Press Release:
Two-Step / Selvedge to Selvedge
Beth Shapeero and Fraser Taylor
WASPS The Briggait
19 March – 11 April 2021
Beth Shapeero and Fraser Taylor present a new series of work as part of their ongoing collaboration Two-Step.
Two-Step / Selvedge to Selvedge is a work in progress which the pair started in mid-October 2021 and worked on for one month while lockdown restrictions permitted. The installation presents their first experiments working on cloth, five-meter lengths of which hang vertically within the window gallery spaces of The Briggait. The work can be viewed from the street, offering an opportunity to see the work in real life, especially in the strictest COVID-19 lockdown restrictions.
The work was produced at Print Clan, a Glasgow based textile printing studio. The cloth was pinned to the ten-meter print table where forms and marks were constructed using silkscreens and mono-printing techniques. The scale of the works demands a physicality in printing; the squeegee is passed between artists halfway across the width of the table as it pushes the ink through the silkscreen mesh and transfers the image to the cloth. Ladders are used to view the works from above, mid-printing; to ‘step-back’ and consider the relationships between the marks, colour and scale.
The use of cloth refers to Taylor’s history in textile printing and is a departure for the pair’s work to date, which has been predominantly silkscreen mono-prints on paper. The printed cloth exists intentionally as visual artwork, yet they hum with potential for different uses - fashion and the domestic. The works are a new medium for Shapeero and they sing a song of collaboration; an expertise shared, a practice disrupted and the creation of something new.
Shapeero and Taylor met in Summer 2017 at Studio Pavilion at House for an Art Lover, where they were both artists in residence. They were drawn to one another’s work, noticing their distinctly shared aesthetic and process. The similarity of their seperate outputs, and the velocity of their relationship, generates a trust in each other that allows both voices to be present and equal at every stage of the process. Since meeting they have produced 100’s of monotypes, a number of ambitious installations and undertaken postal collaborations during COVID-19 lockdown periods – a way of connecting throughout the disruption. The collaboration has become an important part of their creative practices and continues to grow.
Beth is an emerging artist from Nottingham who has lived and worked in Glasgow since 2011. Fraser, originally from Glasgow, is an established artist and has spent a significant part of his career working in Chicago where he was a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Beth graduated her BA in Fine Art (Hons) at Nottingham Trent University in 2008 before relocating to Glasgow for the M.Litt in Fine Art Practice in 2011. Fraser graduated from GSA in 1981 with a BA in Printed Textiles and an MA in 1983 from the RCA in London. He returned to live and work in Glasgow in 2017.
See their work at The Loading Bay skatepark Glasgow (until Sepetember 2021) www.theloadingbayglasgow.com
@two_step_collab
