Shop of Horrors: Rachel Maclean's Mimi in Perth

If you go down to Perth High Street today, you’ll be in for a big surprise. 

Amongst a string of shops, most of which sell products that capitalise on physical insecurities, meet Mimi – a character with such a suffocating, insufferable presence that she demands a shop-sized eponymous installation. Appearing in multiple, Mimi is both the star of an animated short film and also realised in a doll-like sculpture which represents her alternating personae. Intent on inverting the consumer experience, Mimi’s creator is Rachel Maclean, the Scottish multi-media artist based in Glasgow. 

Mimi was originally conceived in 2021 as a permanent commission at Jupiter Artland, outside Edinburgh. Imitating Hansel and Gretel’s demise, visitors are led down a wooded path with heart-shaped paving stones akin to sweets in Grimm’s fairytale. At the end of the path is a candy pink toyshop, filled with doll sculptures packaged and shelved like products. Much of the aesthetic is inspired by social media emojis which, in this context, are symbols of disillusionment and superficiality. Mimi’s two selves are represented in the sculptures: her attractive exterior, and her ghastly underside. Enhanced by the short film, the installation spells out the disastrous effects of Mimi’s obsession with constructing her self-image under late-stage capitalism. 

The Mimi installation in Perth. Photo courtesy of Jupiter Artland

There are no sweets or paving stones leading you to No. 139 Perth High Street, but you’ll be lured in by its glimmering illusion. From a distance, it’s a deteriorating shop, fallen into disuse due to years of austerity. At second glance, it’s a toyshop with a horrible twist. There is no point resisting; enter the topsy-turvy world of Maclean, where cutting satire is the order of the day.

When creating the permanent installation at Jupiter Artland, Maclean tells me that she was “inspired by the idea” that Mimi would one day be presented on a high street. For a while, she grappled with the challenge of translating its original shop-like iteration situated in a sculpture park to an actual shop space on an actual high street. While Jupiter Artland visitors can expect encounters with strange artworks, passers-by on Perth High Street might not expect strange encounters with artworks. 

For Maclean, there is a radical difference between entering a gallery space and stumbling across Mimi in Perth. While in a gallery “[there’s] the wall text and a kind of conceit that’s telling you what you’re about to see and why it’s important,” Mimi in Perth strips that back and "shows people art before they even know they’ve seen art.” During the installation period, a mysterious hoarding covered the shop front. When it was removed, Maclean’s team were exposed to the public’s questions. The most common question was “What is it?” which, she says, “was what I was going for.” Maclean adds: “that’s quite a different thing from being told something is art and you need to engage with it like it’s art.”

There are practical and political advantages to staging Mimi in a high street shop, too. Beside the dysfunctional till there is a door with a sign that reads ‘adults only’ leading to a “secret backstage”. Inside, the dark film is presented on a giant iPhone in a closet-sized room which imitates a dank staff room. While Maclean didn’t want families with young children to unknowingly stumble across the film, this new staging of Mimi also allowed the artist to further realise her vision for toppling “the experience of consumer capitalism” in which “the customer is always right.” Windowless and neglected, the secret backstage is starkly and disconcertingly inharmonious to the polished shop front. 

Inside Maclean’s installation, the customer is never right. Upside-down signs read ‘NOTHING MUST GO’ as the dolls lined up on the shelves are not to be bought or even handled – they are sculptures, not merchandise. After watching the film, I don’t want one anyway. “A lot of our experiences are so banal that they don’t merit reflection,” reflects Maclean. By contrast, she hopes Mimi in Perth is an “arrestingly strange” interaction prompting the visitor to consider how very thin the “façade of care” of consumer capitalism is.

When I ask Maclean how her installation in Perth has been received by the public, she tells me there has been a “mixed bag” of reactions. “Some people love it, some people hate, which is what I expected […] I’m keen artistically that if you experience it, you at the very least don’t feel indifferent towards it,” she emphasises. Personally, I hate Mimi as a character and all she represents, but I am wholeheartedly in love with Mimi as an installation and its disruptive tactics. I am left unpicking the ways in which I attach self-worth to physical appearance and purchase power, and that’s a very hard pill to swallow. 

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Mimi continues at 139 Perth High Street until 28 Jan, open Tue-Sun from 11am-4pm
rachelmaclean.com