Sculpture House

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Sculpture House is run by a group of artists with a passion for sculpture and social inclusion.

We aim to bring together professional artists and members of the community, widening access to the visual arts.

19/10/2026

MADE BY MANY HANDS 🌼

On Friday, artist Laura Aldridge worked with a group of three-year-olds from Ferguslie Early Learning and Childcare Centre.

We began in the Dye Garden, picking the last remaining flowers and choosing one of each colour. Back inside, we looked closely at their shapes, textures and colours before using them as a starting point for working with clay.

The children made their own flowers, but we were less interested in producing a set of matching objects than in what could happen through the process of making. Clay was rolled, pressed, stretched, joined and sometimes changed completely as each child found their own way of responding.

We also worked collectively to build vases. Each child added a piece of clay marked with their hands, tools and textures. No one person decided what the vase should look like. Its form emerged gradually through many different choices and many different hands.

This kind of collective making is an important part of our artist-led approach at Sculpture House. Artists do not arrive with a fixed result for participants to copy. Instead, we create a structure for exploring materials, sharing ideas and allowing something unexpected to develop.

For many of the children, this was their first visit to Sculpture House and their first time using clay. What mattered was not a collection of singular finished objects, bu

18/10/2026

What makes you want to take an artwork home?

Is it the story behind it? The materials it is made from? A connection with the artist? Or simply an immediate feeling that is difficult to explain?

As we begin selecting work for the Art Car Boot Sale, we have been thinking about what happens when an artwork leaves the place where it was made and becomes part of somebody else’s everyday life.

What makes a piece of art stay with you?

1 - My new Ian Godfrey, with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Neil Bickerton
2 - Be A Nose by Laura Aldridge at James house
3 - Laura made tiles for her kitchen using rhubarb leaves from her garden

15/10/2026

We’re going to the Art Car Boot Sale!

Sculpture House will be taking part in the 8th edition of the Art Car Boot Sale, presented by Patricia Fleming Projects in partnership with Wasps Artists’ Studios.

Across the weekend, we’ll be selling a selection of work made by Sculpture House artists, associate artists and participants. It’s an opportunity to discover original artworks, support the people who make them and perhaps take something unexpected home with you.

Saturday 7 and Sunday 8 November 2026 The Briggait, Glasgow
ART CAR BOOT SALE Glasgow The Briggait, Glasgow

More details about what we’ll be bringing soon.

12/10/2026

HOUSE ARTWORK: WARP AND WEFT

We think of Sculpture House as a slow sculpture, shaped over time by the artists, participants and communities we work with.

Our House Artworks become part of the building itself, leaving a lasting record of those relationships within its surfaces, rooms and entrances.

Warp and Weft Encaustic tiles Joanne Dawson 2022

You might have walked over this artwork without realising it.

Situated on the steps of our main entrance, Warp and Weft is a site-specific artwork by Joanne Dawson. It was created while Joanne was taking part in the Building Arts Programme, delivered by The King’s Foundation in partnership with QEST at Dumfries House.

The work formed the culmination of the programme’s final Live Build project and was made in collaboration with master craftsman Chris Cox and the team at Craven Dunnill Jackfield.

More than 300 encaustic tiles were handmade for the work, using a process in which the pattern is embedded into the clay itself rather than applied to its surface.

Across five different tile designs, strands of woven fabric appear frayed, snagged and broken, drifting together to form a larger warp and weft. The work connects to the industrial history of Ferguslie Park, its 19th-century textile mills and the wider story of Paisley.
Designed as an artwork underfoot, it is visible from the street and draws people into the House. As thousands of feet move across it, the design will gradually soften and change, recording the movement of people into and out of Sculpture House.

The House is never simply a container for art. Art is built into its surfaces, entrances and everyday use.

10/10/2026

GROWING COLOUR 🌱

Some of the materials we work with at Sculpture House begin outside.

Our Dye Garden is a space for growing plants that can be harvested and used to make colour. It’s a slow process: planting, tending, waiting, picking, testing, boiling, staining, trying again.

The results aren’t always predictable, which is part of what makes it interesting.

A flower or leaf that looks one way in the garden can become something completely different once it meets water, heat, fabric or paper.

We like that the garden makes the process of making visible from much earlier on. Before there is an artwork, there might be a seed.
Before there is colour, there is time, weather, soil and care.

It also means thinking differently about where materials come from, what we use, what we can grow ourselves, and how much knowledge sits inside something as simple as a plant.

The Dye Garden is looked after and developed with artist Laura Spring, and continues to change with the seasons, the people using it and what we learn from it. 🌿

1. Rope dyed with plant material
2. Calendula growing in the Dye Garden
3. Harvested Calendula flowers
4. A drawing of the garden by St Fergus Primary School children
5. Liz from Ferguslie Dye Gardeners watering the Madder

07/10/2026

WHY MAKE OBJECTS IN A WORLD ALREADY FULL OF THINGS? 🌀

At Sculpture House, we spend a lot of time around stuff.

Clay, fabric, timber, plants, scraps, tools, test pieces, broken bits, half-finished things, things waiting to be fired, things waiting to be decided on.

