New Banner Design Details

Banner – Friends of People’s Palace, Winter Gardens and Glasgow Green, approx 80 inches x 42 inches

It was really fitting that the banner was unveiled on Hallowe’en, memorial eve of the dead and the last day of The Pandemic Furlough scheme and rent/mortgage holidays, therefore the eve of mass unemployment and increasing poverty. These realities form the context for us to listen to those voices from the history of these fields not just its happy festivals but its bloody, bloody past through state executions, gallows and animal slaughter to soup kitchens, mass campaigning and direct action, locals holding council and parliament to account, in the best of times and the worst of times.

The banner came about by accident due to Paula Larkin introducing me and Elspeth over a coffee. The FPPWGGG needed a banner and I make banners. Despite asking for content from either the Group or Elspeth, it was agreed it would be left up to me as the artist to design it how I wanted and include what I wanted on it. All content is my responsibility.

I designed it to be painted in acrylics on cotton duck canvas which makes it more water repellent. It has top loops and side loops to hang from poles.
The imagery was designed to include all aspects of the Group’s aims so I wanted to include a representation of the People’s Palace and its social history collection, the Winter Gardens botanics, and the Glasgow Green.

I also wanted these 3 locations to be understood in relation to people, past present and future.
3 Figures represent young and old, diversity, non- gender stereotypes.
They are holding banners and megaphone with stickers – representing campaigning tools.
They communicate educational information of importance to public understanding of the urban space;
• The Peoples Palace currently closed, was promised at the opening ceremony to ‘the people for ever and ever.’
• The Glasgow Green is owned by the citizens of Glasgow, paid for by the sale of other areas.
• The megaphone with Free Speech stickers refers to the Fight against the Labour Council’s Bylaw 20 from 1916-1932.

Other images include;
• Map of Green and River Clyde
• Painting of Peoples Palace Museum and Winter Gardens
• Smudge the cat – representing the guarding of social history collection
• kestrel – representing wild life as well as symbol of ‘disreputable person from Glasgow’ with keen eyes peeled
• oak tree – representing nature as well as symbol of ‘cycle of life’ as well as ideas growing from small acorns (Tree o’ liberty)
• acorns – symbolising new generations
• white acorns – symbolising ghosts of past generations and of their struggles to secure a better world for the future
• fox – representing wildlife and symbolising cunning, tenacity, imagination and relentless guardian of those acorns.
• Grid references – map details from earliest maps 16th Century onward showing changing location of the Green and Water of Clyd.

Overall I wanted the pictures on the banner to hopefully communicate our relationship to this building and space in the past and for the future, and not alienate youngsters by the way it was constructed or painted. They are the ones with power in future who will make decisions about investment or asset stripping what is … all our stuff.
Stasia Rice, 31/10/2020