Words: Iona McIntosh (she/her)
Salmon delicately pulls the viewer through the space, the invisible thread hanging between each piece of memorabilia, evoking transcendent human emotions and experiences.
I have been a victim of the individuality craze, wanting to stand out and be unique in every sense, searching for a niche. It’s easy to move through life seeing only our reflection – algorithms echoing our own views, the world revolving around our single thread. So when I went to see Margaret Salmon’s solo art exhibition at the Hunterian, Assembly, I visited twice before sitting down to write this article. Walking into the space, I was nothing short of transported into what felt like a shrine of shared histories. As neither Scottish, like the contributors to the piece are, nor a New Yorker like Salmon herself, my resonance with the installation is an unexpected testament to Salmon’s display of humanity, the mundane commonalities that bind us all. She speaks to an essential aspect of human life, reminding us that despite the isolation triggered by the global pandemic, we are not solitary creatures. Rather than weaponising shared experiences as a means for division, distinguishing one group from another, she highlights that at our core, we are all interwoven with the ordinary.
Scattered through the room were scenes that could have been plucked from my very own life, an embodiment of past and present. Ghostly images developed to expose the outline of a spectral figure, and the implication of a presence appeared by the empty space left on a withered sofa, placed in the centre of the room. The room evoked an impossible wave of grief – the gap left by the death of my dad stretching into this new distance from my family in London – and this made me reflect on the first time I experienced community resilience. My community gathered tightly around me in an attempt to stitch me back together, reminding me that my dad is a pillar in my life now equal to what he was before. I understand community as the seen and unseen. Salmon makes evident that the universality of the everyday creates shared experience even with a distant stranger. The installation carries you around the gallery space, the ecosystem of the room flowing with such ease you would think it had one maker. Though it initially seemed a disconnected space, deeper examination revealed the invisible thread connecting each object. Salmon leans on this idea of the habitually hidden, which lends itself to the isolation left behind from the global pandemic. Unassuming normalcies like school trousers and a watch seem insignificant. Unseen moments of intimacy feel like solitary experiences.Yet Salmon expresses that these are the everyday phenomena binding us all.
Assembly dismantles the solitary mode of living which has rapidly become standardised. By offering viewers a shared platform through these seemingly opposing objects, they are prompted to consider the isolation within their local community as well as on a global scale. What struck me was how poignantly composed the installation was; the stack of Guardian newspapers – headlining protests supporting Gaza – hidden under a table littered with trinkets and memorabilia. People’s lives reduced to headlines. Arguably, Salmon shows how our disconnect from mundane aspects of humanity has caused a fatal disjuncture from human empathy overall. There is an inherent link between the worn-in childhood toys and playful cardboard bunting which conceal the untouched newspapers. It has become easy to filter out the important, instead championing nostalgia and ourselves. A poem in space read that the sea connects us all. A film showed the slow process of fishermen collecting their day’s work, moving to a fish and chip dinner, then to a family spending time at the port. These humble rituals can be traced across waters to fishermen in Northern Brazil and Inuit hunters in Canada, exhibiting that our small localities are mirrored everywhere, near and far.
Isolation has ironically become a collective experience. Even when looking outward and thinking about other people’s lives through concepts like “sonder” – the realisation that every random passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own – we highlight our own bubble. Assembly, however, is a testament to the tradition and lifecycle imbued into human life. Childhood games and ripped school trousers patched up and passed down through families in the installation transform these things from insignificant signs of a small-town ecosystem to extraordinary points of contact with others. The rich tapestry of tradition and longstanding interdependence that exists in Kelvinside, Maryhill and even the Isle of Skye were Salmon’s inspirations. Working with youth employment organisation G20, she undercuts the inaccessibility of art and invites new perspectives into a formal art space, giving freedom and representation to untold stories. Salmon re-engages with the forgotten victims of the global pandemic. She weaves together seamlessly their individual experiences of childhood in Scotland by contextualising their memories within the wider world of each other, drawing together individuals and displaying them as one. Salmon’s collaborative method in creating the piece emphasises how specific individual narratives are building blocks for reaching commonalities between people. She tenderly depicts the attempt to re-establish lost strings that thread communities together, encouraging younger people to see how individuals are the needle and thread that patch together the unlikely tapestry that is community.
Salmon delicately pulls the viewer through the space, the invisible thread hanging between each piece of memorabilia, evoking transcendent human emotions and experiences. However, undeniably, the work was birthed by its locality. By holding light to these local themes, Salmon has somehow given space for the global to be considered. Her curiosity and honing in on one locality enables viewers to reconsider, prompting reflection. She made me wonder who I am in isolation, if not the fabric spun by all of my people. In a growing time of isolation, Salmon’s engagement with young people in a remote area encourages them to entwine with their local histories and connections. As the exhibition reaches its last season (growing from spring to winter), constructing the final panels of its ruminations, the lasting impressions of how inextricably bound individual existence is with its community have been embossed on my own mind.
