Instant Whip - The Textile and Papers of Fraser Taylor 1977-87 Revisited
Glasgow artist Fraser Taylor on the occasion of his major homecoming show which opens on Saturday 16 March at Glasgow School of Art. The exhibition reveals the previously unseen archive of Taylor for the first time. Instant Whip: The Textiles and Papers of Fraser Taylor 1977–87 Revisited will shine a light on the archive of Taylor, acquired by The Glasgow School of Art Archives and Collections as well as showing brand new large scale works he has recently made. Taylor’s archive highlights Glasgow as a place of creativity during the 1970s and 80s.
Glasgow artist Fraser Taylor on the occasion of his major homecoming show which opens on Saturday 16 March at Glasgow School of Art. The exhibition reveals the previously unseen archive of Taylor for the first time. Instant Whip: The Textiles and Papers of Fraser Taylor 1977–87 Revisited will shine a light on the archive of Taylor, acquired by The Glasgow School of Art Archives and Collections as well as showing brand new large scale works he has recently made. Taylor’s archive highlights Glasgow as a place of creativity during the 1970s and 80s.
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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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