘Surplus’ is a bright red knitted money box depicting a new-build house. It was created in response to Irish ghost estates that exist as a result of the 2008 property crash. In 2023, it was reported that 75 ghost estates still haunt Ireland, either unoccupied or in varying states of disrepair or dereliction.
Following the panel, attendees are warmly invited to join a reception in The Den space at Platform, celebrating the opening of the exhibition.
