Lisa Wesley in Glasgow

GLASGOW—English artist Lisa Wesley has been making uncompromising work in performance, video, installation, and text for more than a decade now. Drawn from a kaleidoscopic mix of memories—from happily waving to her grandfather from the window of a train to her all-too-sordid adolescent experiences in the pubs and clubs of urban Britain—Wesley’s work manages to combine nostalgia with harsh social observation. Laced with sharp black humor and a desire to mash up highbrow and lowbrow culture, Wesley's work is some of the most compelling, and shocking, on the British new-media scene.

This week Wesley is taking part in the enormous international festival The National Review of Live Art, which happens every February in Glasgow, her adopted hometown. Her two featured pieces are typically eccentric. Breast is Best (2000–01) is a monumental triptych collage which is constructed from every single breast printed in the scurrilous British Daily Sport newspaper over the course of one year. Something in the Blood is a large-scale performance that the advance publicity describes as: “through a passion for all things green, Lisa finds herself in daily correspondence with like-minded plant fanatics from all over the world. But it isn’t only the plants they talk about. They talk about their very different worlds.... Stories of mental breakdown, slug slaughter, rescuing plants from the developer’s bulldozer, and just what it means to be an orchidophile.”

Wesley stresses that if you’re visiting the festival this weekend, you’ll be hard-pressed to make time for anything else, and so her selections—which she calls “my top five of things I love in Glasgow”— are all permanent attractions in the city.

1. William Blake at Pollock House

"Pollock House and surrounding parkland were gifted to the city of Glasgow in 1966 by the Maxwell Family, whose ancestral home it had been for seven centuries. It is well worth the admission fee to see just one thing: In the small Cedar Room (and altogether at odds with the opulence of its surroundings) you’ll find Chaucer and the Nine-and-Twenty Pilgrims (c. 1808), one of a group of sublime William Blake paintings that Sir William Stirling Maxwell (1818–1878) bought very cheaply shortly after Blake’s death. A contemporary writing about this painting called Blake ‘an unfortunate lunatic whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement.’ These paintings simply illuminate the space in which they hang, and the experience of seeing them is pretty much beyond words.”  

2. Kibble Palace at the Botanic Gardens

“Kibble Palace is a 19th-century iron-framed glass house, an astonishing feat of Victorian engineering. It was originally designed and built by architect John Kibble for his home at Coulport on Loch Long in the 1860s, but in 1873 it was brought up the River Clyde by barge to the Botanic Gardens, where it was reassembled.

“It’s a fascinating place, as it serves so many different social functions and attracts such a diverse range of people. Some sit on a bench and chew a sandwich; others use the marble statues for band publicity shots or backdrops for films; tourists take photos in front of giant tropical specimens; couples hold hands and shyly kiss; and others duck in just to shelter from the rain.”

3. Relics at Dowanside Lane

“Relics is not a museum but a shop, and a shrine to forgotten objets d’art of the 20th century. From the very cool—like 1960s space-age television sets—to the quite frankly vulgar (blown-glass ornaments of clowns!), the stock here demonstrates perfectly that one man’s junk is indeed another person’s treasure. Owner Steven Currie is a King of Kitsch who has an encyclopedic knowledge of collectibles—he himself collects cans of the local Tennants lager, among other things—and once you get him chatting you could be in his Aladdin’s cave of a shop for some time.”

4. The Mackintosh House at The Hunterian Gallery

“The Mackintosh House is a reconstruction of the Glasgow home of the Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh and artist Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh. (Their original house, which stood 100 yards away, was demolished [after the ground beneath it sank]).