Craft exhibition explores issues surrounding housing and tenement living in Glasgow

A new exhibition which explores issues surrounding housing and tenement living has opened in Glasgow.

If Only We Had The Space opens at Platform in Easterhouse on Thursday and features contemporary craft installations inspired by the politics of housing, property rights and access to space.

Running until October 26, it also features Glasgow-based archival material and interviews with Scottish based contemporary craft makers.

Works include tapestries by textile designer Jeni Allison titled ‘Don’t you think Vaila needs a garden?’ and ‘How are you going to manage the stairs with a pram?’.

The works explore her experience of tenement living, motherhood and societal expectations.

Meanwhile Deirdre Nelson’s knitted money box SURPLUS is also on display, which was created in 2011 in response to Irish craft and ghost estates in Ireland.

And Jack Brindley of Pavillion Pavillion presents stained glass works which he describes as “Art to live with, rather than art to look at”.

The contemporary pieces will feature alongside film footage from the 1960s to 1990s which documented housing activist movements and redevelopment schemes from Glasgow, sourced from Glasgow Women’s Library, the Moving Image Archive and Glasgow City Archives.

Interviews with makers discussing their experiences of job and housing insecurity, as well as being priced out of adequate studio or making spaces will also feature at the exhibition.

If Only We Had The Space takes its name from a short film commissioned by the Corporation of Glasgow in 1974 made to demonstrate how improvements to Glasgow city tenements could be made with the aid of Home Improvement Grants.

These grants came in response to a lack of adequate housing in Glasgow and “to provide the ordinary citizen with help and encouragement to make his existing home and its surroundings a more pleasant place to live”.