Glasgow Sculpture Studios might be in the process of rebirth, as they move into new premises in a former whisky bond by the canal at Speirs Lock, but their first exhibition is from an artist preoccupied with death.
In the large new gallery, part of a complex that will give studio space to 120 artists alongside greatly expanded production facilities, Teresa Margolles, one of Mexico's foremost artists, will exhibit the results of a five-month GSS residency that took place last year.
Born in 1963, Margolles studied art at the National University of Mexico, followed by a diploma in Forensic Medicine. Her charged practice, which has frequently found its subject in the notorious Mexican border town Ciudad Juarez (known as the City of the Dead Girls), has followed this latter interest, concerned largely with death, women, social unrest and Mexico's inflated murder rate. Margolles often works with the remains of bodies or traces they have left behind in the morgue or more indirectly at the scenes of violence.
At the Tate during the 2006 Liverpool Biennale, Hot Plate vapourised drips of water used to wash corpses in a Mexico morgue. At the 2009 Venice Biennale, Margolles hung bloodied cloths around the walls of a palazzo whose floors were mopped down by relatives of the deceased with water and the blood of murder victims from Mexico's drugs wars (What Else Could We Talk About?).
Last year, she exhibited a concrete block in Frankfurt in which was interred a stillborn child. Margolles says her work has a reverence for the dead, although it is a forensic compassion. There is something there, too, about remembrance, about implication, and the reconstruction of criminal acts through her gathering and collating of "evidence".
"I've been following her practice for 15 years," says GSS curator Amy Sales. "Her work for Venice was incredibly powerful. I wanted to bring her exploration of Mexico's complexities to a wider audience. I felt she would be able to understand the complexities of Glasgow."
Margolles spent the summer walking the streets of Glasgow, "getting to know people", but found herself unexpectedly documenting the fallout of riots in England. "She was so surprised when the riots started," says Sales. "She couldn't understand how something so shocking could happen in the UK."
The resulting work, Diamond, will consist of a text piece carved into the gallery wall and a diamond created from carbonised wood that Margolles found in a burnt-out building in Croydon as she scoured the borough collecting the by-products of vandalism.
The other resultant body of work is Recovery Process Of A Photographic Archive (Work In Progress), a projection of Ciudad Juarez images which Margolles has recovered from the archive of the photographer Luis Alvarado, taken during the 1970s and 1980s.
For those who harbour any concerns, there are no body remains in this exhibition, although the large-scale fabrics billboards at specific locations around Glasgow have been rubbed into the dirt at places in Mexico where violent acts were carried out. "This is something quite different for Teresa," admits Sales. "But it is still as powerful, and will certainly create a lot of debate."
Teresa Margolles, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, The Whisky Bond, Dawson Road, Glasgow (0758 2698 832, www.glasgowsculpturestudios.org), until June 30
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