There is a lovely moment in Dressing Above Your Station, an online exhibition devoted to the role of fashion and textiles in the work of artist Steven Campbell.
As the interactive exhibition, narrated by his wife, Carol, walks through his life and times, via paintings, photos and memorabilia, we reach a section which focuses on what his children thought of his unique sartorial style.
One photo of Campbell and teenage daughter, Greer, on a holiday in France, and another with him with his kids at EuroDisney, reveal “a man more appropriately dressed for combat than a family holiday.” Yes, a black beret on top of flowing blond locks…
Carol’s voiceover adds the refrain from the Campbell kids was: “Why can’t we have a Marks & Spencer’s daddy like everybody else?”
That was never going to happen, as this richly textured exhibition – hosted by Glasgow’s Tramway – reveals in spades.
Campbell, who died aged 54 in 2007, was a key figure in a revival of figurative painting which emanated from the Glasgow School Art (GSA) in the 1980s. He is generally associated with the group known as The New Glasgow Boys – although he hated the term.
Campbell worked in a steelworks in Cambuslang before becoming a mature student at GSA. He dressed as he painted. With style. And like no other dad.
A lynchpin in Dressing Above Your Station is a collection of clothes by Japanese label Comme des Garçons. The collection, worth more than $10,000, was acquired by the couple while living New York in the 1980s in exchange for one of Campbell’s paintings.
To accompany the exhibition, a series of shop window projections on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street have also been installed.
Katie Paterson’s Requiem, currently at Edinburgh’s Ingleby Gallery, aims to tell the story of the birth and life of our planet in a single object filled with layers of dust from pre-solar times to the present day.
Making history: Artist’s new piece has material from all across time crushed down into dust
The dust has been gathered from the likes of fossil fuel detritis, dead coral, war rubble and dust from the atomic bomb.
The grim list of ingredients harvested by Paterson echoes environmentalist George Monbiot’s warning that “the crisis is not imminent; the crisis is here”.
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