MANCHESTER.- For the opening exhibition of 2024, The Lowry is presenting Making Up by visual artist Jo Lathwood.

Commissioned by The Lowry, Lathwood will spend four weeks in residence developing, building, and deconstructing this site-responsive installation.

Making Up will offer visitors a view behind the scenes into the functional spaces that are usually hidden out of sight. In the first few weeks, gallery visitors will be able to watch Lathwood working daily in person or via live-streamed CCTV footage from The Lowry’s basement workshops (11am–5pm Tuesday–Sunday). Over the following weeks, they will see the installation morph and grow in real-time as it is constructed inside the gallery space.

Salford and Manchester’s higgledy-piggledy landscapes of railways, roads, and canals stacked one upon another are reflected in The Lowry’s own architecture, with the building containing several dead ends and unexpected viewpoints. Inspired by this, and by her long-term interest in journeys and movement, Lathwood offers traveling backwards, undoing, and turning around as potentially poignant aspects of a sustainable future.

Lathwood makes sculptures and large-scale installations that regularly respond to a particular site, event, material, or process. Her project at The Lowry will open with a circular rotating platform made from recycled timber. Over the opening days of the exhibition, Lathwood will build a raised boardwalk to the structure; eventually inviting the audience to make a simple journey and become part of a circular system.

In a world of growth and consumption, where the mantra ‘onwards and upwards’ is often at odds with environmentally friendly living, this interactive installation will encourage visitors to move through and around the gallery space, but then, pause, be still, and reflect. The artist’s building materials—all reused or recycled—will be repurposed and distributed during the final days of the exhibition, leaving no trace and minimal waste.

The Lowry’s location at Salford Quays is in part due to the process of containerisation. Once the site of one of Britain's busiest ports, despite the city being about 40 miles inland, the introduction of standardised international cargo packing made the areas working docks redundant. Prior to this, these industrial waterways had been constructed to serve the area's many mills and warehouses, whose packaging workers–called ‘makers up’ powered their development in the 19th century. Referencing this history, and ideas about the economic and the social value of art and ‘progress’, Lathwood’s installation is to be re-purposed into functional small wooden boxes that will be given away for free to the public at the end of the exhibition. Her Open Manifesto for Making Sustainable Artwork (2019) reminds us that future progress is not linear, but circular.