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00:07 My name is Fraser Taylor, I'm a visual artist and I live in Glasgow.
00:15 I studied printed textiles at Glasgow School of Art from 1977 to 81
00:20 and then from 1981 I moved down to London to do my postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art
00:25 and then in 1983 I formed a collective called The Cloth which is a textile design studio and graphic design studio
00:32 and fine art studio based in London which came to an end in 1987.
00:37 So Glasgow is a very vibrant community back in the late 70s into 80s.
00:41 It was all before digital, before the internet, before mobile phones.
00:44 So social culture was very, very important.
00:47 So forming connections or collaborative projects, you had to kind of go out and meet people in the real world.
00:52 So the Glasgow culture of bars and clubs was very prolific and very profound.
00:57 So that's where I met lots of people like musicians, pop stars like the Bluebells, Altered Images, Friends again.
01:04 So through these conversations in these social contexts we kind of formed these collaborative projects
01:09 designing record sleeves, set design, t-shirts for them to wear on stage.
01:14 So these events happened through conversations in a kind of a social context.
01:19 So Glasgow at that point, the hairdressing community was very important, very prolific
01:23 and led by people like Rita and Irvin Rusk, Ian Coleman.
01:27 And they kind of set the trends in some ways, like where the hairdressers went is where everybody else wanted to hang out.
01:32 So what clubs they were going to is where everybody wanted to be.
01:35 So again I formed relationships with the Rusks and in the mid 80s they invited me to design their hair product range
01:42 which was launched in America so that was a very nice conclusion to those relationships that we formed.
01:47 Hairdressers did lead the way back in those years because I think again of the social networking.
01:52 Hairdressers were beginning to have these very radical hair shows which were also fashion shows.
01:58 So they were collaborating with art students from Glasgow School of Art to create fashion for their shows.
02:02 So the cultures were very intermixed, you know everybody kind of cross pollinated into different areas of their social context.
02:11 The creative energy kind of really was sparked by those conversations that happens out on the streets.
02:17 So I kind of spent a lot of time in my studio in London developing paintings, working with galleries,
02:22 because I was in London and abroad sort of having exhibitions.
02:25 And then in 2001 I was invited to be the visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
02:30 So I went there for one year and ended up staying there for 17 years.
02:33 I returned to Glasgow on a sabbatical from my teaching position in 2013 to 2014.
02:39 And it was during that year that I received a phone call from my storage unit in London
02:43 to say that they'd found three cardboard boxes that were unmarked that had my name on it.
02:47 So they were delivered to Glasgow not knowing what was in them.
02:50 I thought maybe there were books or something.
02:52 So basically the contents of those three boxes are in this exhibition today.
02:56 So the contents of the boxes contained work from 1977 to '87, so a 10 year period.
03:03 And I assumed all that work had been lost due to moving studio, moving continents, moving around.
03:08 So it was a real mind-blowing experience to open these boxes and see what was in there.
03:13 And it was basically the history of my creative journey from Glasgow School of Art to London.
03:18 So it was kind of an overwhelming discovery and a very exciting one.
03:22 In 2014 when we discovered the boxes I was just about to return to Chicago.
03:27 So the Glasgow School of Art Archive and Collection Department expressed an interest in the work.
03:31 So they decided, well they invited me to donate the collection to them so they could look after it.
03:36 So that's what I decided to do. So it's housed in their archive.
03:40 And then over that 10 year period when I was back in Chicago I started talking to Helena Britt,
03:45 who's a faculty member at Glasgow School of Art and Pano.
03:48 So the whole idea of the exhibition came about through various conversations over the last 10 years.
03:53 Selecting the work was basically decided by Pano and Helena Britt.
03:57 So there's 600 pieces in the archive, so it's an awful lot of work.
04:01 So I think we're looking at a very small fraction of that.
04:04 So that's why the exhibition has taken so long to develop,
04:07 is because we have been looking at 600 items and trying to get them down to something like just over 100 items.
04:13 So it's a fraction of the collection, but hopefully it gives a whole story about that journey between 1977 and '87.
04:21 So it's a combination of drawings, paintings, sketchbooks, textiles, an ephemera and record sleeves,
04:27 and a whole range of stuff from that period.
04:29 It's here and it's complete, and also part of the exhibition is about me being able to revisit the archive.
04:34 So there's some new work in here as well.
04:36 So the part of the journey is also telling how the experience of me being able to revisit this work
04:41 has informed some of the work that I'm making today,
04:43 and discussing or analysing this visual connection between the past and the present.
04:48 I never thought I'd end up back in Glasgow, but I'm completely excited and happy to be here.
04:53 And it's an amazing city to be an artist.
04:55 My name is Lucy McEachen and I'm a co-director of the Arts Organisation panel.
04:59 I'm one of the co-curators of Instant Whip, along with Dr Helena Britt from the Glasgow School of Art.
05:05 And we've been working in collaboration with the Glasgow School of Art Archives and Collections,
05:09 Read Gallery and Screen Printing Studio Print Clan on a big project which includes an exhibition, a publication and an events programme.
05:18 So the exhibition came about through, well actually over a period of about 10 years.
05:22 And we've been in conversation with Fraser Taylor since we showed some of his work back in an exhibition we did in Glasgow in 2011
05:30 called The Inventors of Tradition.
05:31 And that focused on material that he had produced as part of the collective called The Cloth,
05:36 which he had formed in 1983 with fellow graduates David Band, Helen Manning and Brian Balger.
05:42 There's a lot of work in the collection that encompasses sketchbooks, drawings, works on paper, ephemera, photographs
05:50 and magazines from a period between 1977 and 1987.
05:55 And it was just fascinating to work through all of that material and to see how work that Fraser had been producing in the late 70s and early 80s
06:06 has fed into the work that he's producing now under his own label, Haxton.
06:10 Well the exhibition's organised thematically, but we're really looking at it through the lens of Glasgow.
06:16 So during the late 70s and early 80s, Glasgow was a melting pot for artists, designers, hairdressers and musicians.
06:26 And it was really that kind of crossover between cultures that we wanted to bring out in this exhibition,
06:33 specifically focusing on Glasgow.
06:36 Fraser was a painter, he was a designer, really a bit of a polymath.
06:41 But he worked on these projects with friends, and these were friends and people that he met in bars and working in Glasgow.
06:50 So it was all a very interconnected culture in the city at that time.
06:55 Instant Whip is on at the Reid Gallery from 16th March to 20th April, and it covers the Reid Gallery space and also Window and Heritage.
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