But making here doesn’t always begin with making an object.

Sometimes it starts with growing something.

In the Dye Garden, plants are tended over time, harvested, tested, boiled down and turned into colour. A material can begin in the soil, pass through lots of hands, and become something else entirely.

So we keep coming back to this question:
Why make another object?
Why make another sculpture, another thing to store, move, live with, look after, or eventually throw away?

And still, making things feels important.

Sometimes you need to handle a material before you know what you think. Sometimes growing, gathering, cutting, dyeing, weaving or building becomes a way of paying closer attention. Sometimes an object can hold something that is difficult to put into words.

We don’t have a neat answer.

But we are interested in what makes something worth making, and what might happen when the material itself has a life before it reaches your hands.

Why do you think we still need objects?

1. WHY MAKE OBJECTS IN A WORLD ALREADY FULL OF THINGS?
2. Growing in the Garden
3. Something unresolved in the studio
4. Laura’s desk of work in progress

05/10/2026

🌞 SUMMER SOCIAL: PLOTTING AND SCHEMING 🌿

A little look back at our Summer Social, PLOTTING AND SCHEMING, when artist Martha Orbach joined us to lead a wild weaving workshop in the garden.

Using plant material foraged from around Sculpture House, everyone worked together to weave, build and improvise a maze and shelter. Something somewhere between an artwork, a den and a very large collective experiment.

Inside the House, we also held a creative consultation in the front room, inviting everyone to help us think about what our front garden could become.

We want to develop the garden slowly and over the long term, making it much more publicly accessible and creating a space that can be used, enjoyed and shaped by the local community. So we spent time plotting, drawing, talking and gathering ideas about what might happen there in the future.

We were also really pleased to welcome Neil Bibby MSP to Sculpture House, with the visit facilitated by Helen Moore from SCAN as part of their work connecting MSPs with artists and arts organisations across Scotland. These visits are about helping politicians see first-hand the contribution contemporary art makes to communities, health, happiness and the economy, and taking that experience back into conversations around policy and decision-making.

Alongside all of that there was a BBQ, tours around the House and lots of chatting.

It was really lovely to see so many new and familiar faces, and to watch the House and garden become places for making, eating, meeting, imagining and spending time together.

Thank you to Martha, Helen, Neil and to everyone who came, contributed an idea, wove something, ate something, or helped make the day what it was. 🌱🏠

03/10/2026

AT SCULPTURE HOUSE: LAURA ALDRIDGE

Laura is currently working with Travelling Gallery to redesign the wrap that covers their bus. 🚌

Travelling Gallery is a contemporary art gallery on wheels, taking exhibitions across Scotland and bringing art to towns, villages and communities that might not otherwise have easy access to it.

For the new exterior, Laura is working with graphic designer Martin Elden, thinking together about how something essentially flat can still feel active, layered and full of movement. 💨

The process has involved scanning materials, playing with scale, layering images and testing how colours, finishes and surfaces might shift as the bus moves through different places and changing light.

The wrap needs to work as a graphic identity, but also as something more spatial and alive. A surface that can push and pull, catch your eye from a distance, and make the bus feel like something is already happening before you even step inside.

A very particular kind of artwork: one that has to travel.

1. Documenting materials
2. Vinyl samples
3. The current artwork
4. Martin discussing the potential of vinyl
5. Vinyl samples
6. WIP

30/09/2026

HOUSE MEETING 🏠

Once a month we invite artists into Sculpture House to spend time together looking at work, talking through ideas and working things through together.

Each House Meeting is a little different. The format changes from month to month depending on who is leading it and what they bring into the room. Sometimes it might begin with an artwork, a question, an activity, a material or a different way of talking about practice.

It’s a space for things that are still forming. Work in progress, half-finished thoughts, questions, doubts, experiments, or something you just can’t quite get your head around on your own.

For this month’s House Meeting we’ve invited artist and educator Lilian Ptacek to join us and lead the session, bringing her own approach to thinking, talking and making alongside other artists.

We’re interested in conversation as part of artistic practice, and in what can happen when artists are given a bit of time and space to think alongside one another.

House Meeting also has its very own Instagram account now, so you can follow along over at House Meeting 👀 next meeting is Wednesday 30th September 6-8pm

28/09/2026

SEPTEMBER FRAGMENTS ✨

A few bits of September at Sculpture House.

Studio time, workshops, things drying and waiting to be fired, work being tested and taken apart again. Making Space, plants being picked and turned into colour in the Dye Garden, artists working alongside each other, conversations around tables, things appearing on walls, and lots of small jobs around the House in between.

Some of it becomes artwork, some of it feeds into another idea, and some of it is just part of spending time making things with other people.

A month of clay, colour, plants, tools, experiments, cups of tea, shared space and lots of things still very much in progress.
September at the House 💗

1. Clay remains from tile making
2. Laura Spring in the Dye Garden
3. Bisque and greenware waiting in the kiln room
4. Workshop sign
5. Artwork by David Milne from Making Space
6. Pupils from Glencoats working in the Garden

Address

Paisley
PA3 1

Website

http://sculpturehousecollective.com/

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