Following its inaugural group exhibition, new gallery Beautiful Materials at The Avenues shopping centre in Newton Mearns, Glasgow, is hosting a new show looking at the human desire to be loved, with reference to the practical realm of the carrier bag.
Curated by Glasgow-based artist and the gallery’s owner Nicola Atkinson, LOVE ME invites artists and public, as the gallery puts it, ‘to explore the intersection of emotional connection and material necessity.’ The exhibition prompts viewers to reflect on the desire to be loved, while addressing the logistics of balancing a love for beautiful things with the need ‘to carry our belongings resourcefully.’ The exhibition frames this issue through the evolution of the carrier bag, which has its roots in 1870, when American inventor Margaret E Knight automated the creation of flat, square-bottomed paper bags, moving on to plastic carrier bags, invented in 1962 by Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin. Now viewed as an environmental scourge, Thulin originally designed the plastic bag as a reusable device intended to save trees. Although the arrival of the organic cotton tote bag in the 2000s led to its becoming an emblem of sustainability, the exhibition highlights the startling fact that such a bag must be used daily for 54 years to truly offset its environmental impact.
Addressing these dilemmas of consumption and sustainability, the exhibition presents a solution inspired by the resourcefulness of the wartime ‘make do and mend’ campaigns, showing an installation of bags crafted from a repurposed golden velvet backdrop curtain – a fabric given to Atkinson seven years ago by the band Belle & Sebastian, originally created for the band’s 2011 global Write about Love tour.
Alternating with the bags are landscape photographs printed on soft velvet and framed in black, and a single large tapestry showing details of the curtain backdrop, which, the exhibition posits, absorbed the joyful force of the audiences it stood before.
Artists include Alex Allan, Alison Templeton, Caron McKenna, Despoina Isaia, Eilidh Weir, Emma Gorrie, Joanna Rucklidge, Laura Hainey, Nicola Atkinson, Rosie Cunningham, Sadie Smith, Spencer Dent, Lorna and Madeleine Swinney.
