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.
Price’s film is narrated by two characters, as typed within message bubbles: one in yellow, one in red, soundtracked by the loud click-clack of a keyboard. These disembodied characters have assertive personalities. They guide us through the Mitchell Library’s concert hall, bar and conference suite. Behind the red and yellow text, images of the carpets radiate, humming with kaleidoscopic intensity. Perceived notions of what a library should be begin to shift, pushing back against the modernist lines and stable shelves, presenting a space that some may regard as too lively for traditional ideas of learning.
The carpets flip upwards, meeting the viewer face to weave, revealing the detail of peonies and pine cones, the looping trellis, patterns of nearby leaves. These things we often reach out to in our gentle moments of leisure are suddenly squashed beneath our feet, their function becoming acoustic, their softness now mopping up the library’s sounds.
In Underfoot, Price launches an inquiry into the Spool Axminster loom – the colossal machine used to create the Mitchell carpets. Multiplying the hands of an individual worker, the machine was designed to be operated solely by women, as they could be paid at a much lower rate. The social and the technical collide in a way typical of Price’s work. The carpet becomes representative of women’s underpaid labour, as used to produce an object of public leisure.
The machine’s menacing size is never shown in the film. Instead there are only tight shots of spools clinking purposefully into place. As seen in one of only two archive images in the exhibition, part of the machine hangs like a dense cloud over a woman’s head as she works. The image’s scale works within a contemporary context, invoking the modern-day reality of files pinging nonstop into databanks.
Opposite the two archive images is Price’s textile work Sad Carrel. In a library, a carrel is the name of a single-person study room – the installation of Price’s own carpet echoes this, the piece hanging vertically on a curved stand, creating a sense of privacy and intimacy. Tufted by hand at Dovecot Studios, Sad Carrel uses the repeated and abstracted motif of a record found in the Mitchell library’s music department. Its bold yellows and fading discs are reminiscent of other memorable carpets, those found in pubs and working men’s clubs. Places full of music, energy and knowledge-sharing, are worked into the fibres of the exhibition, once again enlivening the traditional space of the library.
Touch prevails in the work, another common theme for the artist. We feel the tufting and the picking of the weft so astutely, as if we were part of the team of women wielding these chugging looms. Dirty machines weaving landscapes of learning and leisure. In Underfoot, Price reminds us that as universities become privatised and more libraries start to close, it is imperative we don’t stop learning, preferably in the noisiest way possible.
