New Good Press show Permission Slip is a masterclass in archiving and translating everyday chaos

Permission Slip, the latest show at Glasgow’s Good Press, is an exhibition of works by Landfill Editions’ Hugh Frost and artist Sean Roy Parker; who describes the show as being about “the debris of art-making, the capturing of waste thoughts or materials, and how they can become the scaffolding for one’s practice”.

Having never met before the idea of an exhibition was proposed to Hugh and Sean by Good Press, their work and approach immediately proved a great fit when they were hatching plans at the London edition of the Offprint book fair. “Being around the same age and having (scarily) similar cultural touch-points – perhaps because of how we’ve matured on the internet – meant the collaboration felt very natural,” says Sean. “I can’t speak for Hugh, but I think the main crossovers in our work are the blur between (post-) digital and analogue mark-making, an addiction to archiving obscure source materials, and studying how images decay.”

Of working with Sean, Hugh says: “[He’s] a total magpie scavenger with an eye for possibility in anything that would usually be discarded”. And when working on his drawings for the exhibition, Hugh wanted to mirror that approach: “I was looking to develop overlaps in our output, pulling scraps from ‘life’ and a phone-based archive of things seen, heard and read; recombining and fixing them as the contents of various repositories slip out and overlap with one another.” This approach, of collecting and translating sort-of archives of everyday chaos, gives the exhibition coherency while giving both bodies of work room to contrast and compliment each other, exploring the ideas at hand in their own way.

Relying on instinct from start to finish, Hugh, Sean and the team at Good Press employed an equally intuitive approach to the exhibition hang. “Making decisions together quickly in the space when putting up the work, producing last-minute collaborative editions and hurriedly cutting out the signage all had an energising informality to it that I’m hoping to hold on to for future projects,” says Hugh. “This mood came from Sean’s approach, but also the feel of all the shows at Good Press, with the work set against the busy world of books, brought together by Jess, Matt and Nick.”