Shona Macnaughton: Foiling the System

After last year’s experiment with collaboration and discourse, this year the New Work Scotland Programme appears to have struck the right balance between developing dialogue and supporting individual artists’ practices. The process has certainly suited Shona Macnaughton, who is preparing for her joint show at Collective in her Rhubaba studio. 

"I found it really beneficial,” she says. “I’ve not been in art college for four years now, so it’s really a luxury, applying with a set project and going through every single stage of it, to talk it through and articulate it.” This process means Macnaughton’s work has changed a few times since the programme began, mostly in the form the final work has taken rather than its specific content. Indeed, Every Translator is a Traitor continues to mine familiar territory for the artist as she plays with the visual and verbal language of marketing, promotion and projected value. Her work acts as a foil to the economic and social situation she finds herself in. 

But she insists she is not overtly political: “I’m always trying to avoid just reflecting back,” adding something more to the situation rather than simply revealing an economic or political reality. Her new work seems to have expanded in scope and ambition while being a variation on the same themes as previous pieces. 

One previous work in particular, Adverts from the Workplace, has informed her latest project. For Adverts the artist filmed a series of videos in the Edinburgh holiday apartments she was cleaning as a part-time job. The words spoken in the film are part of the marketing material that promotes the apartments to would-be holidaymakers. Recorded during work time, the form of the final piece is imbued with the anxiety that she could be interrupted by her employer at any moment – such is the unforced yet pointed subversion which underpins much of her practice.  Yet simple subversion, she explains, is not her aim. The strategy instead is to “over-identify” to find “the gap between the reality of how a situation is and how it is projected as an ideal – the reality is not reality but a projection we bring to it, because we have bought into the promotional language. If you’ve paid for it, you almost have an investment in really seeing it like that.”

It is through taking apart this personal autobiography, these microcosmic moments, that Macnaughton’s work exposes the bigger picture. The more time spent with it, the more layers are revealed – though it is tempting to wonder what she would do if she was able to fully support herself through her practice without the need to take on the part time jobs that become an integral part of it. Yet all the time we are looking through the lens of her work at the power structures and social systems that exist across society and which are far from absent in the art world. 

The actions of the individual worker and their place within an institution are never far from her mind. “In a sense I am making a new institution. By advertising for employees, I myself become the employer, reversing the power structures. I think in this work specifically, you then start to think of Collective as an institution and I know I am part of that.” Macnaughton impedes these divisions time and again, making her work as an artist during her time as an employee, styling herself as employer while working as an artist. Her new institution is perhaps unworkable – but then, that is probably the point.