Jo Lathwood: Making Up

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The Lowry, Salford

20th January–3rd March 2024

• Gallery visitors will be able to watch artist Jo Lathwood working daily in person or via live-streamed CCTV footage. Lathwood will spend four weeks in residence developing, building, and deconstructing the site-responsive installation in real-time.
• Leaving no trace and minimal waste – the artist’s building materials will be repurposed and distributed during the final days of the exhibition.
• The installation named Making Up is inspired by the history and heritage of Salford Quays, the area that is now home to The Lowry.

For the opening exhibition of 2024, The Lowry is delighted to present Making Up by visual artist Jo Lathwood.

Commissioned by The Lowry, Lathwood will spend four weeks in residence developing, building, and deconstructing this site-responsive installation.

Making Up will offer visitors a view behind the scenes into the functional spaces that are usually hidden out of sight. In the first few weeks, gallery visitors will be able to watch Lathwood working daily in person or via live-streamed CCTV footage from The Lowry’s basement workshops (11am–5pm Tuesday–Sunday). Over the following weeks, they will see the installation morph and grow in real-time as it is constructed inside the gallery space.

Salford and Manchester’s higgledy-piggledy landscapes of railways, roads, and canals stacked one upon another are reflected in The Lowry’s own architecture, with the building containing several dead ends and unexpected viewpoints. Inspired by this, and by her long-term interest in journeys and movement, Lathwood offers traveling backwards, undoing, and turning around as potentially poignant aspects of a sustainable future.

Lathwood makes sculptures and large-scale installations that regularly respond to a particular site, event, material, or process. Her project at The Lowry will open with a circular rotating platform made from recycled timber. Over the opening days of the exhibition, Lathwood will build a raised boardwalk to the structure; eventually inviting the audience to make a simple journey and become part of a circular system.

In a world of growth and consumption, where the mantra ‘onwards and upwards’ is often at odds with environmentally friendly living, this interactive installation will encourage visitors to move through and around the gallery space, but then, pause, be still, and reflect. The artist’s building materials—all reused or recycled—will be repurposed and distributed during the final days of the exhibition, leaving no trace and minimal waste.

The Lowry’s location at Salford Quays is in part due to the process of containerisation. Once the site of one of Britain’s busiest ports, despite the city being about 40 miles inland, the introduction of standardised international cargo packing made the areas working docks redundant. Prior to this, these industrial waterways had been constructed to serve the area’s many mills and warehouses, whose packaging workers–called ‘makers up’ powered their development in the 19th century. Referencing this history, and ideas about the economic and the social value of art and ‘progress’, Lathwood’s installation is to be re-purposed into functional small wooden boxes that will be given away for free to the public at the end of the exhibition. Her Open Manifesto for Making Sustainable Artwork (2019) reminds us that future progress is not linear, but circular.

Jo Lathwood: Making Up is at The Lowry from 20th January–3rd March 2024. Alongside the permanent LS Lowry Collection, The Lowry presents a regularly changing programme of contemporary exhibitions commissioned by or curated in-house by The Lowry. This exhibition was made possible thanks to Arts Council England and Salford City Council.

Image: © Jo Lathwood. Photographer: Paul Blakemore

-ENDS-  

For more information, images, or to arrange interviews please contact Jennifer Dean on jennifer.dean@thelowry.com. Images can also be downloaded from www.flickr.com

LISTING INFORMATION

Exhibition Title: Jo Lathwood: Making Up

Exhibition Dates: 20th January–3rd March 2024

Venue: The Lowry, Pier 8, The Quays, Salford, M50 3AZ

Web: thelowry.com

Gallery Opening Times: Tue-Fri 11am-5pm | Sat-Sun 10am-5pm. See website for Relaxed Hour information | Closed Mon, except bank holidays.

NOTES TO EDITORS

1) Jo Lathwood (b.1984) is contemporary visual artist.  She has shown work in galleries around the UK and internationally including the USA, Canada, France, Belgium, Lithuania and Austria. Her portfolio varies greatly in form, scale, context and method of production, encompassing: temporary and permanent public art, exhibitions curated for galleries, heritage sites and studio-based work. She is a founding trustee for BRICKs who promote the arts in Bristol and provide affordable studio spaces for artists. She is also on the council for Earth Art Gallery which links artists to academics in the field of Earth Sciences providing space for collaboration at Bristol University.

2) The Lowry arts centre in Salford is a registered charity (no. 1053962) and alongside our extensive theatre productions and gallery exhibitions, it runs a multi-award-winning Learning and Engagement programme that delivers incredible resources and activity to school children and families, and life-changing arts projects with local communities. We passionately believe that the arts can be a powerful and unique tool for social change, and creative experiences give the opportunity to learn new skills, enhance wellbeing, improve life chances, and give people a voice through the art that they make.

As the world’s largest collection of paintings and drawings by the artist, The Lowry Collection provides unrivaled insight into LS Lowry’s art. The Collection is unique in its variety of subject matter and in representing all periods of Lowry’s career. The Lowry Collection now numbers around 400 works of art alongside an extensive archive of photographs, press cuttings and exhibition catalogues that provide a rounded view of Lowry’s career.

The Lowry galleries are named The Andrew and Zoe Law Galleries in recognition of the couple’s £1m donation to the arts centre, which is a registered charity.