To enter Elizabeth Price’s exhibition Underfoot you must first walk up a concrete spiral staircase, like a thread wound around a spool. Once you reach the top, Price’s new film clicks into being. Inverted black-and-white images of Glasgow’s Mitchell Library pop up, its reading rooms and desks juxtaposed on a split screen. The whites in the images glow like an X-ray, making any furniture that catches the light hum with the spirit of all who have touched it. You feel these spaces throng with potential energy, all the work there is left to do.
Price, who won the Turner prize in 2012, uses video to explore technology and social history. Born out of a collaborative research project involving the Hunterian Museum, Panel, Fiona Jardine and Dovecot Studios, Underfoot offers an investigation into the archives of psychedelic carpet manufacturer Stoddard and Templeton, whose infamous trippy carpets adorn the Mitchell Library.
