One definition of ‘publication' is ‘to make public, or generally known'.
Whilst publications, and the form of publications, have played a
significant role in Sara MacKillop's work in the past, here they make up
the core of a new series of works presented in the gallery. The works on
display however do not announce, broadcast or circulate as publications
typically do, instead they tend to obscure, complicate and sometimes
overwhelm with information. As such the works flicker between communicating
and withholding.

This exhibition is made up of three series. An element from each series is
extracted and presented in the front gallery and then repeated over the
successive gallery spaces.

One of the three series, Book Blinds, are made from overstocks of A4
publications produced by the artist between 2010 - 2021, which she sliced
in half lengthways with a guillotine. These newly cut publications are
fixed together in a hand – stitched binding that mimics the mass-produced
mechanisms of venetian blinds. Hung in front of shop-bought empty frames
and somewhat blocking them, the gallery wall sitting directly behind is
compressed into the object, becoming a kind of view. Now stacked one on top
of the other or laid side by side, the images and found texts from the
publications find themselves falling into new configurations, completely
reshuffled.

The Calendar Houses on the other hand are made from magazine files with
calendars open and draped over the tops to form their roofs. With the
houses drawing on the themes latent in the graphic design and colour of
these stationery-shop sourced products, and what happens when they are recombined, one of the house's magazine file bodies in fact provides the
title for the exhibition, it being derived from its product name. Another
makes material the affinity of the houses' structures and scale to ‘cuckoo
clocks' by featuring a clock mechanism and stylised hands mounted on its
front. The combination of calendar and clock veers the object from storage
to time management.

The final series sees the detail that is the patterns on the side of
pencils which provides the fortuitous starting point for a series of
digital collages. Starting from the outside of a standard paper size and
filling up the rest of the space moving inwards, the pencils are enlarged,
bent at the corners and rotated before being printed as wall-hangings using
a ‘print-on-demand' service. Deploying surface sheen and scale, such
images, originally intended to attract attention by novelty or branding,
are displayed in the gallery horizontally so that they resemble a series of
digital screens.