Louise Gibson makes monumental sculpture from salvaged materials, pairing crushed and twisted metal with reclaimed fabrics. Her current exhibition “Beachheads,” at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop where she has been a resident artist, took around nine months to create and developed in parallel with her third child. It is a phenomenal achievement. Mountain Close (all works 2025) consists of two crushed wheelie bins combined with leather and pleather, resin, and lacquer, which lend a raw, meaty quality. In Accelerationists, two car doors again meet leather, pleather, resin, and lacquer. The dark blue folds of shiny material recall the image of a body bag at a crash site and a Ballardian world. The radiators of Flat B 52 and filing cabinets of The Cabinet conjure a defunct world, while in Atrophy the Shark, gnarled, contorted bathtubs leak pink and red fabric, as beauty bleeds into violence.
Beth Williamson: You make large-scale studio sculptures and public artworks. Is that a bit of a balancing act? Or do these different types of work complement each other?
Louise Gibson: I use resin in different ways. For the sculptural, it is used like paint or in a looser form. When I’m doing casting work for public sculpture or a private commission, it’s a much tighter process involving mathematics to work with differently designed molds. I source raw materials, mix up the resins, and design them to suit a particular project. Instead of using pigments, I create color using chemistry, working with different irons and cobalt, for instance. In that way, I’m furthering my research, too.
Visually the two sides of my practice are very different, but the common thread is the resin. There is an element of control and loss of control with resin. You are mixing it up and then you hand over to the material. Once it is cured, it’s set, and you can no longer intervene. You have to step away, and then you can work back into it again.
BW: So, it is a balance between those two ways of working?
LG: Yes, and I also work with fabric in both ways. I have worked with objects or artifacts for some commissions, but ideally, I want to have a certain amount of freedom to work with fabrics or materials. If you’re using resin and fabric, you’re actually making a cast and then you’re sculpting into that.
BW: How did your process and approach come about? It’s not the most obvious place to begin with sculpture.
LG: There are a few things, I think. I’ve always had an interest in fabrics and texture. Then, when you are doing a job alongside making artwork, that informs your practice. For example, I worked in trauma surgery for about four years—the fastest paced theater you can work in; there’s no space for sketch books there, but colors and shapes jumped out at me. I am always looking on the streets for materials and fabrics. After I finished college, I went to Berlin, where there was a lot of fly tipping. There was also a refugee crisis in 2014, and people left heaps of fabric around the streets. I collected it and made work. When you’ve not got much money, you need to source materials from what you’ve got.
BW: How did your research projects with resin come about? Do you have a background in chemistry?
LG: No, and it’s quite miraculous that I’ve ended up working in this area. I started working with resin at college. I experimented and began to discover the possibilities of what I could do with the material. When I left college, I contacted four different resin manufacturers. The one that got back to me was in Grimsby in Lancashire, England. I met with the innovation director, who offered to teach me to work with the material. I’ve been working with them for about 12 years, and they supply the resin for my projects. When the innovation director left the company, I followed, and now he consults on all my resin projects. It’s about working with the materials, as well as friendship and a deep mutual interest in polymers and composites.
BW: Did that feed into your work at Summerhall Arts Centre?
LG: At Summerhall, I worked on my resin color palette—hundreds of little disks of colors that I’ve made using just chemistry. For the current project, I’ve been dyeing fabric with bacteria, Serratia marcenscens. I used liquid broths to grow the pink bacteria that appears in the bath sculptures. You can use a liquid broth, or you can put it on fabric set in agar, a solid sort of jelly-like material. Then, you add the bacteria, let it go, and it will imprint onto the fabric. After cleaning the dyed material and sterilizing it, you can then work with it, which is what I’ve done with these pieces. Another fabric—a pink mesh scaffolding net that I collected from Berlin—has its own story. Over the course of a year, I watched the building as the sunlight and the winter discolored this fabric, and then I retrieved it.
BW: What has this project at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop allowed you to do?
LG: The sculpture workshop has been brilliant. I’ve had studios in a recycling yard in Berlin and studios below a motorcycle garage. I’ve had studios and residencies in very raw spaces, because of the materials I use. This is the best, warmest, loveliest studio I’ve ever had. The support has been fantastic, and the technical team have been invaluable. You’ve got everything you need. It’s a perfect place to be.
BW: There is clearly a lot of physical work that has to be done to shape your objects. How do you go about that?
LG: Some of the metal is almost already formed when you salvage it. Sometimes it needs a little bit of a nudge, and we do that in the scrap yard. I direct, and they use the grabber, so we do sometimes do a bit of manipulation. There might be welding, as in this show; and I have also used armatures.
BW: There is a sense of movement or flux, that things might shift or change. Can you talk about that?
LG: I think it comes back to ideas of control. It is as if the work is moving—it’s a bit awkward, it has its new form, but there is a return. It’s a push and pull. It looks organic and flowing, but it’s stiff, it’s metal. There is a resistance within the materials, too, which is what I think makes the work successful; it has a flow of two things. It is hard but soft, wet but dry, internal but external. That’s why it is engaging and satisfying.
BW: What drives you to work with these kinds of resistances?
LG: I think it is about grounding with the actual materials. In “Beachheads,” there are two baths, two filing cabinets, two radiators, two bins, and two car doors. These things are vessels, things that are in our lives, that are completely unsensational; we just walk past them, don’t consider them or think about them. There is a lot of symbolism in them in terms of what they are and what they could potentially represent, or what they could say about us and about what we’re doing, what we intend to do and what we’ve completely lost control of.
BW: You are creating something out of waste, essentially.
LG: There is an elegance and beauty in them, though they show all their scars. There’s a brutality in the way that they’ve been forced and positioned. There is a sadness within the work, too. All of the work in this show has many forms of symbolism and narrative. Most of the time, I’m not just picking an object and then immediately making something from it. The two filing cabinets have come back from Berlin; I’ve had them for maybe 10 years. There is fabric that I’ve had for six or seven years. There is a sense of living with materials, detritus, almost indefinitely, until you find the right partner for it. I know I will find it at some point.
“Beachheads,” part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2025, is on view through August 31, 2025.
