With its grubby pastel paint and wonky signage, Rachel Maclean’s shopfront on Ayr high street at first appears like any other in a town centre that has seen better days.
But look more closely through the window and you will notice that familiar promotional entreaties are backwards: don’t buy mi, don’t let me, nothing must go.
Step inside and you are immersed in a fantastical candy-coloured mash-up of pop culture and fairytale created by the Glasgow-based multimedia artist, where everything is upside down and nothing is for sale.
“What art can do best is to make you look at things that you’re very used to in a different way,” says Maclean, who has represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale and once spent a month living in Birmingham’s Bullring shopping centre as artist in residence.
“Sadly, the decline of our city centres is something that is banal these days, so I want to bring people into a space where they can reflect on it in a surreal, potentially quite fun way.”
Maclean has taken over this former butcher’s shop in the historic market place of Ayr, on the south-west coast of Scotland, as part of Jupiter Plus, a new arts and education initiative from the team behind the sculpture park Jupiter Artland, which intends to rejuvenate empty high street shops in towns and cities in Scotland with free art exhibitions and workshops for young people.
Passersby have to spend some time recalibrating their expectations of what usually happens in a shop. Their immediate joy at seeing something happening in here is palpable and it is a catalyst for conversations, about how they remember the high street and how the space could be used again.
Matilda Coleman, six, picks up one of the dolls – a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Disneyfied princess – and turns her upside down. The wide skirt inverts too, revealing a pale-faced witchy version of the dolly underneath. The girl is sold on it, then perplexed that the toy isn’t available to buy.
“What’s exciting for me is that when you show work in galleries and museums, there’s often a barrier to access, and people can bring certain ideas with them before they even see the work,” says Maclean, whose work playfully unpicks the grip that consumer culture has on modern minds and, in particular, women’s bodies.
“There’s something about showing it on the high street that means you just get people’s honest opinion.”
The Jupiter Plus outreach programme around the shop takeover offers every high school in Ayrshire the chance to take part in green-screen workshops and create their own short films inspired by Maclean’s as a concerted response to the marked decline in students in Scotland taking up the creative arts from school level onward.
Teenagers Briadh Parker and Daria Dzieza are members of Jupiter’s youth council and identified the high street site as ready for change.
“Art is taught in a really black-and-white way at school,” says Parker, 17, from Kilmarnock. “But here it’s really free with a million different ways of doing it.”
Dzieza, from nearby Dalmellington, says: “In school you’re taught art is about painting but it’s much more than that. A lot of people don’t think art can be your job, just a hobby, and this shows it can be a career.”
“When the shop first opened, everyone was interested in finding out what it was,” says Parker. “It has lots of different themes about identity, consumerism, capitalism, but they are silent messages and everyone has different thoughts about it.”
