The Glasgow School of Art

Mobile Solutions: Justin Carter, Grizedale Arts, Icecream Architecture, The Mobile Foundry, myvillages.org, Public Works

Customised sections of a milk float adapted into museum vitrines; a travelling sculpture foundry; an honesty stall selling the produce of a Cumbrian community and the chance to build a cairn with paper bricks are all on offer in the Mackintosh Museum.

This exhibition called 'Mobile Solutions' brings together a selection of mobile structures made by designers, architects and artists that are designed to journey out around communities and diverse contexts from rural locations to urban environments. The structures all set out to solve something or to generate an alternative situation for the people and communities that come into contact with them.

The solutions that each project offers range in economic scale, from the DIY options initiated by the artist or community, to larger, publicly funded projects.  Many have sprung from identifying a gap in provision.  The Mobile Foundry was initiated by Roddy Mathieson when he identified he could not afford to use a foundry to make his sculptures following art college, so he made his own one which is now used as an educational resource for wider communities in order to teach skills in bronze casting. Bibliobox, a travelling archive of artist books and DVDs, was created by a collective of artists brought up in small villages, who perceived that inhabitants of rural areas are rarely considered as an audience for contemporary art.

Issues looked at include exchange, or usefulness of art in the Village Honesty Stall; participatory solutions to local problems such as the unique method of keeping a Norwegian pedestrian underpass safely lit in Justin Carter's project Pedalpower; and ways to create a spotlight on over-looked community heritage and creativity as part of a wider regeneration programme with The Folk Float. As part of 'Mobile Solutions' we host a live project where Icecream Architecture invites a new community-led architecture to evolve within the Mackintosh Museum in 'Do you Cairn?'

Icecream Architecture, a mobile practice who tour in a renovated ice cream van, were founded by Desmond Bernie and the GSA architecture graduate Sarah Frood. They have done much to democratise the elitist world of architecture since first hitting the road in 2009. In Scotland, it is traditional to carry a stone up from the bottom of a hill to place on a cairn at its top. In such a fashion, cairns grow ever larger. Icecream Architecture's new live project for the Mackintosh Museum, 'Do you cairn?' offers the chance to climb the stairs into the Museum and add your customised 'brick', made out of the exhibition leaflet, to the 'cairn'.