Beatrice Loft Schulz: Chew and Spit

For her first solo exhibition in Scotland Beatrice Loft Schulz has created an immersive installation for Tramway’s front gallery titled Chew and Spit.

Chew and Spit employs craft, artifice, and deception to neutralise the power of the gallery space. The materials used reference moments of personal significance generated from passing fashions. For the installation, Loft Schulz has attempted to reproduce a decorative wall texture ‘Popcorn’ from the North London council flat she grew up in. ‘Popcorn’ texture is created by spraying plaster onto the wall and google primarily turns up results on how to remove it. Popcorn sticks, it is difficult to remove, it covers imperfections in the walls and as one site warns 'textured walls may devalue your home'. By bringing back such out-dated and anachronistic styles, the work investigates the construction of taste. Specifically, the construction of class, aspiration and style within a broader culture.

Drawing from sources such as Balzac's Lost Illusions and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, as well as The Metro newspaper and DIY home decor YouTube channels, Loft Schulz explores the dynamics that underpin aspiration and the tensions between the cosmopolitan and the provincial. Fashions specific to a time, culture and politics, which eventually fade, like the changing fortunes of the characters, and become devalued or worthless.

Chew and Spit is the result of a Tramway Open commission, part of the venue’s work to create new platforms for emerging talent and to enable artists to develop their practice within a supportive context.

Image: Chew and Spit (2016), courtesy the artist