DRESSING ABOVE YOUR STATION

TEXT BY CRISTABEL STEWART

Dressing Above Your Station (installation view), 2022. Courtesy Tramway

Dressing Above Your Station, curated by Mairi MacKenzie and Beca Lipscombe, looks at the work and life of Scottish painter Steven Campbell and his partner, Carol, through the lens of clothing and textiles. In the exhibition, it is Carol Campbell’s perceptive viewpoint that traces and contextualises the objects and their histories, giving essential readings on the work of her long-term partner. While completely virtual – and placed inside an online environment that copies the real-life exhibition space, the Tramway in Glasgow – the exhibition revels in the materiality of Campbell’s bold, anarchic and sometimes overtly traditional figurative work, examining his painterly treatment of fabrics and fashion. This work is intertwined with photographs of streetwear from Glasgow to create a personal and poetic view of the relationship between existence and self, and the important connections that can exist between clothing, textiles, painting, documents, archives and collecting.

The show’s curators – long-time celebrators of the uncelebrated – both come from the world of textiles.A research fellow in fashion and textiles at Glasgow School of Art, MacKenzie is also a fashion historian, writer and curator, whose research seeks to understand not just what was worn and by whom, but why. Lipscombe is a Scottish fashion and textile designer and printmaker. After studying at Central Saint Martins, she set up an eponymous label and worked in London and Paris, freelancing for companies such as Liberty, Chloé, Stella McCartney and Ann-Sofie Back. In 2011, she left her job at Glasgow School of Art to focus on her collaborative fashion label, Atelier E.B and has since made a public persona out of championing the artists undermined by their medium.

Lipscombe and MacKenzie look anew at Steven Campbell’s legacy through his work and the man himself. Campbell’s Gesturing Gardener with Watering Can and The Happy Camper, both from 1983 and not included in the show, both depict men engaging in the labour of joyful, outdoorsy recreation, but twist and elaborate on expectations: the camper is upside down, as if falling or mid accident, his hammer in mid-air, his hand having dropped his bag, and wide almost completely circular eyes (the kind of graphic simplicity we are all so used to thanks to emoticons) hover above a small fire and saucepan.

MacKenzie has long investigated histories of marginal but popular cultures of tribal dressing (think, football casuals in the 1980s) as part of her research into the history of vernacular textiles and clothing, and Dressing Above Your Station can be seen as an homage to anyone who has ever sought to escape their world through magazines and the aspirational clothing they featured. When you live far from the glamour of a metropolis, images ripped out of magazines take on added importance, acting as conduits out of the present, inspiring dreams of fantastical futures far away. The photographs of well-dressed Scottish teenagers that feature in the show – youngsters in bedrooms plastered with pages ripped from magazines – echo the same themes of longing and aspiration given off by the well-dressed men dreaming of escape and far-off lands in Campbell’s paintings. The adverts for perfumes and designer clothing represent glamorous worlds beyond the reach of most young people. However, the teenagers photographed present their best selves. They wear clothes they love and pose as if in the images they stand before, a little like the photograph of Steven Campbell in his tweed out in the wild. ◉