• 2 years ago
Turner Prize winning artist Elizabeth Price to unveil exhibition inspired by Glasgow's textile heritage


The Hunterian, Glasgow, are pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Scotland by Turner Prize winning artist Elizabeth Price. Referencing and employing never before exhibited archival material, the commission will focus on the textile heritage of Glasgow’s industrial age and in particular Stoddard International Plc and James Templeton & Co. Ltd, world-famous carpet manufacturers based in Renfrewshire and Glasgow. The exhibition opens to the public from 11th November 2022 – 16th April 2023.


UNDERFOOT is being developed in partnership with The Hunterian, Panel, Fiona Jardine (The Glasgow School of Art) and Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. Working with these partners, Price will create an ambitious new moving image work and bespoke textile piece – the artist’s first in this medium – both of which have been commissioned by The Hunterian for its permanent collection. The textile piece also marks Price’s first major commission in a medium other than video in over five years.

Carpet designs, industrial machinery and architectural interiors will all feature within the moving image work UNDERFOOT and the textile piece, SAD CARREL will take the form of a hand-tufted rug. Though it reflects the process of its production in largely abstract ways, a recurring vinyl record motif is a key point of connection to the themes of the moving image work.

“As an artist working in digital media, I am also really fascinated by the shared technical histories of woven textiles and computing, and most of the industrialised carpet production of Templetons directly employed jacquard technologies, or processes derived from the Jacquard loom. Understanding the relation between carpets and data in this way, perhaps also offers ways to think about the realm or terrain they visualise: related to the creation of digital or virtual worlds. But, I am always also interested in the political and social histories and/impacts of cultural artefacts, and this is why part of the project focuses upon the use of carpet in civic and public space – specifically the Mitchell Library with its intensely coloured and patterned carpets, which have unexpected psychedelic effect. If carpets imagine another space, what space was/is imagined here?” said the artist


Elizabeth Price is an artist who creates powerful, accessible and innovative works that address social history. Her 2012 Turner Prize-winning work, The Woolworths Choir of 1979, stitched together news footage of a fatal fire in a Manchester branch of Woolworth’s with a TV performance by the Shangri-Las and digital animations analysing the cultural and political relationships between the two, to profoundly moving effect.

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