Inside Out was an exhibition held at the New Glasgow Society gallery in the west-end of Glasgow. My first solo exhibition used materials salvages from the fire damaged Glasgow School of Art building, designed in 1896 by esteemed architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

The work took the materials and used some of Mackintosh’s ideas about light and space to ask people to consider their relationship to the physical environment around them.

I was able to procure these materials before the second fire that stuck the ill fated building. As hundreds of us — many fellow art school students — gathered on the streets of Glasgow in the early hours of the morning to watch the building burn down again, there was tears, anger, disbelief…a whole gambit of emotions.

It was this that gave me the idea for the exhibition. How and why can people become so attached to concrete, stone, wood, nails? These materials create the shapes of our towns and cities, they give us the reference points of what home is and through that there is an undeniable emotional attachment.