Blunders and roundabouts

Blunders and Roundabouts : shopping trolleys, plasticine and fake fur, variable size,1996. Two person show with Annie Cattrell - Pace (the distance covered by a step), Gasworks, London, 1996.

 

PACE was an exhibition of recent work by London-based artists Leila Galloway and Annie Cattrell who are interested in an innovative use of materials and process. Leila Galloway in 'Blunders and Roundabouts' made a work from shopping trolleys where plasticine clogged the wheels of the empty vehicles rendering them immobile. Fragile glass tubes are intrinsically woven together to form a human nervous system in Annie Cattrell's piece Untitled'. The delicate body is thus exposed hovering inches above the concrete floor, vulnerable to the spectator's feet.

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Blunder a mid-14c., “to stumble about blindly,” from a Scandinavian source akin to Old Norse blundra “shut one’s eyes,” perhaps from Proto-Germanic *blinda- “blind” (see blind (adj.)). The meaning “make a stupid mistake” is recorded by 1711.

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"...Galloway's potentially facile adoption of shopping trolleys and furry material as symbols of excess makes a convincing impact through her neat vandalism on access. Access to what? Blinded by its focus on vociferous majorities 'consumer power' works like the decorative steps in an ill-conceived space that trap the wheel bound pedestrian's life into the stuff of nightmares. Someone has to pay for it; the wrong people pay for it; what are they paying för? Galloway may have started out on a more frivolous tack, but by suggesting stupidity without too stark a reference to suffering, she endows her work with the perfect public didactic persona. Blunders and Roundabouts should do a tour of shopping malls. It would attract a lot more attention from shoppers than Gillian Wearing dancing in front of a video camera. It might even make them think twice. 

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Althea Greenan: “A preliminary map and three grey furry forms.” MAKE: The Magazine of Women’s Art, no. 74, Feb.-Mar. 1997, p. 24.

 

 

 

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