Helen de Main & Mandy McIntosh - Repeat Patterns

A new exhibition of works on paper, fabric, and sculpture commissioned from Glasgow-based artists Helen de Main and Mandy McIntosh. 

The work exhibited in Repeat Patterns emerges from research and conversations about feminism and social reproduction – how inequalities persist through generations – addressed through radical printmaking practices.

Helen de Main and Mandy McIntosh are both artists who employ group work as a pivotal part of their practice. Their approaches are rooted in multi-directional models of cooperative learning, capacity building and creativity, with a desire to create change in imagination and conditions. Informed by these ways of working, their research for Repeat Patterns examines class, housing, planning, displacement, care and the demand for equality.

With print as a starting point for making, Repeat Patterns has developed to include works on paper, fabric, and sculpture. It also references the second-wave feminist argument that ‘the personal is the political’, which asserts experiences in women’s personal lives are directly linked to the social and political conditions within society. 

Repeat Patterns contributes to current conversations about the core pillars of the welfare state provisions in housing, care, work, and public spaces.

Repeat Patterns has been supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.

Header image:

LEFT - Helen de Main - We Want the Moon (detail), 2023 courtesy and © Helen de Main

RIGHT - Mandy McIntosh - The Family of Ten (detail), 2023 courtesy and © Mandy McIntosh