Louise Gibson: Beachheads
Commission/Exhibition for Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop
£5,000 awarded
Crafted from the detritus of late capitalism, Beachheads is an exhibition of monumental sculpture made from material salvaged from junkyards, textile banks and halfway houses on the road to landfill.
About the exhibition
At first glance, Gibson’s work appear to operate through a series of dualities: pairs of hard, mass-produced objects fused with soft materials; formal sculptures that explore contingent binaries – industrial versus organic, interior versus exterior, manufactured versus handmade, and strength versus fragility.
On closer examination, these oppositions reveal themselves to be neither fixed nor absolute. They are situational, fluid. Simplistic binary reading begins to unravel as soft materials harden through the application of resin and lacquer, while the supposed durability of industrial forms is undermined by their mangled, twisted states.
These sculptures, made from materials collected, combined, and transformed by the artist, stand as a testament to the excesses of an unsustainable society. At the same time, they speculate on a possible future where capitalism has failed; a glimpse over the event horizon into a world of new relationships between our bodies and the environment – one that is neither better nor
worse, but different.
Louise Gibson: Beachheads was on display at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop from 7 until 31 August 2025.