Artist previews innovative ‘Making Up’ exhibition at The Lowry

The artist behind The Lowry’s latest exhibition has explained why the Salford Quays’ fascinating history has influenced her work. 

The artist, Jo Lathwood, is inviting Salford to watch her develop her Salford Quays-inspired sculptural work at The Lowy from January 20 – March 3.

The exhibition offers visitors “a view behind the scenes” into the spaces that are usually hidden out of sight during exhibitions.

Jo told Salford Now that she is interested in the idea of “broken trajectories”. Her exhibition explores the idea of “physical journeys” and also the “symbolic journeys” that are taken throughout life.

Salford Now spoke to Jo today (January 19) to find out what exactly inspired her work.

Question: What inspired you to create work that reflects the history of the Salford Quays?

Jo, from Bristol, answered: “Whenever I’ve done artworks in the past I always tend to have an element of site-responsive work because I feel like the audience who are going to come and see the work are generally from the area.

“That’s sort of why I started that research and I also think there is an interesting link between Bristol and Salford, I think they both have quite a few crossovers like, Bristol’s got this floating harbour which is like a man made port and Salford’s got the ship canals, so there’s sort of a familiar landscape in regards to what I’m used to seeing.

“Because the Lowry is a building within my lifetime I was also interested in how this building came to be here. So part of my research was looking into what was here before The Lowry and that sort of links back to these ideas of building sites and construction sites and the fact that we’ve got MediaCity but if we go beyond MediaCity you’ve still got quite a lot of brownfield sites so it’s the idea that it’s still in influx and it’s still being built in itself.”

@salfordnownewsThis month, sculptural artist Jo Lathwood is inviting Salford to watch her develop her Salford Quays-inspired sculptural work at The Lowry.♬ Travel – Livang

Question: What about the docks specifically relate to the artwork? 

“So it’s this idea of containerisation, so the whole artwork is going to be made into boxes and the boxes are a kind of nod to the fact of what was mostly happening in the docs you know it’s import, export, it’s moving things from one space to another space.

“So it’s the idea that the exhibition could end with a load of boxes being given away and then being distributed back into the communities.” 

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