British Council Scotland is celebrating their 70th anniversary by spotlighting works from the British Council Collection that map the vitality and record the activity of just some of the artists who were born in, or studied, lived or visited Scotland in the last 70 years.
For the third in a series of blog posts about seven of these works, Susanna has written about a sculpture by Jim Lambie:
Jim Lambie, Let it Bleed, 2001
Turntable, glitter & hairbands, 36 x 36 x 72cm
Music is important to Jim Lambie. A frequent DJ, he commandeers music and the visual language of the nightclub and dance floor to inspire his art. A graduate of Glasgow School of Art, and still based in the city, Lambie’s work is joyfully immersive. His on-going series entitled Zobop, has seen Lambie transform numerous workaday floors into kaleidoscopic dazzles of colour. Covering a given floor with strips of coloured vinyl, he creates an energetic yet tightly controlled explosion of colour beneath your feet.
And in a series of sculptural works entitled Metal Box, Lambie layers highly reflective sheets of steel. He then flips over the corners of each sheet to reveal lurid blasts of glossy hi-viz colour. Lambie’s work is brilliantly audacious.
Let it Bleed, a title borrowed from the Rolling Stones’ eighth album released in 1969, is from 2001. A record player is coated in rusty-coloured glitter, making a once functional object beautifully and seductively dysfunctional. Beneath the turntable hangs a colourful assortment of hairbands. Once functioning hairbands, they now hang limply, a kind of memorial to a lost age of teenager flicks. Yet when plugged in, the turntable continues to spin. Playful yes, but Lambie brings out the melancholic in the everyday.
Read the previous blog posts about Bruce Mclean and Ethel Walker
