'Exquisite, Imaginary Cure (curtain)', 2025
Metal track and curtains - digital print (from watercolour) onto polyester
(curtain height: 3.2 metres, width: variable but 28.5 metres when fully extended)

This work - a print of digitally altered watercolour paintings onto a nineteen-panelled polyester curtain - was made as both a curatorial strategy for exhibition, and as an artwork/artefact in its own right.

‘Exquisite, Imaginary Cure (curtain)’ wraps and cares for the other works in a show, as well as, sometimes, veiling them from view. The curtain is both theatrical and medicalised (printed onto cheap fabric and running along NHS tracks, forming bays as on a ward). It gently enrobes as well as forcefully separates works from the viewer and from each other, allowing forms of privileged or total access dependent on the mood of the curator/custodian.

The work takes as its starting point an account of the time, in 1917, when the Glasgow School of Art gave up some of its spaces to the drying and preparation of sphagnum moss used in dressings for wounds. Letters reveal that the drying of the moss on site was making a caretaker unwell - a reflection on how the production of a cure designed for many can cause environmental illness in others. This small story usefully invites a querying of the pharmaceutical industrial complex.

The work includes nineteen panels, sewn together in pairs or threes, printed with various digitally reproduced watercolour paintings of sphagnum moss placed onto visibly dissolving cleaning cloths. The curtain was printed with the support of the Centre for Advanced Textiles.

Using the historical, large-scale procuring and drying of antiseptic moss as a device through which to talk about pharmaceutical mopping, cleansing, patting or sealing of bodies allows the curtain to become a connective tissue between painting and medicine. The re-imagining of the wartime Art School as a moss depot, shows its studios to have maintained shared methodological connections with painting, such as the gathering of wet media, arranging, hanging and drying.

This work draws painting in an expanded field into a dialogue with pharmaceutical production and an aesthetics of the clinic, protection and cure. The medical curtain performs as a cloak of forced intimacies and a theatre of medical fictions, as well as a veil of protection. It wraps physician and patient into an unseen bundle, protects the unwell body from being gazed upon and contributes to visual isolation in illness. This artwork is a fantastical medical apparition keeping us out and holding us in, as well as performing a direct reference to a Foucaldian critique of the clinic.

Exquisite, Imaginary Cure at the Annex Gallery, Stow Building,The Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, 14 November - 18 December 2025.

• Author
• https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/10719