00:00I'm Rachel Lowther, I'm an artist and we're at the Savoy Center for an exhibition that I'm doing
00:21with my friend fellow artist Kerry Stewart and the exhibition is called A Miracle Happened
00:28and we knew what to do. Everybody knows the Savoy Center but it often gets a little bit forgotten
00:33and we feel that it's a really interesting diverse community of people that all help each other.
00:42We came up here and had a look around and we sort of really loved it, we loved this sense of community.
00:48The location is really important to us so even though we're making our own work as artists we
00:53wanted to speak to the environment that we're in and make work that feels like it fits with the Savoy Center.
00:59It's part shop part gallery so we're in sort of enjoying the fact that we're also selling what's here.
01:07Rachel has made skirts that people can, there's a changing room so people can come in here and try
01:13on the skirts. A few people have already bought them yeah and they're sort of advertised in the window.
01:19The money is for sale so you can buy bundles of money which is quite nice yeah.
01:24So there's a whole variety of things in this exhibition, there's furniture, there's things you can actually sit on.
01:30So they're sculptures but they're upholstered such as this chair so you can come and sit on it and we're inviting
01:36people to come in and sit and chat and also we've got a book that we'd like to collect stories,
01:42people's stories of from the past, from memories from the Savoy Center. So people have come and sat on this
01:47chair and written in the book which is really lovely. There's sculptures, there's kinetic pieces
01:53as you can see behind me, there's even books for sale by an artist who's a friend of ours.
02:00A lot of my work here deals with getting older and ageing. I've cast my 86 year old mother just before
02:09she died I cast her as a scuba diver and I've also cast my mum driving like careering around the road
02:19and I think and I've also got greying hair, a woman's greying hair swaying to a new young
02:26soundtrack so I'm interested in the idea of precarity and old age and I think that relates well here in
02:36this context too. That's one of the nice things about being here it's just people coming in who
02:43are just using the shopping centre coming in and having a chat and we're ending up having very
02:48different conversations to the ones we might normally have in a white cube gallery and sort of lovely
02:53just very honest and funny often and insightful reactions to what we're doing. I think our work
03:02is quite accessible. I think most people can understand it. I think nowadays it's not uncommon
03:10for artists to be taking their work into the community. In fact Glasgow City Council have got
03:15a scheme where they're trying to regenerate areas by offering artists the opportunity to take over
03:23units or empty shops to try and sort of do short-term projects in them as a way of regenerating areas.
03:32So we've received a lot of support for this exhibition that's made it happen partly from the
03:38actual Savoy Centre themselves so they were really open to something an artistic project happening here
03:44and we're very generous with the space and really crucially Creative Scotland supported this project
03:52which made it made a lot of the work possible. So we're open Monday to Saturday 11 to 5 30 and
04:01we've called the last day is the 15th of November.
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