This month, we will be going to Dovecot Studios to view Carpets of Distinction, a collection of new works that explores the connections between art and craft and mass-produced industrial design.
Curated by Panel (Glasgow School of Art graduates, Lucy McGeachan and Catriona Duffy), the exhibition pairs the traditional, specialist skills of the Dovecot Studio weavers with six contemporary Scottish artists: John Byrne, Alasdair Gray, Ruth Ewan, Nick Evans, Nicholas Party and Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan. The artists have been asked to make new designs for rugs in response to the Stoddard-Templeton archive, examples of which are also shown in this exhibition.
Panel are also exhibiting at Glasgow’s People’s Palace in Scotland Can Make It (until Jan 2013). Here, they have paired artists, designers and musicians with Scottish heritage brands such as Highland Stoneware, Tunnocks and Johnstone’s of Paisley, to make souvenirs of quality. The collaboration results in objects with an art aesthetic or sensibility.
In previous projects, as well as in the Dovecot exhibition, they have used archives as inspiration for new works, asking artists and designers to respond to historic material.
Lucy McGeachan and Catriona Duffy, rug commissioners and curators of the exhibition, will be joining us to discuss the work on show.
