Jamie Cooper (b.1972, Manchester) makes sculptures that resemble
the plastic illuminated signage found in shopping centres – brand
logos in their most physical form. He imagines these signs ‘to take
on their own consciousness’ and break free from the shops. In this
exhibition these anarchic characters seem to crawl across the floor
and up the beams of the Warehouse, munching up sculptural coins
found in their paths.

The exhibition title – LEVELLING UP – borrows from the language
of broken political promises to ‘level up’ working class communities,
but also from the world of video games, revealing the precarious
game-like logic of the capitalist system we live in. Cooper is
interested in the way in which logos distil desire, acting as symbols
for the things that we are made to want, trapping us into a cycle of
consumerism and often debt. Yet his sculptures unleash themselves
from the capitalist system for which they were designed, mutating
away from their original forms. As he says: ‘These things begin to
take on a new life. They begin to liberate themselves and organise.
It has this potential.’

Cooper last showed at Fruitmarket in 2023 as part of the group
exhibition Poor Things, brought together by artists Emma Hart
and Dean Kenning.

New book
The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication, The Book
of Fiscal Abstraction, which reproduces pages from Cooper’s
sketchbooks, offering a chance to see the imaginative processes
of his world building. The book includes an essay by Fruitmarket’s
Partnerships Curator, Iain Morrison.

all photgraphs courtesy of Ruth Clark