Fields, Factories and Workshops by Simon Yuill

About

Simon Yuill is a Glasgow-based artist whose work focuses around forms of social enquiry, involving processes of interview, discussion and documentation, sometimes working alongside specific groups and communities, sometimes working independently. The works employ a variety of media, including sound, film, internet, software and print publications, and are often created as resources for others to make use of. Some present their material in the form of archives or collections that enable audiences to re-engage with that process of enquiry, proposing different readings and interpretations. Others are created as spaces and frameworks in which people may develop their own practices or support explorations of different social processes. This exhibition brings together three projects that, in different ways, address the relationship between people's ability to make use of space, either through occupancy or mobility, and the relationship of these to legal processes, such as the ability to form self-defined social groupings that have some form of 'political' power. 'Politics' here is meant in the most basic sense of an ability to effect or resist change at a social and material level, and to legitimise or contest authority. In realising their spatial agency (finding somewhere to live, to work, to support oneself) people are both shaped by law and, in turn, may also be compelled to challenge or shape that law themselves.