At first, the title of the first exhibition from Edinburgh-based shop and gallery Bard—“The Grit and the Glamour”—may catch you by surprise. The cult homewares destination, which launched in November of last year, has developed a distinct identity around its meticulously curated offering of the very best of Scottish craft and design, from mottled, wonky ceramics thrown in a Galloway potter’s studio to lambswool blankets woven in the textile heartland of the Scottish Borders. Essentially, Bard is a beacon of earthy, rough-around-the-edges tastefulness—not exactly what you’d associate with the glitzy visions prompted by the word “glamour.”
Except, as the partners (in both life and work) behind the project, Hugo Macdonald and James Stevens, explain, the word “glamour” has different roots from what you might think. “It’s not about feather boas or hen parties,” Macdonald laughs. “It’s about something otherworldly, or even transcendent in some way.” (It turns out the word “glamour” can be traced back to early modern Scotland, where it was used in reference to witchcraft as a kind of magic spell or charm.) The “grit” element of the show, though, was a little easier for their collaborators on the exhibition to interpret. “The grit is about the graft and hard work and effort and bloody fingers and smashed pots—all the things that go into craft behind the scenes that people rarely see,” says Macdonald, matter-of-factly.
After all, it’s this fascination with the untold stories behind the objects we fill our homes with that first encouraged Macdonald and Stevens to create Bard. Both may have come from design backgrounds—Macdonald, as a writer and curator working with the likes of Wallpaper and Monocle; Stevens, as an architect at the architectural salvage and design firm Retrouvius, where he counted Helena Bonham Carter and Eddie Redmayne among his clients—but it was always the imperfections and backstories of the objects they worked with that fascinated them. “There are all these craft traditions that have developed with their own vernaculars and histories over a very long period of time,” says Stevens. “So it’s been interesting to go deeper into those stories.”
While spending the pandemic at their home on England’s south coast, Macdonald, who grew up on the Isle of Skye, began to feel the emotional tug to return to his homeland. Given the couple had spent many years exploring the country, it didn’t take long for them to settle on a site for their new project: a historic customs house overlooking the Water of Leith, Edinburgh’s main river. Next came the process of sourcing the various makers and objects that would come to populate the Bard store—both within the physical space of its gallery in Leith and online, where a slick but charming website has seen them attract customers from around the globe.
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While Bard’s identity is firmly rooted in Scotland, their mandate was to offer a portrait of Scottish craft that is far broader and more eclectic than the clichés of “tartan and tins with Highland cattle on them,” as Stevens puts it. Browsing the site—which features editorial profiles of the makers alongside thoughtfully captured product shots—you’ll find everything from woven lobster pots created with willow sourced from the Isle of Eigg, to thick leather tote bags crafted on the outskirts of Glasgow, to druid-inspired chalky candlesticks hand-thrown in Perthshire.
“We’ve been amazed at people’s willingness to buy these objects online without seeing them in the flesh,” says Macdonald, noting that the pair will often capture videos of the backs and undersides of products on their iPhones to send to curious customers. Adds Stevens: “We do make sure that the products are photographed well, and with a sense of scale, so that we’re marking ourselves out that we’re a reliable platform, and so hopefully there’s a degree of trust that the objects will be a certain level of quality.”
When it came to putting together the exhibition, Macdonald and Stevens decided to give a number of their regular collaborators and makers (at first it was 10, but it quickly ballooned to 21) carte blanche to interpret the theme of “grit and glamour” as they saw fit. Unsurprisingly, this led many of them down a route that playfully engages with the opposing forces inherent to Scotland and its cultural imagination: “It really brought to the surface this idea that craft can be mundane and exquisite, or that it can be painful and beautiful,” says Macdonald. “That Scotland can be both kitsch and profound, both fierce and cozy.”
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Staged in their space in Leith, the result is something that fully captures this spirit of contrasting rhythms and textures—or, as they write in their curator’s statement, “the rough and the smooth.” In place of anything as dull as a white plinth to display the objects, they’re positioned on reclaimed packing crates, in a nod to the customs house they’re housed in; once upon a time, its rooms would have held Scottish goods ready to be shipped around the world from the nearby port. “There’s a sort of subliminal idea there of these objects having multiple lives, and the longevity of things that are well-made, generally,” adds Stevens. “Whether it’s craft itself, or the packing material that takes craft around the world.”
Despite the exhibition serving as a kind of statement of intent to mark the one-year anniversary of Bard, the pair describe the past 12 months as a learning curve. That’s in no small part due to the efforts they’ve made to communicate the care and skill that has gone into every single object to justify their price tags—especially, as Macdonald notes, while the U.K. has endured a cost of living crisis. The most pleasant surprise for the pair? The level of interest they’ve seen from younger generations in the work they’re doing.
“One of the things that we have been thrilled about is the fact that younger people particularly really do understand the importance of craft, not just as beautiful objects made by hand or keeping traditions alive, but actually as being a more ethical mindset and approach to manufacturing, consumption, and material use,” says Macdonald. “If you understand where the things that you live with came from, and who made it, and how they made it, then you intrinsically have a deeper relationship with it, and you take better care of it, and you enjoy using it more.”
That the objects give back to the communities they’re sourced from is also a selling point for many of Bard’s loyal customers. “People understand they’re not just buying a doormat made of sea rope, say, but that they’re also investing in a beach-cleaning project and a village hall enterprise that is teaching people within the community how to pick up rope and turn it into something useful,” Macdonald continues.
It’s a spirit expressed vividly through the exhibition, which makes a concerted effort to embrace the idea that all of these objects can be two things at once—and that in purchasing them and taking them home with you, you’re simply opening a new chapter in their story. “I think it’s a very interesting, intriguing mix, which brings to light exactly what we hoped it would: that craft is multifaceted, and weird, and that it’s not singular, or about a particular aesthetic,” says Macdonald. “We wanted it to be a show that challenges people to feel things. And I think when you put all of these things together in a room, it’s chaos, but in a good way.” And glamorous, too—just in the original sense of the word.
