Elizabeth Price, the 2012 Turner Prize winning artist, is to create a new work in partnership with The Hungarian, Panel, Fiona Jardine of Glasgow School of Art and Edinburgh-based Dovecot Studios.
The work is called UNDERFOOT and is a moving image installation alongside a bespoke textile work which is a first for Price. Both of these pieces of art will be acquired by The Hunterian.
The work is created following Price’s Research Fellowship with The University of Glasgow Library which gave her access to the archives of carpet manufacturers Stoddard and Templeton based in Renfrewshire and in Glasgow. The archive includes thousands of design sketches, photos, books, journals and carpet pieces.
Elizabeth Price said: “I’m delighted to be working with The Hunterian, Panel, Dovecot, Glasgow University Archives and Fiona Jardine of The Glasgow School of Art on this project. It is a great pleasure to spend time getting to know the extraordinary Stoddard Templeton archives, and to be entrusted to respond to them.
“I am not quite sure yet where this project will take me, but I know I will reflect upon the carpet as an image of terrain, and the looms that wove them as vast systems of data storage.
“The work I usually make is described as video, but it is always a composition in sound as much as image, and this emphasis has a special significance for me in this commission. I first visited Glasgow and Edinburgh in the early eighties to perform in a band and I came to know these cities through their post-punk music. That experience will inflect both the moving image work and the textile commission. In respect of that, It is a profound pleasure and challenge to have the opportunity to create a textile for this project, along with the expert weavers at Dovecot. I am fascinated to work with a medium so technically related, and sensually estranged from video.”
Celia Joicey, Director of Dovecot, said: “The exhibition is an outstanding opportunity for Dovecot Studios to explore Elizabeth Price’s thoughtful approach to creating art, craft and design with hand and machine processes. Price is a world-class contemporary artist and this commission will showcase art made in Scotland to an international audience”
Elizabeth Price is an artist who creates powerful, accessible and innovative works that address social history. Her 2012 Turner-Prize-winning film 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.
Price creates narrative works that feature historic artefacts and documents, often of marginal significance or derogated value. Her selection and treatment of them is shaped by a politics of gender and social class and she often uses historical material to consider and give expression to the adjacent blind spots, oversights and erasures of particular archives and museum collections. She was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1966 and grew up in Luton, Bedfordshire. She attended Putteridge Comprehensive High School and studied at the Royal College of Art, London and Leeds University. Throughout her career as an artist, Price has continued to work in academia, and is presently Professor of Film and Photography in the School of Art, Kingston University.
The exhibition at The Hunterian – the oldest museum in Scotland – will run from 11 November 2022 – 16 April 2023.
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