Kitchen Island was commissioned for a group exhibition under the same title presented during Glasgow International 2024. It’s part interpretative, part expansive, part parallel, part peripheral, part responsive, part improvisation, part riff. It’s about the show, it’s not about the show. It’s pretty standard prose. It’s a collaged poetics? It’s not about my record collection. It’s an exhibition text. It’s a personal exegesis. It’s the ‘dirty secret’ that Eileen Myles reminds us of that ‘it’s of course all about me’. It was written following the invitation, from the artists, to ‘write from the same position’. The show didn’t exist at this stage, the title did. I took this position as kitchen island politics: of a/the kitchen island as a symbol of, or metaphor for, aspiration, class and gender politics. I took it as a symbol for conspicuous consumption mired by alienation, ambivalence and apathy. My Kitchen Island structures my own associations with these themes and somewhat writes with two seminal film works: Maya Deren’s 1943 film Meshes of the Afternoon and Martha Rosler’s 1975 parodic performance to camera, Semiotics of the Kitchen.

Kitchen Island, the exhibition, included new work and performance by Glasgow and Edinburgh-based artists Ariane Jackson, Shona Macnaughton, Casey Miller, Katie Orton and Chris Walker. It was presented 14-17 June 2024, St Ninians Church, Albert Drive, Glasgow