The Making of 'If only we had the space'

Image: Fionn Duffy / Photography by Laura Prieto Martin

This exhibition takes inspiration from Glasgow’s housing redevelopments and movements that span from the 1960s to the 1990s. Through contemporary craft, 'If only we had the space' responds to modern and contemporary politics of housing, property rights and access to ‘space’. 

We found ‘IF WE ONLY HAD THE SPACE’ in the depths of the Moving Image Archive, held at the National Library of Scotland. This promotional documentary was produced in 1974 to demonstrate how improvements to Glasgow city tenements could be made with the aid of Home Improvement Grants. These grants came in response to a total lack of adequate housing in Glasgow at the time and ‘to provide the ordinary citizen with help and encouragement to make his existing home and its surroundings a more pleasant place to live.'

The phrase ‘If only we had the space’ implies making do with what you have and how you can inhabit the space within the existing walls around you. Although taken from the 1970s, it feels particularly connected to our contemporary conditions today, with another housing crisis exacerbating the wealth gap between renters, landlords, property and land owners, and an economy in recession. 

In a hyper-capitalist society, many artists and makers experience job and housing insecurity, and are priced out of adequate studio or making spaces. Homes become the space where they create and produce work. We have been asking artists and makers: how does this impact or restrict what and how you create? Does it change how you inhabit or perceive your home? 

Image: Jeni Allison / Photography by Laura Prieto Martin

We commissioned artist and textile designer Jeni Allison to create two responsive and vibrant tapestries. 'Don’t you think Vaila needs a garden?' and 'How are you going to manage the stairs with a pram?' deal with her experience of tenement living, motherhood and societal expectations.  

Image: Fionn Duffy / Photography by Laura Prieto Martin

Fionn Duffy’s ceramic works 'ev'ryday', a little cataclysm and rooting delightfully are artworks and also habitats. Some have been used in dairy production, some have never been fired. Now they hold things that grow. Deirdre Nelson presents 'SURPLUS', a knitted money box created in 2011 in response to Irish craft and ghost estates in Ireland. Jack Brindley, of Pavillion Pavillion presents stained glass works which he aptly describes as ‘Art to live with, rather than art to look at’. 

Image: Deirdre Nelson / Photography by Laura Prieto Martin

Contextualising these works in the exhibition, are selected records of Glasgow’s housing activist movements and redevelopment schemes from Glasgow Women’s Library, the Moving Image Archive and Glasgow City Archives. The ‘Womanhouse’ project began as an idea for a collaborative artwork which would, by its context, address historical and contemporary notions of women’s creativity, within and outside the home. Women artists from all over Britain worked alongside women and children from Castlemilk. During the summer of 1990 four flats in an empty tenement block became a huge living (room) artwork and a meeting place for women and children in the neighbourhood. 

Image: Jack Brindley  / Photography by Laura Prieto Martin

‘Take Root’, a women’s self-build group in nineties Glasgow, spent years working towards the dream of building their own homes. They fundraised, learnt to build and negotiated land; they went to training camps and worked directly with architects. The project got close, but was eventually dropped by the housing association.  ‘Places…or People’, is a short documentary from the 70s illustrating the planning and construction of improvements in the housing and industrial landscape of the city of Glasgow. Efforts are made by the council’s Department of Environmental Improvement to lift the poor condition of tenements built in the early 1930s in Possil, previously blamed on tenants rather than the severe lack of adequate investment and unfit for purpose design.